Hey, everyone. I'm Caitlin Rossi. I'm the creative director at Storyblocks. We are a stock media subscription service who help brands and creators make better video content faster than ever. We do this by offering unlimited access to a library of footage, audio, templates, and more. I'm so thrilled to have you all here for our very first, live video editing demo. Today you're going to be learning how you can create special effects within Premiere Pro using Storyblocks content. Your teacher today is none other than Kelsey Brennan. Kelsey is the creator and host of the YouTube channel Premiere Gal. She's empowered millions of video editors with her weekly editing tutorials, tech reviews, and video tips. Before her YouTube success, Kelsey honed her skills producing and editing documentaries for international exchange program student exchange programs. She has an MA from Georgetown University, a BA from UC Santa Barbara's film and media studies program. And Kelsey is known for her signature style, which combines academic expertise with creative flair. Kelsey, we are so excited to have you here today teaching our very first live editing course. I think we've got your mic muted, Kelsey. Sorry. Once again, I'm excited to be here and dive into my timelines with you guys. Lot of cool effects coming up. Awesome. Before we begin, I just wanna call out that on the right, you're gonna notice there's a chat and a QA window. You can submit questions there at any time throughout the demo. We're gonna try to be adjusting most of these in real time as we go along, as well as any that are more general at the end of the tutorial. This event is also being recorded and will be shared afterwards. So if you have to miss any of it or wanna share this along with your colleagues or peers, feel free to do that after the event. And with that, I am going to pass it off to Kelsey, to get started. Amazing. Thank you so much, Caitlin. I just wanted to note that, like, I know a lot of you may be interested in, like, how I assemble the full timeline. As you can see inside of Premiere Pro here, we got a lot of layers going on here. We're not gonna talk about the whole process of assembly in this video, but I do have a video on my YouTube channel called our entire YouTube production process revealed. So you can go check out that video if you wanna learn about, like, the building blocks of building the timeline. But for this specific video, we're diving into specific fun effects because, you know, we always like to have fun with our edits. And on YouTube, it's important for not only retention, but also just to give yourself a signature style. You'll see if you've watched our video edits, especially over the past few years, we have some comedic moments. We always try to visually show something to make it a little bit more interesting, a little bit more engaging, whether that's through sound effects, rotoscoping, and just overlays. And that's what we're gonna be showing you. So the first effect that we're gonna show you is how to do a VHS overlay effect plus some sound design to really sell it. And feel free to ask questions in the chat, and Caitlin and Storyblocks will, you know, find those relevant questions in a moment, and we'll see if we can answer them live. So let me show you the first final effect here, and then I'll show you how to create it from scratch. In this video, we're going back to the basics to show you so you saw there in the very beginning, it was a retro sounding audio coming from the television plus this overlay effect and a little bit of shake, plus we had some music and some sound effects that was actually like taking a VHS tape out of a of a VCR. And so how did we do this? So let me go to a different sequence, our demo sequence here. And this does not have any effects on it. So it's just in this video, we're going back to the basics to show you so you can see how those effects can really bring it to life. And we didn't actually write this in our script. Sometimes we have a script and we'll, like, leave a comment and be like, oh, it'd be cool to do this here. But in this video, I just literally improvise. We're going back to the basics. And then in the timeline, we're like, okay. How can we make this more interesting? What if we do a retro effect? We're going back. So how can you make the effect kind of echo what is being said in this video? Right? So for this particular effect, we use some VHS overlays from Storyblocks. Now I have the Storyblocks panel open. And if you guys have watched some of my videos, you've seen me use it before, but it's a free extension, but you need a subscription to be able to download. And what's really great, you get unlimited downloads. Right? So an extension is located from window extensions, and then Storyblocks. So one thing that's important to note, and I'll just mention this once here at the beginning, is that when you are downloading assets, you wanna be sure to go into your account by clicking on the little icon there in the upper right and click on download settings and be sure to change by clicking browse and set your current folder to a folder inside your project so everything stays online. So once that's set up confirm good to go so I've already downloaded many assets from Storyblocks but I'll just show you quickly how to do it so let's say you want to do VHS effect If you search that and you're like oh I like this grain or I like this VHS maybe you like this one what you can do is click on this download icon and then you can choose a resolution that you need I'm gonna use the smallest for this demo and then depending on what folder you had selected it will import automatically in there so if I double click on this you can see we have this VHS overlay which is pretty neat So that's what I did is I just went through and found all the assets that I needed the music, the sound effects, the VHS overlays and here it is inside of this folder. Now one of the effects that I downloaded was actually a pack and it was a Premiere Pro project template so if I click on this icon you'll see Premiere Pro project. This doesn't automatically import it it actually downloads into your folder and then you can drag it into the folder and that's what I did here. So you can see over here I have this folder called VHS effects and inside of it is another folder called