Little Sapphire's Lullaby — learn about the editing process!

Hey friends! I got a great response to my post with some deep-dive detail about the Jester's Bad Advice editing process, so I wanted to do something similar with Little Sapphire's Lullaby! Here's a general overview of the steps to editing a music video like this.

Rough Cut

A rough cut is basically just choosing your clips, cutting them down, and putting them in order. This is to make sure you have all the footage you need, work out the timings with the music, and just generally lay out the groundwork of the video. If a music video were a drawing, this would be the sketch.

I finished the Little Sapphire's Lullaby rough cut tonight. It took me about two hours, which is pretty quick for a video like this! One thing that really speeds up the rough cut process is having a clear shot list, which I had for this project.

Composition Cleanup

If you have a skilled videographer, you might not need this step! But for me, since I mostly work with either my own footage of other amateurs (in this, my fiancé Josh), some of the footage inevitably needs to have the composition fixed. For example, here are some of the things I had to fix in this video:

• Straighten clips that are skewed/tilted
• Use warp stabilizer on handheld clips that are shaky (this smooths out the motion)
• Create zoom effects that we can't achieve with our current equipment

Light & Color Cleanup

Since Josh isn't terribly familiar with my camera and doesn't have much video experience, we shot on auto mode so he could just focus on framing each shot. Unfortunately, this means that some shots are brighter or darker than others, and have slightly different color tones, thanks to auto white balance.

To correct this, I use Premiere's color correction tool to darken the overexposed clips, brighten the underexposed clips, and tweak the color in each clip so that they all match as best as I can manage. This is fiddly, and not always fully possible, but the closer I can get to uniform, the more cohesive the whole video will look.

Cosmetic Fixes

This category is for things that are fiddly and that some people might just ignore. (Depending on how quickly this editing process goes, I might ignore some of them, too!)

For example, Inca (our 4-year-old Jester actress) had a lot of trouble with the undereye makeup, so in some close-up shots, her regular skin tone shows through very clearly under her eyes. With some careful masking and a color replacement layer, I can fix this (but it has to be done frame-by-frame.) 

In one section, Inca looks to her mother offscreen, then looks briefly at the camera, and then back at her mother. I needed a longer clip of her looking offscreen, so I cut out the section where she looks at the camera and joined those clips together. Of course, there's a slight jump where that cut is, making it obvious that I removed something. To fix this, I used a feature called morph cut, which is designed to disguise the appearance of a cut between two similar clips. It samples from each clip and creates a series of "morphed" frames in between. It's a little hit or miss, but in this case, it worked — I don't think anyone could spot it unless I pointed it out.

Green Screen and Spill

This is going to be the most time consuming part of editing this video. Since two different sets feature green screen, I will need to chroma key about 80% of the footage. This is a long process to do well:

• Export the finished cut from Premiere
• Import the video into After Effects
• Brighten the green screen and remove shadows/inconsistencies
• Isolate the "spill" (green color that is reflected off nearby things; the green "halo" around a figure that is silhouetted against the screen) and neutralize it
• Key out the green and add the new background
• Render from AfterEffects (this takes ~3-5 hours)
• Import back into Premiere
• Manually mask/correct any issues (e.g., other green items on screen, such as a plant)

Light and Color Effects

Finally, I'll need to apply any light and color effects I want to add. In this case, I may add some light leaks or other effects to soften the footage and make it feel more "dreamy," and I will probably apply a "day4nite" color grade, which gives the footage a blue tone to simulate nighttime (and has the added bonus here of toning down the absolutely garish bright red of my skin.)

YouTube Stuff

Once the video itself is done, it's time to add all the stuff that makes it YouTube-ready: An intro with a spoiler warning, an outro with a subscribe message, and all the additional stuff I'll need in order to upload (thumbnail, copy for the description, tags, endscreen & cards, captions.) Only then is the video ready to release!

My goal is to release this video before I leave for ECCC, which means I have until Wednesday night to get it done. This wouldn't be such a difficult thing if I hadn't stupidly scheduled my annual physical for tomorrow and... am also still lowkey hoping to remake Jester's blouse and skirt before I leave! YIKES!! I'm just going to prioritize the video and we'll see if I end up having time for any sewing.