EDITING GUIDES ->
Editing with Adobe Premiere
This guide does not
intend to discuss advanced Adobe Premiere techniques, only
basic ones to help those unfamiliar with this program or
NLEs in general. Anybody wanting advanced Premiere lessons
should visit www.wrigleyvideo.com,
buy some books (like the Premiere "bible"), or
maybe even invest in some digital editing courses.
Much like Photoshop and any other numbers of
intricate/complex softwares, the best way to learn in
Premiere is to literally "play around". This
mini-guide should introduce you to the location and workflow
of common elements found in this NLE ("NLE" means
non-linear editor, and is usually confined to describing
software like Apple Final Cut Pro, Adobe Premiere, and Sony
Vegas Video).
This guide was built with Adobe Premiere 6.5, but it should
work fairly the same for all 5.x, 6.x and PRO versions. Not
much has changed in the past few years, in terms of how the
software interface looks.
Import
files
When Premiere starts, it should automatically launch the
project wizard that prompts you to either load or start a
new editing project. In this example, the DV NTSC Standard
48kHz template was fine, the standard video template.
Get familiar with the PREMIERE interface:
- EFFECTS MENU is
audio/video effects you can choose.
- APPLIED EFFECTS is
what you have in use for the project at hand. You add them
by dragging them onto the video or audio in the timeline.
- HISTORY is the undo
area where you can undo changes while working. Just like
Photoshop undo history.
- TIMELINE is where the
video and audio is maintained. The first time you launch
PREMIERE, it'll ask if you want A/B editing or single
time-line editing. As it suggests, for most people the A/B
is easier.
- PREVIEW shows you the
video as it should look when exported, though it can be a
bit buggy on all versions, and needs a good CPU, and
fluidity of movement is sometimes determined by the
compression of the source file.
- SOURCE is where you
import the source files. The assets. Audio, video, images.
Importing source. Right click in the blank area of
the SOURCE window. Go to IMPORT -> FILE and select your
audio/video/images for use in the project. You can import
new items at any time.
Basic
editing concepts
The first order of business in Premiere is making the
workspace more useful. Some of those windows are just sized
wrong and not needed.
For screen resolution, 1024x768 is the minimum screen res
you can comfortably have in Premiere. If you have a good
video card, I'd actually suggest raising it to 1600x1200
when editing video, simply because all that headroom in the
Premiere workplace is nice.
Working with the timeline. The first step is to make
sure the video is properly imported. Then drag the
video/audio (or video and audio separately if they are
separate files) to the timeline. In the image above, I
already dragged the M2V file to the VIDEO1A timeline slot.
Become familiar with the timeline tools. It'll affect how
you work in the timeline:
- The "hand" tool
works much like it does in Photoshop. You can select this
tool, click on the timeline footage, and then hold the mouse
button and slide the mouse to move down the timeline with
handheld accuracy. This is an alternative to using the
scroll bars. Much like photographers prefer this tool,
videographers tend to like it also.
- The arrow is
"default" status with no tool selected. This lets
you move object around on the timeline.
- The "cut" tool
will slice items on the timeline into smaller parts. You can
then move these smaller parts around or use the arrow to
select them and then press DELETE on the keyboard to delete
unwanted footage. A good trick for using the CUT tool is to
move the timeline slider to the exact position. The slider
controls what the preview window shows, so you can see
precisely when the cut is being made. When you get the
slider in the correct position, move the cut tool on top of
the slider line and the cut tool will disappear. This means
you have a perfect alignment and will be cutting in the
exact spot shown in the preview window.
- The "distance" meter
select the visual increments on the timeline. The clip in
this guide in 30 seconds long. The default 8 minute mark
makes 30 second nothing more than a sliver, and near
impossible to accurately insert those 1-second additive
fades. Cuts are also harder to make at such long intervals.
A 2-second span was chosen for this clip. Usually, 10
seconds is good for long footage, change it as needed. (FYI:
There is a max length the Premiere timeline can hold, many
hours, I forget the amount. I never have more than 3 hours in
a timeline, so I never paid much attention to that high
limit, not something that affects me.)
- The DELETE button in
general removes items from the timeline.
Adding effects/transitions. As was shown in the
workspace image above, this clip has already had 2 effects
and 1 transition added. Go to the effect window. Notice how
it has effects organized in 3 tabs (transitions, video
effects, audio effects). Both a crop filter and clip filter
were added to the video in this example. Click on the filter
you want, hold the mouse button, drag to the timeline item
(video in this case) and drop it on the item when it is
highlighted. A green bar will appear at the top of the
timeline item and the effect will now appear in the effects
window. Most effects are "virgin" and must be
altered to actually add the effect (much like clip and crop,
which come set to all "0").
Basic filters: Most PREMIERE filters are named so
that they are self-explanatory. In this video in the example
(Batman), I wanted to clip out noise, as well as crop in on
the video some. Some of the noise over-spilled the typical
overscan, so both filters were needed. The next effect I
wanted to add was a fade-in and fade-out of the video. The
final video will be used in a loop, so this is required.
Therefore, I'll be adding both.
Clip/crop. This
is by far a high-use filter for those editing VHS tapes, and
often used interchangeably, which is INCORRECT.
"Clip" is another term for "MASK" or to
"cover up" parts of the video. It will not resize
the video. "Crop" is the process of removing
extraneous image/footage, and will result in a resize of the
remaining image, as it must now fill the canvas with less
data. While it is possible to crop without resize, your
final video will not be the correct size compliant with DVD.
Clip is great for covering up overscan noise. These are just
two of many, many filters.
Transitions. Like any
other affect, you drag the effect from the effects menu to
the timeline. However, you'll be putting it into the
TRANSITIONS slot instead of the VIDEO/AUDIO slots. It will
be dropped at default size, but can be dragged out to larger
or smaller length. If you hover the mouse over the left or
right sides of the effect, a resize icon with arrows will
appear that you can use to stretch or shrink the effect.
Once it is in the right position, double-click on it (must
be on the ARROW tool) to launch the properties window. As
shown above, for this dissolve, you can view it on the
actual video. Click the up/down arrows to flip the direction
of the fade. Move the sliders to preview it in action. This
will now get you a clip that is edited to the correct size,
has noise covered, cropped as needed, and transitions in
place. This will serve for most home editing. It's a good
handful of basics.
Advanced
editing, encoding, authoring.
This is where the intro guide ends. For more advanced
methods, follow the suggestions given at the start of this
guide. Adobe Premiere 6.5 and later comes with the Adobe
MPEG Encoder (using the MainConcept engine) built-in. Go to
FILE -> EXPORT -> EXPORT TIMELINE and select with the
Adobe encoder, or any other third-party encoder you may have
installed.
ALWAYS
REMEMBER TO SAVE YOUR PROJECTS !!!
Page Last Updated: May 15th 2005
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