VHS presets. So if I double click on that you can see I've switched to icon view. You can kind of go through and preview which VHS effects you like. So let's go back into my timeline here. And the first thing I'm going to do is when applying effects with multiple layers, I like to nest my video clip so that way it doesn't get too many layers happening. Right? So what I do is I right click on this clip that I've already cut by the way because I don't want the effect to be applied to this whole moment. I want it to go back to regular Kelsey in her studio without VHS. So right click, let's nest and you can call it anything to help with organization. We'll just call this VHS demo. Press okay. So now you double click on this and it created and it opened up that nest as its own sequence and this is where you can put all those layers on and it appears as one layer only in that original sequence. So I went through all of these and I really liked the simplicity of VHS twenty five. So you can see that this one is just pretty simple and I like that simplicity but I'm gonna stack a few more so I'm going to copy these layers by just hitting ctrl c or command z and then I'm gonna go back into the VHS demo and I'm going to paste it in this nest. So now we have these effects. Now on each of these layers it's a template so it has a bunch of effects and you can always go into the adjustment layer for example, effect controls, and you can see what effects were applied to these adjustments for you. Now I really like this look, but I really wanna have a little bit of jitterness. And I noticed in all of those different presets when we go back here that VHS eighteen also had some shaking movement. So I'm going to copy just this one adjustment layer from this one particular preset and I'm going to copy it into our nest and then I'm gonna bring up these layers. So this is what's really cool about using templates like this is you can combine multiple different effects together. So I'm gonna put this down here and if I play this back probably should render this out so you guys can see the full thing. If you go up to sequence, render in and out, it basically renders out a full video clip of the sequence to show you what it looks like. Now sometimes this is slower sometimes this is faster depending on the software that you use. I'm on an m one max with sixty four gigabytes of RAM and this was released at the end of twenty twenty and you can see it's pretty fast. There was a little bit of delay because I'm editing this over our server by the way. So let me show you the shake real quick. Now you can see it might be a little bit too much and what you can do is click on this adjustment layer, go to effect controls, and over here there's an effect called offset and this is what's creating that wiggling action. So if you want to lessen it don't worry about having to customize these keyframes which can get complicated instead you can go to where it says blend original and here we can change it to fifty percent for example. So it's showing fifty percent of the original still blended together. I'm going to render this out again so you guys can see what that looks like and it's pretty neat to play around with the offset effect, and it's good to get comfortable with customizing templates right because you can really make the effects your own as just a starting point. So here we go we have this really cool shake effect so now if we go back into our VHS demo you can see we have our nest here as one as one layer so we don't have to deal with all those adjustment layers and the only thing missing here is I really wanted to have a little play icon in the upper left you know when you watch a old VHS tape so I also downloaded this other effect and actually let me open this up as its own tab here so you can see what I'm talking about so I downloaded this as well and it has this little play icon and some other effects so So what you can do is you can like set in and out points for areas that you wanna grab from a stock video clip. And the way that I do that is I press I for in and O for out and that creates an in and out point. And then rather than grabbing the whole clip and dragging it down, I just click on those little image icon. It's called drag video only, and I just drag this down. So now you can see that actually the video is gone. It's just black. Now this is where blend modes comes into play. If you if you've used Photoshop before, I'm sure you've played around with blend modes. It works exactly the same. So you can go to effect controls and underneath opacity is where it's at. It's kind of hidden in Premiere Pro but just go to blend mode and to get rid of darkness you use screen. And so now we have this combination. One second. And now we have this combination. In this video, we're going back to the basics to show you how alright. So by the way, up up here, I have a little preset, a little cam move preset. Me and my team actually developed these separately. You can see we have different transform effects. So you can play around with keyframing and the motion controls to create your own, but this is the one that we have here and this is the one I had at the start. Okay. So now we need to start bringing it to life with our audio changes. So for example, this audio clip, this is my dialogue, my voice here on audio track one. I wanna make it sound like it's coming from an old television. There's a ton of audio effects in Premiere Pro, and a lot of them are confusing if you don't know how to use all those controls. But with the advent of the essential sound panel, which I think was like six years ago I wanna say, it has a lot of cool presets that I don't think a lot of people know about but when you select dialogue the dialogue in your timeline and go up to essential sound you can choose what to tag your audio with so I'm gonna choose dialogue. Now up here at the top there's a drop down for presets so you have all sorts of cool stuff like some actually very interesting stuff here too you can do in a small room, in a large room, from a television, from a telephone. You can do over the intercom, podcast voice. In this case, we wanna use from the television. And immediately, you can hear the difference. In this video, we're going back to the basics to show you. And you didn't have to play around with anything