Music Video Proof Of Concept Under Way

Another thing I'm sort of dorking around with in the background is preparation for the first official music video to go with the release of the album. Though I am unsure which song will be the opener, I'm doing some technical tests to see if I can accomplish certain effects using Adobe Premiere Elements 9. The reason I'm using Elements instead of CS3 is because Elements 9 supports the HD files that come straight off my camera. CS3 does not. And while I'm more familiar with CS3, and it's feature set is richer than Elements, I have yet to find something in CS3 that cannot be accomplished in Elements. I think this is a fine application of the 80/20 rule. For all of the functionality that is required by a novice editor like myself, it is easily covered with the functionality of a "light weight" program like Elements 9.

I'm sure there are a number of advanced things that cannot be done in Elements, but for my purposes, it works just fine.

I recently made a video for a convention I attended the other week named "Wizard World," which was my first successful test of true HD video for YouTube. It took a lot of work, patience and trial and error to get to this point, but I'm really excited to finally be able to edit HD video without having to down convert it to SD. And the video quality is just stunning, so I'm very happy.

The effect I'm trying to duplicate right now is something that is very common to music videos. Basically, the trick is that they speed up the music, and then play it back during filming. Lip sync is done to the sped up music. Then, in post production, you slow the music AND the video down to normal speed. The end result is a sort of ethereal looking video that seems sort of out of phase with reality. If you're unfamiliar with the effect I'm describing, I'm confident that you will recognize it when you see it. It's totally over used. Which is why we simply MUST have it in our first video!

I'm also testing the effect in the opposite direction. What happens when you slow the music down for the play back and lip sync?

So far, I've prepared a number of sound clips that are either slowed down or sped up to a number of different speeds. Now I just need to film some footage and see how it all works out. I will of course post a link to the final results once I have some test footage filmed.