Ever since I've made my first film all the way back in 2019, I never understood what the point of media encoding was with our finished videos. Sure, we were told that we should encode things with the YouTube 720p preset, but that never necessarily meant anything to me. There were always options for other presets that were meant for other video websites, however I thought that they were all the same. If they said 720p, what was the difference between doing 720p for YouTube versus Facebook? Well, I have learned that there actually is a difference. When something goes through Adobe Media Encoder, it is being rendered, converted from an editing file to a video file, and compressed.
That idea of compression is the main difference here. Compression is essentially making the files go down to a lower size. Instead of having a 20gb video, Media Encoder works to maybe compress it down to a 13gb video. Those numbers were made up bit you get the idea. This works because of the bitrate that the files work with. Instead of having a thousand little pixels make up areas, the tiny pixels are grouped into slightly larger pixels. This is what makes the bitrate more manageable for the size of the file; things are becoming grouped together. This idea of compression is related to the bitrate of your file. The bitrate is how much information is present within your video at a time, meaning that a higher bitrate means more information for the computer to handle (specifically its bandwidth). Mike Leonard, a director, says that bitrate is essentially the depth of information in your file. Compression and bitrate is the difference between a 720p YouTube Media Encoder preset and a 720p Vimeo Media Encoder preset. While practically everything is the same for the two, YouTube tries to have a target bitrate of 16 Mbps (megabits per second which measures bandwidth) yet Vimeo has a target bitrate of 8 Mbps. That is the difference between the two Media Encoder Presets that seem like they should be the same.
B-Roll
Over the couples of weeks, I filmed and edited together an On the Spot for CVTV on the Boys Wrestling team.
While I learned a lot and it was a satisfactory project, there were still some things that I could have done better. One big thing that I could have focused on was a more diverse array of B-Roll footage. What I had was fine, but it could have been more. Even if I couldn't have gotten closer to the game to record better up-close footage, I could have added more creative shots to the work. I could have added scripted footage instead of just the game and just the one shot of the interview. An addition of a worm's eye shot of the interviewee walking past, a close up of the interviewee's hands as he speaks, or even a POV shot of walking through the doors to the gym all could have added to the professionalism of the On the Spot. Having B-Roll doesn't just mean having footage to cover the audio, it means having an equally good visual stimulus that keeps attention along with that interesting audio.
Text/Caption Borders (Safe Margins)
Example One, where the placement of text is not well within the Safe Margins
Another very useful bit of information I was given came from an element in film/video that I had never considered before: it's the placement of where your text goes. One thing I never knew is that text is actually supposed to be place within a specific area of the video. When placing text in a video, there is a border of two rectangles that the text should be placed within. There is a small rectangular box which would be considered the perfect area for your text to be, and a slightly bigger rectangle that is outside that perfect zone. That second rectangle is considered the very limit of where your text should go. In the video I made, my text was outside of that text. Because I didn't know that the borders that pop up when I make text in Premiere Pro meant, I just had my text go towards the corner. However, my text actually should have went a little more to the right and up to stay within at least that bigger rectangle.
Example Two, where the text is within the Safe Margins
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