Editing Blog Continued: Audio and Color - Music Video

    

    Once the song was imported, I had to choose which bits of the song I wanted to use in the 75 second limit. The plan was to use the introduction, and the chorus of the song. In practice, this was far too long, forcing me to cut various parts out. For instance, the first four measures of the song, and the two measures before the vocals start. I used the third repetition of the chorus in the song, which linked nicely into a concluding phrase. I then ended the music video at a point where it sounded nice, which conveniently fell right on the 1 minute 14 second mark. I adjusted the audio levels and tried to blend the transitions the best I could using the blade tool. I then modified the length of each shot to be in sync with the music. I also had to cut a little bit of the lyrics as some parts were inappropriate for an academic project. I did this by overlaying the instrumental version of the song to the audio and then cutting to and back from the instrumental track. I then added some visual effects, like screen shake in the boxing shots, and slightly adjusting the speed of the running shots. I also added an adaptive zoom effect in scene 4, in combination with the camera moving towards the actor.

    I then started to color grade the shots. I used the auto balance feature to automatically color correct the shots. I found that it would increase the contrast too much, so I had to compensate for that. Then for most of the shots I would just slightly increase the saturation till the colors look realistic and add some warmth to the color for the cinematic look. I also adjusted the shadows and highlights for some of the shots. The waveform scope proved very useful in visualizing the colors in the image, making it intuitive to adjust contrast and manipulate colors. A problem I encountered during color grading was that my main monitor for some reason shows warmer colors much more saturated than normal. When I first color graded on that monitor, I realized that when I viewed the music video on another device the colors were significantly less saturated than how they appeared on my monitor. I tried changing color spaces and even using a LUT, to no avail. I double checked how the image appeared on YouTube on other devices around the house and they all appeared less saturated. No matter what I did I could never get the colors to look consistent. I therefore did the color grading on my laptop’s display, and hoped it was just something wrong with my monitor, not the footage.