The Basics of Video Editing Part III: Effects and Color Correction

Lifehacker by Adam Dachis

Today's the fun lesson, where we look at basics effects, color correction, and titles for your video editing projects. We're tackling all these topics in both Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Final Cut Pro, so come on in and we'll get started!

The lesson is in the video, and this is a long one. It was supposed to be a short one, but it's not. There's a lot of stuff to cover when it comes to all the different kinds of effects you can do and show them in both applications, so we're packing it in! Below you'll find notes for this lesson. They won't replace the lesson, but you can use them as a sort of cheat sheet to refer back to as you're trying things out in Final Cut or Premiere.

Motion Effects
Final Cut, Premiere, and most pro editing software come with basic motion effects you can apply to your footage. These are things like cropping, scaling, rotating, distorting, and more. Both Premiere and Final Cut have these settings in the viewer. To access them, just load up a clip you want to edit and click correct tab. In Final Cut it's called Motion. In Premiere it's called Effects Settings. Once there, you'll see your options and a small timeline to the right of them. From there you can apply any adjustments you want, but one neat thing you can do is also add key frames. Adding key frames will let you animate the video in very basic ways, such as make it get bigger or smaller, spin around, and more. You can't do anything really fancy here, but it's useful for many simple operations you'll need to perform when editing. For a demonstration on how this all works, see the video associated with this lesson. read more & watch the video...