Roundup: PremiumBeat’s Top 10 Video Tutorials of 2019
2020 is here, so it’s time to reflect on what we’ve learned in the past year. We’ve rounded up our favorite tutorials of 2019 so you can start 2020 smarter.
2019 was a wild ride. Great films, questionable Oscar winners, and of course, Baby Yoda. We enjoyed the year thoroughly, so we thought we would reminisce and revisit our top ten video tutorials produced in the year 2019. These are all of the most viewed and most commented videos we brought out, along with a few staff picks that we thought deserved a little love. So strap in, get your filmmaker cap on, and let’s take a ride down memory lane to start 2020 with a little bit more filmmaking knowledge.
How To Prepare For Your Film
Is 2020 the year that you finally get that feature done?
Well, before you grab your camera and set out, there’s plenty of things you need to know before you get started. Zach Ramelan shares his experience in making his first feature film, which includes why your budget might be a lot smaller than you think and how it might be a better option in the long run to condense your feature into a short film to make distribution and production easier.
How to Get the Most Out of LUTs
As much as all of us love LUTs to get our desired look in a short amount of time, there is plenty of options for you to customize the look of your footage after you slap on your look-up table. LUTs can really only go so far in customizing your color, so to really get the look you desire, Charles Yeager has some options for you in the Lumetri Color panel to fine tune the palette of your shot.
How to Get the VHS Look in Premiere Pro
By far one of our most popular videos this year, the VHS look in Premiere Pro is a fan favorite. The VHS aesthetic made a radical comeback in 2019, and getting that look is a lot easier than you think. Most of the tutorials on the internet will sell you VHS overlays or tell you it can only be done in After Effects, but Charles Yeager comes in hot with a video that teaches you to get that look directly in Premiere. He even includes the project files so all you have to do is plug and play with your footage.
Create 8 Bit Pixel Art In After Effects
Apparently, retrowave took over the aesthetic landscape of 2019. Another extremely popular video on the PremiumBeat channel was Yeager’s tutorial on how to transform your motion graphics into 8-bit art without having to create them pixel by pixel. With some creative use of the Grid and CC Blockload effects, you can easily create a full-resolution graphic and turn it into something that looks like it came straight out of an NES.
How to Get Better Footage with Bright Windows
Shooting a scene with windows involved can be a frustrating process. Indoors, you can adjust your camera to the brightness outside, but that might make the windows look blown out if the light outside is too bright. There’s a few options you have to combat this though, such as throwing up a ND gel to cut down light or adding a diffusion paper to the outside to limit light and let an even amount of light creep into your scene.
100 Years of Color Grading
Color grading has changed drastically throughout the past 100 years. There were phases of certain colors and palettes that defined entire generations of film. In this tutorial by Rubidium Wu, we dive into four distinct color grades of the past, such as technicolor, bleach bypass, 70’s sepia, and the Michael Bay look.
3 DIY Practical Horror Effects
For Halloween this year, we decided to kickstart our practical effects series by creating a realistic-looking hand out of alginate molding powder and silicone paint. It’s an easy enough project, and to really sell the hand, we also included a recipe for fake blood and fake organs to make your horror short as gory as you can get it.
Making Your Film Flow Better
Pro tip: you don’t need fancy transitions or grabby motion graphics to make your project flow better. Sometimes, all you need is some creative framing. Matching your cuts can provide a seamless transition from one clip to another, and the only work you have to do is re-scaling your clips to match eyeline or size, depending on the subject of your sequence.
Free Week: 51 Free Accent Motion Graphics
For this year’s free week, we came out hot with different (and completely free) assets for you to download and use in your projects. From cinematic atmosphere sounds to accent graphics and social packs, these 215 completely free assets are available for you to download here.
Creating Anime Speed Lines in After Effects
Ever wanted your video to have those fun anime speed lines to transform your subject into something straight out of Naruto?
Well, Jason Boone’s got a tutorial for that. It’s actually a pretty straightforward process. Just create a shape layer in After effects with a triangle, and with some creative use of the repeater tool and digital zooms, you’ll be looking like Vegeta in no time.
If you liked our videos of 2019, make sure you hop over to the PremiumBeat YouTube page and subscribe. We’ve got some super exciting content planned for 2020, and we hope you join along for our continuing journey into making you all (and ourselves) better filmmakers.
Want even more filmmaking tutorials, but don’t want to wait? Check these out in the meantime.
