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This 62 year old “Grandma” became a YouTube star after teaching herself how to green screen

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Tatiana Subbotina, from Saint Petersburg, Russia, started making videos in 2013 while living in Thailand. The videos were aimed at children. But then she decided she wanted more from her creations. So, she decided to teach herself how to chroma key composite with a green screen and Adobe Premiere Pro. And it’s made her something of a YouTube hit.

With nearly 20,000 subscribers and over a million views of her videos in the past month, she’s certainly doing something right. While her videos are in Russian, some of the comments show that they go simply to watch, even if they can’t understand what she’s saying. Although, YouTube’s fancy algorithms do offer translated subtitles, they’re not always that reliable.

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Combine regular, fast, and slow motion footage for mind bending video effects

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Fundamentally, for me, photography’s about playing with time. Either you’re freezing a moment of it, or you’re capturing a lot of it into a single image. There’s a lot we can do with those two principles, but ultimately you’re creating a still image. This image only shows one of those two things. A moment frozen, or lots of moments mashed together.

With video, we get other options. Obviously, we can shoot in realtime. But, we can also speed it up with timelapse, or grind our scene to a near halt with slow motion. Video also has the advantage of not being just a single image, but many images played back in sequence. In this video, Justin Odisho explores mixing different speeds of footage together to create some rather interesting effects. He even reverses one clip for a very odd result.

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How to effectively use Warp Stabilizer to make your shaky footage rock steady

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Even if you’re trying to be as rock steady as possible with your footage, the camera almost inevitably moves in a way you hadn’t counted on. Sometimes you’ll just shoot it again, but there may be no opportunity for that. You might not even know there’s a problem until you’re back home reviewing the footage.

Sometimes, there’s no choice but to fix it in post. Adobe’s Warp Stabilizer that comes with After Effects and Premiere has always been something of a mixed blessing. It’s a fantastic tool that can often fail miserably. Mostly due to user error. In these two videos, we find out how to fix it.

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Advanced video stabilisation with Premiere and After Effects

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One of the most off putting things for viewers of video is shaky footage. The best way to keep the camera steady is to use a tripod, but sometimes we want to add a little motion. Quality sliders can still cost a fair amount of money, and not everybody has a gimbal or other stabiliser. We just have to go regular handheld. But this often leads to bumpy footage. So, what can we do?

Adobe Premiere Pro has a built in Warp Stabiliser, but it doesn’t always do the best job. When it works, it works extremely well, but it often falls over and gives results we really didn’t expect. In this video from Miesner Media, Theo takes us on a round trip from Premiere to After Effects, and back to Premiere again, resulting in perfectly stabilised footage.

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How to create the dolly zoom effect without a zoom lens

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The dolly zoom, also known as the “Vertigo Effect” or “Hitchcock Zoom” can be an amazing technique to add tension or drama to a scene. It’s a process whereby the camera is dollied in toward your subject while the lens zooms out wide. Or, the reverse, where the camera moves away from your subject while the lens zooms in.

It’s a difficult technique to master, and almost impossible if shooting on your own. You have to move the camera, adjust the zoom of the lens, and try to keep your subject in focus all at the same time. This video from Lewis McGregor shows a technique to create a similar effect without doing any zooming whatsoever. But, there is a caveat. It won’t really work if your camera only shoots 1080p.

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An easy guide to colouring with LUTs in Adobe Premiere and DaVinci Resolve

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Lookup Tables, or LUTs, are simply amazing. LUTs are like presets, but work across all platforms and software, for both video and stills. LUTs can be used for both colour correction, to bring cameras to a standard, and for giving your footage or images a desired “look”. But how do we use them?

In this video from Casey Faris, we see how to use LUTs for both correction and grading for video. Using both DaVinci Resolve and Adobe Premiere Pro, Casey walks us through the whole process.

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Adobe responds to QuickTime for Windows security flaw, offers native ProRes support

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Many Windows based video users have been concerned lately regarding security flaws which led Apple to pull all support for Quicktime for Windows, with the Federal Government going so far as recommending that Windows users completely remove it from their system.

Adobe have today announced a response to this issue, declaring that they are adding native support for ProRes into their products.

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Faking the tilt-shift video look in Adobe Premiere Pro

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Since the first tilt-shift timelapses started to appear online several years ago, it’s a look that’s been attempted, copied, and improved upon quite a bit.  Tilt-shift lenses, however, can be pretty expensive, and for something that you may only use occasionally, an expense you may not be able to justify.

As a consequence, the tilt-shift look of many videos is created in post.  In this video from VideoRevealed, Colin Smith shows us how we can quickly achieve the look in Adobe Premiere Pro.

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Edit your videos using a game controller

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If, like some, you spend the same amount of time playing Doom 4K as you are editing videos, you will absolutely like this hack for using a game controller to control premiere.

Editor Casey Faris has a pretty sweet setup using Logitech Gamepad controller (about $20). The secret sauce is the actual mapping of the buttons. Casey uses a free software called xPadder  (here is a link to the free version)

Of course, using the gamepad only makes sense if it actually expedites your workflow, if it makes you go slow, there is no point in using it. And the magic to making it fast is mapping the right buttons to the right shortcuts. And what do you know, Casey shares his layout on the video link.

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