really. You might have to change the audio levels a little bit by going into the clip volume, but it's pretty fun. Right? Another thing you can do is when it transitions from this point to this point is add a little sound effect. It could be a glitch sound effect, but in this case, I'm gonna do the v v h, v, c r eject sound effect that I downloaded. Alright. Let's go to this folder and the ejection. Here we go. So we can take this sound effect, drag it down here. We can reposition it. By the way, a quick little tip I have is if you press option on a Mac or alt if you're on Windows and you hold that and then you use the bracket keys, you know, the greater and less than symbols, you can move it to the left or to the right frame by frame and this can work for any clip which comes in handy a lot. Another thing you can do here is use these new audio handles to make the audio a little bit smoother so you can click on this little square icon and create a little fade drag up or down to adjust how that works which is really neat. So usually what I do is I'll just play it back and see how it sounds and then I'll make some adjustments to the volume. Basics to show you how Actually the basics to show you so it it's a little loud. So generally what I do is I solo the track. So I just press s. So that way, I can just hear the volume. And, generally, you don't want the audio of a sound effect to be all the way up to zero because it's going to overpower the voice a little bit. So I like to go over to a central sound again and just lower this a few decibels, and then we can hear how it sounds. Alright. That's a little bit better. Can tweak that a little bit. The last final touch and I know a lot of you may have I've used this effect before but I use it all the time. It is the remix tool for music. So let's go into our synthwave music that we got here from Storyblocks. Some nice retro vibes. Love that. I'm going to make my timeline a little bit smaller here, and let's drag this music track. So right now what you see in my timeline is just the intro all the way to when I have my gal logo reveal. So I want this music track to end naturally right when you see my logo reveal so as you can see here this sound that kind of loud I think it's a snare crash sound I want it to end exactly there so you can go over here to the rolling edit tool and go to the remix tool and you can drag this and experiment with how it's going to remix this track So you can see it almost ends perfectly here. Let's see how this sounds. It created two cuts by the way. I don't know if you guys can see this. Let me make this a little bit bigger. So there's two kind of squiggly lines. You know, the pink color isn't helping here with this. Let's change the label color to something darker. Oh, that didn't really help either. Let's try. I don't know what would be good here. I guess it is hard to see with the waveform so big. But here's, like, a little crooked line, and here's another crooked line. It basically did the slicing for you. Didn't have to worry about that. So let me just play this. Almost perfect there. The only thing I like to do in the beginning here is just In this video. I want it to start right on the drumbeat. So I'm gonna take away that beginning section of this little fade up here and just roll that in so it starts immediately. Oops. Didn't wanna do that. Roll that over. Interest three. Awesome. Maybe a little fade there too so it's not too harsh. The last thing is to level your sound, right? Because it's a bit too loud with my voice. In this video, we're going back to the basics to show So it's starting to feel more rich with texture, right? This is what we're always trying to do on our edits is really fill it in with fun effects, really bring our audience into our vibe. And so you can start to think about how you can use these different effects I'm showing in your own edits as well. But generally, for music, it's good to be between, like, minus eighteen or minus twenty, and there's many different ways that you can manipulate the volume. You can use your meters here to see how loud it is. So if I do a solo right now, it's way too loud. We need to bring this down into this region minus eighteen. So, you know, one way you could do it is go to effect controls and just literally go to volume and just type in minus eighteen. You can do it up here in effect controls. In this video we're going back to the basics to show you how to do so it's better now another way that you can change it now is with the new properties panel so you can select the audio go to properties and adjust volume here to do minus eighteen There's a few different places now. In this video, we're going back to the basics to show you how alright. Cool. So that is the first effect. Caitlin, let me know if there's any questions to ask about this first effect before we dive in to rotoscoping. So let's go ahead. I'll get that set up here, and we will see. Don't forget to leave questions in the q and a, and we'll be happy to answer them at the end as well. Okay. So we did VHS. Now let's go into rotoscoping. So one particular effect we probably use in every edit is rotoscoping. And if you guys are not familiar with what rotoscoping is it's essentially separating a foreground from a background, separating one element from the image. In this case most of the time my editors and I are separating myself from the foreground. Now it looks like there's some media pending here. It wasn't pending before. There we go. I just had to it had to wake up. Alright. So right here, I have this moment where I say I'm on a time crunch. And like I was saying before, doing your edit doing an edit that complements or visually makes what you're saying more interesting is what we're always looking for. So listen back here. So I'll play it from the screen record. Most of the time when I'm editing, I'm on a time crunch to get the video so most of the time I'm on a time crunch. So right here, I thought it would be cool to add a clock behind me with a ticking sound effect. So how do we do that? Well, there is a masking tool in Premiere Pro and I will show you how to do that for more static shots. But if you have more movement, I recommend using dynamic link with after effects. So to do that, let's go ahead and click on option or alt on a Mac. So you just press that key and drag