A Good Way to Learn!
 

Hey, just wanted to give you guys an update on my 'newbieness'.

I got my camcorder in the mail wednesday and have not stopped playing with it. I can see myself busy for months trying to figure out all the things I can do.

But from day one what I thought I'd do was plan out a beginners project...sort of like a very short skit that included a lot of features. This way I would be forced to learn certain things and cover different aspects with regards to my camcorder, my pc hardware and software.

So keep in mind this is very newbieish.

Anyway, I was reading up on stop-motion animation within Premiere and found a tutorial on Light Sabers on the Internet. Thought that would be good enough to start with. So I dug up my 12 inch Darth Maul Figure and created a stop-motion animation scene. Really short, basically just him standing still and then twisting around the waist and head (about all he can do). But without his sabers...and then later with them.

Then I followed the Light Saber tutorial adding some of my own ideas. I had the sabers actually ignite out which I fooled around with...found some perfect sound effects off the internet. Then put some titles and transitions together into the final clip.

I must say, it came out pretty good considering. Just wanted to share my experience. Just by this one idea I was able to learn the following:

1) many features on my camcorder
2) how to transfer dv to and from pc
3) many features in premiere including managing the timeline, splitting video/audio, transition effects, exporting different formats to edit in other programs, using different codecs, stop-motion-animation, capturing sequences from DV source, etc...
4) many features in adobe photoshop including working with filmstrip files, working with layers, effects, etc...
5) plus many more...

K...I'm blabbing now. If anybody has any suggestions on other things I can try or stuff I can do to learn more...please don't hesitate to pass that on to me.

What I am going todo and you might also do are the following:

- Doing a Voice Over movie, see what works and doesn't
- Shooting dialogue different ways
- Trying some action scenes
- Toying with lighting differences

etc. etc.

Could you post the URLs to the articles and tutorial(s)
you mentioned?

Good ideas Rob!

Here are some links to that info I was talking about earlier. Basically there is a whole group out there for Star Wars fan-based filming. Ever since those "Troops" videos came out years ago. Not sure if you remember that.

But you can find a bunch of tutorials and see other peoples videos at http://www.theforce.net/theater/

Specifically you can go here for the Light Saber Tutorial I found using Adobe Premiere and Photoshop...http://www.theforce.net/theater/software/premiere/rotoscoping/rotoscoping_finley.shtml

and http://theforce.net/theater/postproduction/soundfx/
for Sound Effects which was gathered in a smart way. By extracting sounds through Star Wars released games.

Another site
 

Found another site which I didn't realize. Adobe has a good section on their site for tips and tutorials for certain features in their products. Perfect!

http://studio.adobe.com/learn/main.html

Register Free to enter the Expert Center which includes a lot of other tips and tutorials.