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First fanedit advice?

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I’ve been a fan of watching star wars (and other) fan edits for a while, and lately I’ve got to thinking it’s time for me to make one of my own. I figured I’d post here first to see if anyone had general advice on how to go about this from a technical perspective.

I want to make a movie edit combining the Clone Wars episodes about the battle of Umbara, along the same lines as smudger9’s Clone Wars edits (I assume, I haven’t actually been able to track down a copy till today; very excited to start watching them tonight), with a crawl and a pan and the whole thing.

I have ripped the season 4 blu-ray for these episodes and plan on editing them in Premier because that’s what I have. I’m a decent enough editor (my dad does it professionally and taught me as a kid and then I took a couple film school classes in my early 20s), but it’s been a very long time since I’ve done it seriously.

What I struggle most with now is the exporting. I don’t understand codecs and for the small, personal projects I’ve made recently, I pretty much always end up with a file that’s way too big, still looks bad, and struggles to play on anything that’s not VLC running on my PC. If anyone has any tips for this or can point me to a relevant thread, I would very much appreciate that.

I also have trouble importing from different sources. Most of my sources for this will be the blu-ray rip, but I’m planning on making a crawl in Blender, so it might be an issue.

Finally, I’ve made a crawl in Blender before and I’m confident I can do it again. What I imagine will be more tricky is the trademark pan that comes after the crawl. I have done this once before, adding a crawl to one of NumeralJ’s Clone Wars edits just for my own personal satisfaction.

It was the return of Darth Maul arc, which starts not in space, but in a diner on a planet that definitely isn’t Coruscant, but which I treated as if it were Coruscant since this was just for my personal use. This way, I could use the pan from Attack of the Clones to suggest the vague notion of a ship arriving at Coruscant.

So what I did was, I took the one second of empty space in AotC after the crawl but before the pan, slowed it down so that it lasted the length of the crawl, used that in premier as a background for the crawl I had created, then after my crawl was done, allowed it to return to normal speed for the bits of that opening shot I wanted to use.

It looked surprisingly great, but obviously this trick has very limited use. I’m sure people must have discussed how to fake a pan when there isn’t one on this website before, but I’m having trouble finding it. So if anyone could point me in the right direction, that would be very helpful!

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With exporting your projects, I’ve not used Premier (I use and older version of Power Director), so I don’t know how your system works, however most codecs all serve the same purpose. What editing software systems do is to encode the file and place it into a container (such as MKV, MP4 etc.).
As for which type works best, it depends upon what level of quality you’re after. You can generate a file that is 50GB in size, or that same video can be produced as a 3GB file – the choice is yours!

As for recreating a pan, I have found that finding information on this is extremely rare…It took me quite a while to get details on how to do this in Power Director.

Sorry I couldn’t be of more help!

I hope that your edits are going well!

My edits:
https://ifdb.fanedit.org/fanedit-search/tag/faneditorname/phase3/