up. Don't let go of that key. Let go of the mouse first and then let go of the key. And now we have a duplicate. So now on this duplicate copy we can right click and we can replace with After Effects composition and this is going to open up After Effects right now and to rotoscope you need to bring up the layers panel. To do that, just double click on the footage that you want a rotoscope. So double click, and now we're inside of the layers panel. The rotor brush tool is this little guy here with a little paintbrush. So you just click on that, make sure it's highlighted blue, and then you're able to get this little green icon and you can just click and move around. And you can basically be super rough because it uses AI now to detect the edges. And you can change how it works here. So you can see this had a pink outline, which is kind of hard to see, and this is like the inverse. So, basically, I just wanna make sure that this is selected here too, and we can do our glasses here. This can be a little bit rough because the element we're adding behind me has, some transparency, so it doesn't have to be a perfect rotoscope. So I'm just gonna go in here and perfect that. If anything is selected that you don't wanna be selected, you can always press option and you'll get a red brush and you can, you know, click to add that back in, for example. So this is our roto brush here. Let's just make sure that looks good. And once everything is almost ready, what I like to do is just hit the space bar for play, and this will rotoscope it in real time. And you can see there's just one little air happening right about here on the right, which isn't a huge deal, but a little bit of the rotoscope starts to creep in. So what I do is I go right before this moment, and I press option, and I just remove that. Oops. Reverse. Sorry. I just paint over that part and then press play, and it starts to work. Let's let's fix the one down here as well. There we go. Sometimes it's a little tricky, but then once you get it alright. It looks pretty good. So then once it's good, I don't recommend just hitting save and going back to Premiere Pro. What I recommend doing is clicking on freeze and I don't know if you guys can see that because I'm covering it in the window from what I can see, but you click on freeze here at the bottom and this basically frees the rotoscope. So that way, it doesn't reprocess it every single time, which is important. So now when you go back into the composition, you can see that we have the transparent background. You can always turn that off and it's just black. Right? Don't worry about the glasses. It's not, necessary in this case. So go ahead and hit save. And now when we go back to Premiere Pro it doesn't look like anything because we actually have our background layer we have a duplicate copy beneath remember. So what we can do now is put a graphic beneath this so I'm going to move up the roto and we're basically placing text or graphic between the foreground and the background. So now I'm gonna go over here and I found a couple different clock options from Storyblocks and this one I like the most. So I'm going to double click on this and open this up and just take an in and out of just the first part here and drag this into the timeline. So now you can see we have the clock behind me. First, we need to get rid of the green. If you don't have it I know that Storyblocks has a lot of assets that is alpha or it has transparency layer already built in, but in this case, we gotta use the ultra key effect and bam drag and drop it doesn't do anything because we have to go to effect controls and here you can select the key color and just select anywhere here and bam it's gone the green is gone. From here, you can go up to motion controls. You can use these scale parameters and position parameters here just by manipulating these numbers, or you can click on motion, and then you can click directly on the monitor and rescale it up if you prefer that method. Now if we go back to the clock here you'll notice that the actual what do you call it? The arms, the hands of the clock, they're black so it's actually kind of hard to see. Can we make these white? That's the question and the answer is yes we can. We can go to effects and we can go to color replace and just drag and drop this on here Then from effect controls again, what we're going to do is click on solid colors, make sure that's enabled, and then we need to choose our target color, which is black. So let's change this to black. And now you can see the arm is blue because the replace color is blue. In this case, I want it to be white. Alright. And then you can, increase the similarity to make it a little bit more smooth. So now we see on a time the hand more and if you want to speed it up, here's a really cool tip. You can use, the rate stretch tool. So you can just press r on your keyboard and that should be a default preset by the way and then just speed it up just drag it in to speed it up. If you make it longer it's gonna slow it down so it's kind of like manipulating time with the rate stretch tool. So now we can preview how it looks on a time crunch. There we go that works so we can just cut here the excess off. So that look that's looking pretty good. What we could do now is add a little timer sound effect. So let's go ahead and drag and drop the sound effect I got here, and let's see how this sounds. You know, I'm on a time crunch to get so just adding something like that really makes a difference. Right? There's a few more things I would do in this case to spice it up. How about add a nice glow on our graphic? I always say the little things that you don't have to do make the biggest difference and will set you apart. So one thing that Premiere Pro doesn't have is a built in glow effect that's easy to use, but there are three sixty effects which can still be used on regular footage. So there's a VR glow. So even if you don't have three sixty footage in your timeline, you can still drag and drop it and apply it to this graphic and, bam, there it's glowing. So one thing we can do here is go in and adjust the glow radius. So if you don't want it to be as intense, let's change it to, like, forty or something, and that looks pretty cool. And hold on one second. Let me fix my camera. Cool. One thing you can also do, an effect