Posts By :

customatic

When you don’t have the Right Tools 1024 576 Customatic

When you don’t have the Right Tools

Tackling any video project comes with its own set of problems. Mine was a lighting issue for my podcast I was creating. It’s called It’s Only Monday Podcast (Feel free to listen to an episode) and I wanted to give it a very bright vibe. I figured Monday morning, bright and early. Those were the visuals that came to mind. Here was my problem. I didn’t have lights strong enough to overpower the sun coming in from my floor to ceiling windows. So what did I do? I struggled for 2 weeks trying different ways to light it how I initially wanted with no success.

Trying to figure out the podcast lighting during the day

After 14 days of fighting with 35.73 octillion lumens (how bright the sun is) I realized this was a losing battle. Suddenly a thought popped in my head.

“If I can’t control the sun, what can I control?”

This one inner question to myself opened my mind up to a bunch of different possibilities that I didn’t even try to think of because I was so stuck on trying to get my initial idea to work. So long story short I figured out how I was going to light the podcast, but that isn’t the point of this article.

The final look of It’s Only Monday Podcast | Episode 29

As video editors we are going to be in situations where we won’t be able to do our initial ideas. There are many factors at play. But this thought of focusing on what you can control, creates the painted boundaries of the game you are playing. I will leave you with one example. If you have some photo assets that are to be displayed in a video, but some are high quality and some aren’t. Well instead of trying to get everything high quality which may not be possible because someone doesn’t want to update a photo from 1982. Lean into making all the photos look like they all are from 1982. Or lean into a look that is more rustic, or gritty. The possibilities are endless.

Now instead of forcing something that just won’t work. Focus on the things you can physically engineer and get to work!

More External HDD Space, Fast? 1024 576 Customatic

More External HDD Space, Fast?

Space. No I am not talking about the final frontier. I’m talking about a different void which video editors need to survive. External hard drive space. We fill them up fast, and as technology advances and cameras get better, their trade off is file sizes become massive.

So let me paint the picture. You have an edit you are about to start. Ingesting footage, downloading assets, you know how it is. Quickly you realize this project is going to need more external HDD space. Just one problem. All of your external HDD’s are full. So here is a quick fix to your problem if you are an Adobe Creative Cloud user. Keyword is “Adobe”.


Step 1: File location

So if you set up your Premiere projects like I do, I create a folder where I store the project file. You are going to navigate to this folder in older projects. (Where you save your project file is where you need to be)

Step 2: The culprit

You are looking for folders that are called “Adobe Premiere Pro Videos Previews” & “Adobe Premiere Pro Audio Previews”

These folders and files within them can get pretty big. If you go through old projects deleting these you can possibly free up a huge amount of space on your hard drives. I have been able to free up over 200 GB on one drive by doing this.

These files are not vital to your project and will not affect your project by deleting them. These files will build back up as you continue to work in your project and render preview.

That’s it! I hope that helps if you are in a pinch and need the space quick.