Editing my Music Video - Editing the Band's Performance alone

After uploading my footage I made a start on editing. I imported the mp3 file/song - Folding Stars as this will give me the beat/lyrics to base my editing around. I had roughly 2 hours of footage from the Church (one hour of the grieving man shots and the other hour of the band playing in the Church). I had to watch the two hours to refresh my memory. Soon after, I dragged them onto the timeline and started to make cuts when I found a match with the song (such as a line sang) and when the instruments matched up with the song, such as the drum beat. I was able to use this window (see above and to the right) to play, pause and rewind. However I preferred using the buttons on the keyboard as they were easier to access:

I slowly began to fill more and more of the space with small pieces of the band playing in the Church. However, I did not have enough shots of the main artist singing so I had to look especially hard for those even a couple of seconds worth.


I could easily adjust the brightness and contrast levels to make the colours appear 'richer'.

I felt the beginning was too abrupt so I dragged in a "cross dissolve" transition and then decreased it's size.

As my music video has a narrative I wanted to make my music video look aesthetically similar to a feature film. In addition, I also feel it makes my video look more professional. I was able to create the letter box effect using the "Four-Point Garbage Matte" where I could either move the four points with my mouse or type in the coordinates to each clip.

In hind sight I should have applied this effect first to the whole piece of raw footage. Instead, I had do each clip individually which took up a lot of time. One could also look at it from other perspective and ask why Adobe Premiere Pro does not have a feature which allows you to apply one effect to many clips.

I want slightly more than half of my music video to be the band playing (especially on the choruses) however, for now I have filled in half of the timeline with 2/3 second clips of the band. I want to film and add the narrative and then see what it looks like before I do too much.


For the past week/5 days I have been editing during school, in lunch breaks, free periods and media lessons as well as after school (when I get a lot of work done) when I stayed until roughly 9pm/10pm.