that I use all the time are, like, these little pop motion presets. Let's see how my typing skills are. Pop. That didn't work. Pop motion. Here we go. So rather than keyframing pop motion, I use film impact pop motion, and I just drag and drop it here, and it creates a little pop pop effect. I'm on a time saw a little pop. Use this all the time, and I just copy and paste it on the end. And I would probably go in and I would lower the volume of the ticking a bit. And that's how we do. Most of the time when I'm editing, I'm on a time crunch to get the video out. A little a little fun rotoscope. So rotoscoping isn't isn't as hard as it is as it looks, I should say. Alright. So, Caitlin, we could go into questions, or I can show quickly the b roll audio trick. Yeah. Let's, we have a couple of questions from the audience that I wanna, bring up. And then if we have some time, which it looks like we do, we can jump into the third one. Sure. So the first question should be an easy one. Which Premiere Pro version are you using here, that includes these effects? Let's go in here. I'm using version twenty five as you can see right here. I just wanna note that Premiere Pro comes with a very limited amount of effects. This pop motion impact is a plug in, and all the effects like this graphic of the clock is part of the media library that I've downloaded. So I just want to emphasize that. The VR glow and some other effects that I was using are things that, like, are built in. Like, VR glow is built in and, you know, essential sound stuff that I was showing you before with, like, the presets. That's all built in. But there is a lot of things that you need to download and use, and and that's kind of the power of using Storyblocks and other plugins and, like, different presets that you can create yourself. So hopefully, that answered it. Yeah. And then the other question, can you go back and show the essential sound panel, feature that auto docks the music when, like, layering that with vocals? Sure. I don't use it a whole lot, to be honest, because most of the time, I'm just either showing audio or I'm, like, have a music track and then I don't want it to go out. But if you wanted this audio track to auto duck to dialogue, what you would do is you would use this ducking feature from essential sound. So what I did was I actually used the properties panel to lower this volume, I believe. Let's go to demo. Oh, here I am in in the right one now. Demo. I did minus eighteen, so let's do zero. So let's say you want AI to do the ducking for you. You just go to essential sound, and you click on ducking. Can you guys see this? Is that better? See. So there's ducking here and what you can do now is you can say I want the music to duck against audio that's been tagged as dialogue. So you can see that this is selected. We want that. So all you need to do, first of all, is make sure that both of these have been selected and tagged as dialogue. And you can see they've already been tagged as dialogue, And they have this little I can't really zoom in on the icon, but there's this little dialogue icon here. So once those have been tagged, you can go back to the music, and here you can choose how low you want it to duck. And you can see the duck amount is automatically set set to minus eighteen. So then you can click on generate keyframes, and what this does is it essentially will duck the dialogue for you so you don't have to go in and manually type it, and it'll go up and down if you have a moment where there is no dialogue. In this case, it it it's not as pertinent, but you can see that it does increase slightly here. It created, key frames as we go into on in. So it gets a little bit louder there, but it automatically In this video, we're going back to the base. So that's how you can use auto ducking, and then you can, you know, manipulate these key frames as much as you want. Awesome. Thank you, Kelsey. Mhmm. Yeah. Let's move on to the next one. Sweet. Alright. So we have here an interesting sequence here of me actually in a pilot's costume. You can see I really jump into the role here. Basically, I was actually showing, the rotoscoping round trip. So the whole analogy here was that I was your captain taking you on a round trip from Premiere Pro to after effects and back. So let me just play this sequence for you, and we can jump into a couple different effects here that we have in the timeline. Awesome pilot's costume for this video. Alright, everybody. We have reached our Prozine altitude here. And starting off in Premiere Pro, I'm going to open up the story block. Alright. So you can see in the beginning here, we have this little where I'm saying, you know, thanks for the costume. Awesome pilot's call. And we have this little light sweep situation. I'm gonna show this to you in a moment because it also involves another way of rotoscoping inside of Premiere Pro that I think a few of you will be interested in. But this part here with the b roll and the sound Alright, everybody. We have reached our It sounds like I'm coming from a radio, and it sounds like that air is kind of like how you, feel inside of an airplane. Right? So let's go into the demo, and let's show you how we did it. So for this part, it was just me saying this normally. Alright, everybody. We have reached our cruising altitude here. So rather than having me on screen, we thought, oh, wouldn't it be funny if we just found a b roll shot of, you know, a plane at cruising altitude? So that's what we did with Storyblocks. We found that stock video clip, and let's go ahead and find this clip here from project here. There we go. So here it is, the downloaded clip. So I'm gonna double click on this, and then you can choose the in and outs, the in, pressing I for when you want it to start and the out for when you want it to end, and drag this video down. Okay. And I'll expand all tracks here so it's a little bit bigger for you. There we go. Alright. By the way, I have snap turned on, and snap in timeline helps you align your clips up with the ones beneath, and I use that all the time. It just comes in a lot of handy. Okay. So we have the b roll clip here, which looks good. Buddy. We have reached our cruising, but we need to play around with the audio a little bit more. Let me resize Premiere Pro here real quick because something