Premiere - Lighting Tutorial (Spotlights To Dark Scene)

While I have been experimenting with the different tools of premiere I decided that I would look at some tutorials in order to learn new skills and hence look at ways in which I could go above and beyond for my assignment. The tutorial would not upload to this site in a higher quality format and hence the tutorial is in low quality however the following details can track the tutorial I used. Sourced: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EsZOhSSvOfw - Accessed 31/03/2014.

 

 

As stated in my previous blog post I have not gathered various clips which I could use for my own DVD trailer. Based on these I needed to find a clip which had an evening or ideally night scene so I was able to fully show this tutorial. I decided to take a clip from the Midnight In Paris movie trailer. I imported this into Premiere and then used the mark in and out tools to cut the specific piece of footage which I wanted to edit. With this in place I was then ready to start the tutorial.

So with this now set I began the tutorial. I started by adding the Adjust, Lighting Effects to my clip. I then used the Effects Control panel to adjust this effect. Obviously because my clip is different to the one used on the tutorial my settings differed slightly based on what worked best for my own clip. The first three settings which I changed were Ambient Colour, Ambient intensity and finally the exposure. These settings adjusted the overall lighting of the whole clip. This was the basis to set the scene. The settings which I changed can be seen in the below screenshot.

With the general lighting of the clip improved the tutorial went on to look at the different Lights (1-5). These acts as spotlights so you can edit the lighting of a clip in specific places. This is what I wanted to do. With Light 1 selected I changed the light type to Spotlight and then used the icon spotlight positioning icon to adjust the size and shape of my spotlight. This can be seen below. I decided I wanted to add a spotlight to the streetlights in this clip and hence my spotlight is positioned here. This is similar to the tutorial.

From here I was then able to use the effects in the Effects Control panel to edit the intensity and focus of the light. The settings I chose can be seen below. I chose these settings as they give a subtle yet effective look. The light isn't too bright as this made the effect look fake which wasn't what I wanted at all.

Once I had changed these settings I then took a look at the clip again. I then decided that actually the clip was a bit bright and hence the effect wasn't too noticeable and I hence changed the exposure and the ambient intensity. This can be seen below along with the clip with the effect to the light added.

 

 



The tutorial then went on to add a different effect to a different clip which I will discuss in a separate blog post. Based on the steps I took above I then repeated these stages to create the same effect for the second light in the street. I did leave this to just the two lights as these are the biggest and most noticeable two. I feel that if I was to add this effect to the smaller lights the clip would begin to look fake and become overpowered by this effect. The image below shows a before and after shot for this tutorial.

Before:

After:

You can clearly see from this that the lighting around the two lights is now much brighter and gives off the impression that the lights are actually working correctly. I really like this effect and hope to use this particular clip in my final DVD trailer.