This is a bit of a noob question,

I been making little vids for a while using premiere and prem. pro with a shitty handycam. Work is hopefully getting me a Sony hvr hd1000e to use soon. My question tho is about post-effects. What sort of thing can u do in the editing process to make vids look good. I mean I use titles and layer tracks to music[is this what post-effects mean?]etc.
Any advice is welcome.

Thanks,]
Briano.

If you're using Premiere Pro CS3 there's virtually nothing you can't do. See the tutorials on the Adobe website.

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Adam
Proud owner of 8 Sony HDV cams. Checking into rehab next week.
"There are no experimental failures. There's only more data."

I think I have premiere pro cs2, i looked in the index and it doesnt appear one can apply depth of field effects after the fact. can one do it using 'adobe after effects'?

I just completed a video for work, 17 mins long, used a sony trv120 i bought yrs ago and adobe premiere elements 2.0 to edit.
i layered clips and audio and music and titles etc and various transitions and effects on audio like low pass to get rid of hiss etc.My point is I know the bacis workings of premiere but am I missing something in editing, i.e. is there a 'mastering' technique u can do similar to recording music that can gel the whole thing together .Is there other valuable treatments to the footage that are essential or advisable...if anybody knows. apart from buying a 3 chip cam and getting quality audio and lighting etc.

Thanks,

Brian.

Some things have got to be done with camera technique,like depth of field,your going to need a camera with some manual adjustments and maybe some neutral density filters to play with the depth of field.The more I get into editing I find I'm almost always color correcting or maybe better called color balancing kind of adjusting the brightness of the colors,usually to darken things a little bit,to me when made into a dvd and played on a television,my vids look better darkened up a little.
Dennis

As DTM said, DoF is best and most easily applied in-cam. But you need manual control to do so.

It's likely you could fake this in post by using something like After Effects. I imagine you could create a mask around your subject and blur everything else. I'm guessing there are tutorials on how to do this.

Other things you might consider are applying Auto Color and Auto Levels either to all the individual clips, or rendering the project out into a single file and applying these to the resulting single clip.

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Adam
Proud owner of 8 Sony HDV cams. Checking into rehab next week.
"There are no experimental failures. There's only more data."

First I'd like to say thanks for answering all my noob questions over the past few months acgold7 and others. I really appreciate it. I hope work will buy me a Sony fx7 or something in the new year similar.I will be better able to produce depth of field with a better cam than my 8 yr old digi8 cam which is prolly single chip etc etc. I looked up the possibility of doin it in editing and it said after effects can do it but i have premiere and i couldnt find it there. What would autocolour do exactly?i cant imagine it has anything to do with depth of field...

No, it wouldn't, but you were also asking what you could do to make the whole video come together as one,and proper color correction goes a long way in that regard.

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Adam
Proud owner of 8 Sony HDV cams. Checking into rehab next week.
"There are no experimental failures. There's only more data."

ah I see... so use the color level to harmonise different clips that may have been taken at different locations and lighting conditions.

Thanks.