happened. Limited real estate on my little tiny computer monitor right here. Okay. So let's select once again our dialogue, the voice here. And then from essential sound, I'm going to select dialogue. And this time, like what I showed you before, instead of from a television, I'm gonna do from the radio. Over the intercom could work too, but let's see the difference. Let's try radio. Alright, everybody. We have reached our cruising altitude here. Okay. That's from the radio. Now let's try it from the intercom. Alright, everybody. We have reached our cruising altitude here. I I think I like that one a little bit more. So let's stick with that. And then this is the cool part. So I downloaded this ambiance track of just this wind. Let's press o if we want that to be the little the little highlighted clip area the in and out is what I'm going to drag into the timeline you can always extend it it doesn't cut it it still exists there so now we have the wind Alright everybody we have reached our kroszene altitude. But it's not quite right. We need to add some effects. Now rather than using essential sound I want to go a little bit more advanced here with you and use what is called the parametric equalizer effect, which allows you to do high passes and low pass. And in this case, we wanna do a low pass because we wanna remove all of those higher higher frequencies from the audio clip. So let's go ahead and I'll explain as we go along. Go to effects and let's search for parametric equalizer. By the way, this is built in it's not a plug in. So go ahead and drag and drop this or you can double click. You don't have to drag and drop. And go to effect controls. And now we have the effect here, but we need to click on edit. And now this window can feel a little intimidating. Right? Because you got a lot of different channels going on. But for this particular effect, the only thing we need to do is click on low pass, and then you'll get a tiny little LP that comes up here. And you just drag this LP point over to around three or so. And basically, here at the bottom are all of the frequency levels. So I just lowered it down to one k, so we're cutting out all the frequencies in sound above one k all the way up to ten k, twenty k. So let me play you the before and after so you can hear the difference. So this is after. Alright, everybody. We have reached our cruising altitude here. And this is the before. I'm just gonna turn off the effect by clicking on this little bypass icon inside this window. Alright, everybody. We have reached our And now with it on We're cruising altitude. It just has that kind of low rumble sound to it. Right? And this low pass filter can also be applied when you're underwater. So if you've been wondering how to create that kind of underwater sound, it's very similar. So you just create that low pass filter on here and bam, you got it. So that's a super cool effect, and you can see that it just made this a lot more interesting. Again, I would probably go to a central sound still and go to ambiance. And down at the bottom, I might play around with clip volume here just slightly to make it not quite as loud. Alright, everybody. We have reached our cruising altitude here. And start yep. It just is great. I love it. This is what I love about editing. I love just kind of recreating and faking, these little moments in our timeline. So there's that, and that's really fun. And that's super it's pretty basic. Right? All we did here was just add one b roll shot, a filter to my voice, and an ambient sound effect of wind. That's it. So let's show you this other way of rotoscoping that I think you're going to like. So right here, I'm talking about the costume. So how cool would it be to have, like, a shiny effect come up over the hat and the the shirt, the captain shirt as I'm talking? So just like before, what we can do is actually, let me join this through edit. So we have this one clip here. Let me duplicate this again just like we did before when we are sending the after effects, but this time we're not gonna send it. So press option or alt and click and drag and let go of that key, and now we have a duplicate. So here, what I'm gonna do is go over here to effect controls again. And what we're going to do is use the pen tool underneath opacity to create a custom mask over the hat. And there's a little bit of movement here. So right before I move more is all that we need to really mask out. Let me hear what I say real quick. Pilot's costume. So pilots see if it's gonna play. Let's costume. So right around here, I look at the waveform where I want it to happen. So let's say let's create a mask at this moment. I usually like to zoom in by going to this drop down and going to, like, two hundred percent, and then I can, move around. I can press h for the hand tool and reposition this and then go back to the pen tool. So I'm gonna click on this little free draw bezier is what it's called, and then let's draw. So I'm gonna click to make the first point and then click again and hold to make it curved. I'm just gonna go around and just gently draw here. And what the heck just happened here? That's weird. It, like, repositioned itself on me. What just happened? Premiere Pro glitch. Let's undo that. Like, repositioned itself. How weird. Let's delete that. Well, I'll be duped to there. I'm going to delete that and reposition this. I don't know why these weird things happen sometimes. I'm like, what just happened? Let's go ahead and do two hundred percent again, and let's see what happened exactly. Let's try this. I'll try to do this quicker to see the result. But it should just create a mass, so I'm not quite sure what happened there. It's like I would say, like, ninety percent of the time with editing, it's always, like, everything's pretty good. And then on occasion, you'll get something weird happen like that, and you're like, what just happened? Okay. That's good. I'm afraid to click anywhere now. Okay. There we go. So that worked. So we created a mask there. And now we're gonna create another mask, but this time on the t shirt. So let's go to two hundred percent. Actually, this time I'm gonna do one hundred. And we'll just use the pen tool again. Make sure it's selected. And this time, we'll just create a quick mask here. So it's a bit more manual with Premiere Pro. I know that they're