Intelligent Information Blog

Guest Author Sven Brencher
Speaker at UA Reloaded 18

A few years ago, a great idea, a webcam and a small office light on your desk were all you needed to become famous on social media. But today even hobbyist publishers create more and more professional-looking content and, in doing so, raise the bar for the visual expectations of their followers and audiences. Often, it is visually hard to tell whether video clips are created by professionals or private publishers.

Why We Create More Professional Social Media Video Clips

One of the reasons is that the tools and services you need to create professional-looking video clips are becoming more and more affordable, powerful and easier to use. This is true not only for hardware like cameras, mobile phones or PCs – it’s also absolutely true for editing and visual effects software.

The challenge for everyone who wants to produce good-looking video clips is to catch up with these expectations… as always with limited time resources.

How to Become More Professional

1. Shape Your Idea

In Adobe’s Creative Cloud, you’ll find a couple of tools and services that might help you get the job done. After you have created a basic idea of what you want to produce, you may find inspiration in the content that other professional users share on behance.net. This is a great resource for refining your idea or finding new design styles, sometimes even providing a way to get in touch with other creatives.

behance.net: You can get inspired or connect with other creative professionals.

Tip: If you don’t have the time or knowledge to create well-designed projects from scratch, then have a look at Adobe Stock. You can find millions of great images, graphics, video clips and motion designs to enhance your projects. And it’s always easier and cheaper to modify existing content than to start with a blank sheet of paper or an empty screen. All design templates on Adobe Stock can be modified to fit your design restrictions. And as the graphics and templates were created natively for tools like Photoshop, Illustrator or After Effects, they can easily be adjusted to contain exactly the information your audience is looking for.

2. Focus on The Essence

Now that you have shaped your idea and collected or created the content you need, it’s time to produce your clip. Start in Adobe Premiere Pro and do a rough cut of your content. Make sure you cut it down as short as possible – bear in mind that the audience should still get your idea.

3. Add, Drag and Drop Your Images

Now it’s time to add your graphics. You can use tools like Photoshop or Illustrator to edit existing images, create graphics or modify templates. Then simply use Creative Cloud Libraries to synch all your design assets between applications. With these Libraries, you don’t have to worry about file formats or specifications. Just drag and drop and the content appears where you need it.

You can easily import animation templates from After Effects into your Premiere Pro project via the Essential Graphics panel.

Tip: You can use After Effects to create individual animations based on Photoshop or Illustrator files or simply modify motion graphic templates from Adobe Stock. After Effects projects can be exported as Motion Graphic Templates to Premiere Pro, where you can make predefined adjustments or dynamically change the text.

4. Make It Sound

Last but not least, don’t forget about the sound. A well-designed clip with bad sound will be unconvincing to your audience. The basics of sound editing are included in Premiere Pro in a Panel called Essential Sound. You can add effects and mix loudness. Useful presets will help you to enhance the sound experience. And for bigger issues, you can send the whole timeline or individual clips to Adobe Audition where you can get rid of background noise or unwanted sound artifacts.

Audition is the perfect tool if you want to focus on audio mixing or restoration.

There’s no doubt that these tools are really powerful…

…as they have been used by professionals all around the globe – but they are really easy to learn. To be honest, they are not a no-brainer. But there are a couple of helpful assistants built into the applications to get started, such as a learning panel in Premiere Pro that will guide you through the first steps. Built-in tutorials in After Effects or tool explanations and a powerful search in Photoshop – just type in what you are searching for and Photoshop will find the right tool, explanation or content.

In the end, video production is always a lot of work, but if you want to be successful with video content on social media you have to accept this challenge. Make yourself familiar with the tools that help you create your content, learn the basics of visual storytelling and then share your ideas and visions with your audience and followers on social media.

And believe me: it’s not just a lot of work, but also a lot of fun!