This week Spud shows you how to read and adjust white balance and skin tone in Adobe Premiere, what neutral cards to use on your slate, and why adjusting by eye may not be such a good idea.

If you’ve dabbled with editing and Premiere Pro, you’ve seen its levels of complexity. Spuds delves into one layer to help beginning editors work faster and easier. He gives tips on monitors, templates and Premiere Pro timeline tips.

What’s the difference between reverb and echo? How do you minimize reverb in a small room without covering every inch of the walls with acoustic foam? What is good acoustic foam? Spuds covers all this and more as he shows how he strategically set up acoustic foam panels on his walls to minimize reverb when he records sound and when he edits audio. 

Spuds gets tied up explaining how we made the Hackintosh video collaborating on WriterDuet, using more than one microphone input into the two-input Zoom H5, and without renting a white cyc studio.

We’re so used to digital post effects and CGI that we forget that in camera effects were the defacto SFX technique back in the day, and are still used today. Spuds creates both in camera and post effects with the help of Micah and looks at the history and use of a time-honored technique: from Pepper’s ghost to a recent episode of “Sherlock.”

Spuds explores the different types of editing computers and gives advice on how to decide which is best for your needs. Do you need a fast editing machine but like the Mac OS? He also highlights the pro's and con's he discovered when he built his own Hackintosh, a PC/Mac hybrid.  

Ask any video editor what the most used transition effect in their arsenal of effects is and she'll usually say the dissolve. Besides a direct cut, the dissolve is a staple in the book of film and video editing. How did editors perform a dissolve, or what is also called a "cross fade" before digital editing was available? 

When you’re in the business of creating video productions, you will quickly notice that it doesn’t take long for digital assets to get out of hand. It only took me two or three projects before I realized that I needed to develop a system so I could manage the sheer amount of files I had to keep track of with every project.

There are times when you need a gorgeous shot of a landmark location. Or a dynamic shot of a jet plane on the runway. Or maybe a high tech office location shot. You can rent tons of lenses, lights and airline tickets and go shoot it yourself, or you can turn to stock footage. But how do we make stock footage look exciting?