working on some object selection tools, with generative AI to help speed up this process, and I was telling Adobe and Premiere, Pro team that they should add, foreground separation so it's more automatic for folks. But I don't know. Something about, like, creating these masks for me is, like, super meditative, like, if I'm listening to music. So we have this done. Great. So now what we can do is at this moment, we can create a cut. And then, like I was telling you before, there's many different effects that you can apply. Premiere Pro's built in effects compared to either platforms like, let's say, like CapCut is pretty limited. That's why there's so many plugins or so many effects that you can get story blocks included. And like I showed you before that pop motion impact that we use all the time, another one that we use is called light sweep. And, again, this is a paid for one. But the reason why it's so great is that it drag and drops as its own transition, like a built in transition in Premiere Pro. So now this is only being applied to the hat and the shirt. Isn't that cool? It doesn't affect my face. So when this plays Let's costume. So that's really neat. And then to really sell it, we can add a sound effect. I found this swish. Little little tear. It almost sounds like a paper tear. Let's go ahead and drop this in and try to line it up. Remember the frame by frame option, less than, greater than, eyelid costume for it. Sounds good. What I would do over here in essential sound is probably do sound effects, make it a little bit less, and apply a little bit of reverb as well to make it a little echoey. Let's costume for this video. There we go. That's all she wrote. So those are, like, the main effects that I had planned to show you all. Happy to answer some live questions in the moment, but can also show you more. There's always more to show. Let me know, Caitlin, if there's anything. Yeah. Let's move on to questions. Really quickly before we get there, I just want to do a quick PSA. So the first thing, our next webinar is going to take place on March twentieth, and we're gonna be featuring Michael Lahud, who is the lead video editor at Freethink Media. We're gonna be discussing how Freethink creates sponsored content that ad audiences actually want to watch. So be sure to bookmark that, and we should be sending out the registration link, early next week. And then next, be sure to check out Kelsey on, Premier Gal on YouTube, to learn more of, the skills that she's teaching and just kinda follow along with the channel. And then lastly, you can visit story blocks dot com slash resources, to find the recording for this webinar if you missed the email, as well as some of our past events and a lot more educational content from us. So with that, let's go ahead and jump into, q and a. And, you know, please keep questions coming as we go through these if you think of anything else, but we do have a few that are are queued up here and ready to go. So Kelsey, the first one, what's a standard DB level that works for you for different audio? So for example, for music, you know, is it around, like, negative eighteen? What would those levels be for vocals and sound effects? Yeah. Generally, I try to keep my voice audio between zero and minus six and, basically, the entire mix between that. But you don't want the sound effects or the music to overpower that at any time. So, for example, if there's no dialogue, then the music should be between zero and minus six also. Right? But if there's dialogue, then drop the music minus eighteen, minus twenty five depending on how loud that track is. Sound effects, it varies. It could be minus eight. It could be minus sixteen. It just depends. So you really have to just kind of solo those individual tracks and then play it with whatever other mix you have and and and play it by ear. It's kind of like painting but with audio. Yeah. And I know, you know, for Storyblocks' video team, we sort of have, like, a little bit of, like, a reminder of, like, where we set our levels so we're not having to figure it out each time. So, you know, like, once we kind of perfected what we felt like was the good balance, we just save those levels, you know, in a little bit of a reference sheet that we use for future edits. Yeah. And, yeah, the next question that we have here, do you have a recommended technique to add a solid border around a person or an object in Premiere now that the paint bucket has been removed? Do you use, like, multiple drop shadows, or is there a better method you have to kinda create that border effect? Absolutely. We do that all the time actually in our tutorials here. If I go to let's see if I can show this here. Is it the Roto one? Yeah. So you can see here I have my React cam, and I'm in the circle here. So I'm I'm guessing that's what you're talking about in this question. But, basically, in the React cam, I have a graphic that I actually make. So I use the properties panel to create a shape. So you can click here to create an ellipse. And when you do that, you get the shape. And if you press shift, it should automatically make it a square. Interesting. Could be a bug. Actually, haven't done this since since they've switched to the properties panel and and, basically, the essential graphics panel became kind of properties. It's kinda confusing for some folks. But normally, when you click on that, it should be proportional, but for some reason, it's not. Let's see if I if I do it from here, if it's if it's the same. Okay. That worked. So then I would just choose the color of the fill to be our classic yellow. I I have a hex code that I normally just copy and paste in here, but then I put that graphic behind me. So let me actually just undo that, and you can see that I have just that graphic and then I place my video on top and I use effect controls to create that mask, that circular mask. So that's how we do it. We don't use any drop shadows. You can add a drop shadow on the graphic itself to create some a little bit of beveling or some contrast, but that's that's pretty much it. Very cool. Next question. This one came up a couple times. Where do you get your plugins, like the pop one that you mentioned earlier? Well, the pop the the pop plug in is one that, I partnered with Film Impact for many years, one of the first partners I