For my independent learning outcome, which is required in the course “VR Storytelling”, I decided to take option 2: “Lynda.com course”. As a matter of fact, I need Adobe Premiere Pro for my final project because it is a required skill for editing 360 videos and I am not advanced experienced in this software, I took the Lynda.com Premiere Pro CC Essential Training (2015) course. This course is for beginner in video editing and includes:

• Editing in Premiere Pro: the fast-track approach
• Setting up a project and a sequence
• Importing and organizing media
• Marking and selecting the best takes from clips
• Performing insert, overwrite, and replace edits
• Trimming, splitting, moving, and deleting clips
• Dynamic linking and round-tripping with other Creative Cloud apps
• Audio editing and mixing
• Recording voice-overs
• Applying transitions, effects, and filters
• Changing clip speed
• Color correction
• Creating titles
• Multicam editing techniques
• Exporting your final project

The course takes more than 11 hours and is very helpful when you are new. I thought that I really need it. After a couple of hours, I stopped taking all the course. We already discussed some how-tos regarding 360 projects in class and I did know the basics of Premiere. So, I skipped some parts and didn’t watch all the 11 hours. Also, I found it hard to navigate and search after the solution to solve my problems. That is why I watched specific YouTube videos parallelly.

The following how-tos are based on the time I needed them. The order is also, from the very beginning of editing videos to exporting them. I watched several how-tos to one topic to evaluate the best way of doing it. Here, I only include the most helpful ones.

The first tutorial is about how to edit audio in Adobe Premiere Pro:

It includes basics lice volume and fading audios. But if you don’t know how to do any of these. It is very helpful. Justin, the creator of this tutorial, explains the storage and folder structure in Adobe products in the very beginning. Through the Lynda course, I already knew how to do that an jumped over the intro.

The next tutorial is about removing wind noises in Premiere.

Unfortunately, shooting with the GoPro rig has one big disadvantage: wind noises. The integrated microphone of the GoPros is coverable with a wind protection. But the rig out of the Cage does not come with the windslayer for GoPros and I needed to shoot without it. After going through the footage, I was very annoyed that all the recorded sounds had these disturbing wind noises and I wanted to get rid of it in Premiere. This tutorial is very helpful. It explains how to use filters to remove the noises of the wind. Unfortunately, if you add the so called Highpass to the audio footage, it removes all noises under the specific figure. That leads to higher human voices and robotic-sounding cars (in my example). To avoid that, you need to add an equalizer which is obsolete in the current version of Premiere Pro. Still, after adding it, you need to “play around” till your audio is better (still not perfect) than before. The wind is removed, but the audio is still not really awesome.

The third tutorial I watched was about fading in and out in video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ekdx22ld_8

This tutorial is super easy and very short. It explains all the essential steps to fade in and out of the video as well as gives an explanation about audio. There is not a lot to talk about. A quick solution for a quick problem. It helped a lot.

If you have problems with very specific issues or situation in Adobe Premiere Pro and you already used Adobe CC products, you can easily navigate through it and you don’t need to take the Lynda.com course. Even though the course is created for all skill levels, I think it is just for early beginners.

Prof. Pacheco also provided a written manual for Premiere but I prefer YouTube tutorials. Just because I can listen while implementing and it is easier for me. But this is my opinion.

In conclusion, I’d like to say that the Lynda.com courses are a very good extension to the normal lecture. I watched some more videos which are not applicable to this class but informative for me. These courses are very professional and can help a lot. The best thing is that you can skip some parts you already know or close the whole lecture, whenever you want. They also give you further recommendations what to watch to improve your learning experience. So my idea is: Just try it out!