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>> Maybe you saw our earlier Insider Secrets video on how to cut your home movies that come from your camcorder, into a good, clean, basic story and whittle out the junk. But perhaps the final product looks a little plain? I'm Brian Cooley from CNET.com. We're gonna fix that. Stand by for Insider Secrets on video polishing. Well here's a basic video we did in a previous Insider Secrets lesson. It's pretty good. It's tightly cut. It's clean, there's not a lot of waste and it basically tells the story. But it's a little bit oh, flat. We're gonna add the big 3 of video polishing in this Insider Secret. So I'm going to add titles, transitions and we're going to add some background music. Some audio. These are easily done in just about any video editing software you've got but again, we're gonna be using Adobe Premiere in this particular lesson. But the concepts are the same. Let's start with the first one which is titling. Titles are when you see text on the screen and it's a very handy thing to do if you're going to post your video to the web, in particular. Because you won't be there to actually introduce the video. So let a title do it for you. Here's how you add a title. In most software that has titling ability, you'll find that there's a separate titling area, separate tool. On Premiere it's this button right up here. And you'll also find that most programs give you a variety of pre-templated titles. So in this case I'm gonna choose one called generic one title. Just to show you how it works. I okay that particular style and it presents me with a title that has generic boiler plate text, which I can then go and edit up the way I want to. So I open up my title to get a good look at it and I start typing in the text that I really want there. In my case, we'll call it A Trip To See The Cats. And again, this is kind of like using a very simple word processor in a way. You can change the size of the font, the position of the text and the color of it, as well as the font style. So get that the way you like as if you're using sort of a glorified word processor. When you're done you can close or save the titling tool and then move the title into your timeline. I drag it down to the beginning of my video, because that's where titles go best and now I'm ready to preview it and see if it looks the way I want and if it runs the right duration. So I go to the edge of my title, I move it back and forth and I get it to the length I want. Just drag it to the right duration, preview it again and make sure it's the length you want and that looks good. That's about the right length of title I want. But I don't like how the title gets into the video. It's a clean cut. What they call a butt edit which is not a very glamorous term for a not a very glamorous edit. So let's polish that up. That's our next polishing trick and that's a video transition. Head over here to the menu where it says video transitions and then pick on out. I like simple ones. That's another Insider Secret. Use dissolves, use wipes, don't go nuts with transitions, just get the job done. I go to dissolves, I find a simple one and I drag it on the junction between the two scenes that I wanna dissolve. In this case, between my titles and my first piece of video. And again, I back up a little bit and rehearse it. Very good. I like the way that looks. Now I like the way our video is shaping up visually but orally it leaves a little something to be desired. There are times when there's nothing to listen to, just background noise that isn't always very interesting. Maybe not a lot of dialog or narration. So why not add a music bed underneath your video. When it makes sense, it can do wonders for the whole look and feel of your piece. Here's how to do it. I go into again, my media selector in this particular program to add media. Add from files or folders. I pick up an MP3 I've already selected and I add that to my selection of potential assets I can work with. Same place we keep going to get titles, videos, everything. Now I drag that MP3 and you can also use waves and many other audio formats, down to an audio track. Okay now, let's preview or rehearse it and see how the music works against the video. You can tune and tweak audio levels up and down. The audio from your video as well as background audio that you add, even sound effects that you add and get the mix just right. I've really now done wonders for a video without having to do a lot of effort. Cause I've used the big three. Titles, transitions and background music. You'll find you'll use those over and over again and you can add lots of polish to your video with hardly any elbow grease. Now get to it. Make your videos look and sound better.