had on the channel, and we just found it so so useful. It's just so easy to drag and drop. It's the only transitions that I found that behave very similarly to the way that the built in transitions work in Premiere Pro. And, yeah, that I mean, I also developed my own plug in to where we save our presets too. It's called the GAL toolkit. You guys probably heard me talk about it before and that, you know, I didn't find it. I created it. So if you can't find it, you create it. And then, of course, you don't need to have plugins. You can create your own presets using transform controls, and you can save them inside the effects panel underneath this folder called presets. Oh, you you guys can't see it, but, basically, it's in the effects panel, underneath presets. And then oh, here we go. Effects panel presets. So, for example, you can use the transform effect, apply it to footage, and then you can create a preset with keyframes and save it in your preset folder. And, yeah, there's all sorts of tools all the time. Because of the nature of my YouTube channel, I get a lot of companies reaching out who have developed new tools. So it's actually pretty cool to be in this arena because I get to test a lot of new things as they come out, and that's how I discover them and share them with you guys. Very cool. I wanna go back to, you know, the effect that you were just showing with the border around your pop out. Question was, how do you make that perfect circle? You know, I thought it was, like, impossible in Premiere to get that perfect circle done. You press shift. Hold on. I need to go back to wherever this was. Final it was demo roto. So in my React Nest, are you talking about the mask tool or the graphic tool? Did they say? Didn't say, but I'm assuming it's probably the mask. Okay. So here in effect controls let's zoom in so you guys can see this better. Oh, that's too big. Two hundred. There we go. It is possible. Let me go ahead and delete that. So you're gonna click on this little ellipse icon, and then you're going to press v to go to the selection tool, and press shift, and now it's a perfect circle. And then you can reposition this, like so, and I like to get rid of the feathering. And is it the same for the shape as well? Just holding down that shift? Yeah. Just holding down shift, but use it from the toolbar because there's something buggy from the properties panel. So you just click on ellipse, and then you click, press shift, and it it should work. Awesome. Thank you. Mhmm. And then one more question while we're on this one. How do you create an outline around, you, not the entire area with the background? Rotoscoping. And then how would you create that outline around the rotoscope shape? You could you could use kind of a glow effect. I personally would probably use after effects for that. I do have a tutorial on my channel. I think it's called glowing lines effect, where you do the rotoscope and then and then you add this kind of line around the whole person. So if you just go to my channel and you go to little magnifying glass, you can search glowing lions, and and you'll find the solution there. Cool. Alright. We've got a couple more minutes. So I wanna shift gears a little bit. I think we got through most of the questions on the technical stuff. But there are a few questions in here just kind of about how you operate your channel. So one question here is, do you and your team, perform any sort of formal, like, quality assurance checks before you upload your content? By quality assurance, do you mean, like, is everything correct in the video, like typos or, like, everything, like, is copyright friendly, like, that type of question? Yeah? Well, for example, most of the main channel edits are done by my editors right now, and I have two main channel editors. And what we use, the products that we use in our videos are always safe to use. Like, I make sure that I give my editors all the tools that don't have any, like, copyright infringement and stuff like that, first of all. And, yeah, they sent me a review link. You know, review links are really popular now with the time coded feedback, and I'll watch them look out for any typos and any issues with the sound, and that provides that assurance. So it's still going through me. I guess I'm the quality assurance here and making sure everything looks good. And if there's any, sponsors involved in that video, I'll send the link to them too. It's always good to have another set of eyes on a video because it's easy to miss stuff. You know? Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. And then one last question here. How do you storyboard your videos and where do you get the inspiration to come up with, or where do you get the inspiration for your new videos? Right now, I currently don't storyboard for the YouTube videos. I mainly create an editing script, and the script is just done in Google Docs. And, I also have a cowriter now too that writes some of the videos as well. And, normally, what we'll do is we'll just create a a text description of, like, you know, it would be cool to to scope me out and place this mountain behind me with a cool sound effect or something like that. And as of now, because I've been working with these editors for three years now, they understand my style. They have the sixth sense of what to do that sometimes I'll say in my talking head when I'm recording the video. I'll be like, oh, by the way, Rickard, can you, download this clip and use this here? And I'll, like, direct a little bit while I'm also recording myself. But I also give them complete freedom to have fun. And a lot of times, they come up with things that actually surprise me and make me laugh because I was not expecting that. So it's kind of beautiful to work with other people who can, like, find those little moments. So, yeah, we don't storyboard right now. For thumbnails, though, sometimes I'll sketch out an idea, and I'll send that to the thumbnail artist to help visualize it. But that's pretty much the only hand drawn thing that I do right now. Awesome. That's super cool. Alright. Well, I think we're at about time. So, yeah, thank you everybody for joining. Thank you, Kelsey, for teaching such a great in-depth session. Yeah, we hope you all will join us for the next event in March, and enjoy the rest of your days. Bye.
