Editing Zen - cleaning up your timeline in Premiere Pro

In this video, my friend, we are going to find editing zen. We're going to go from this messy Timeline to this, look at that Timeline, do you feel karma, do you feel more creative? You might not, there's a couple of little tricks in here, with learning; before, after, before, after. Let me actually just show you. 

All right, to find that happy place for editing, I'm going to show you one new thing, and then we'll combine a few of the things that we've done previously. So at the moment I've got a bunch of different tracks, this is a small job, and I've ended up only using two of my tracks. It's really common for a small job, for bigger jobs, I don't know, you end up using like all 10, and keep adding them, but let's say--

I'm going to zoom out, so I can see what I've got. Who remembers the shortcut, like pop quiz, shortcut of shrinking all the tracks? You don't remember, do you? It's 'Shift - ', that'll get it all the way small, 'Shift +', all the way, big, 'Shift -', I've got all this stuff I'm not using, same with an extra audio track. You might have loads more, so let's clean it all up. 

To do it you right click in this kind of, like random gray area, any of these ones, this random gray area has useful stuff. Premiere Pro does some weird things, so just any here, right click, you don't want to delete track because that'll just delete the track. You want 'Delete Tracks', plural, click on that, there's an option here, it says delete all empty tracks for audio and video. So let's click 'OK', look at that, nice and clean. 

All right, that's phase one of our editing zen. Phase two is, let's get our-- this is really opinionated, you can-- I'm going to show you all the things you can do, you get it how you want, and then we'll save a preset. We've got lots of bunch of icons in here, and if I make them a little bit bigger, let's say that I do-- I'm going to use a shortcut, remember, it's 'Command +' to go in and out a little bit, and 'Shift' to go full Monty. 

So I'm going to go to say something like that, that feels nice and manageable for my screen, but there's some icons in here, I'm like, I don't use that. Sync Lock, you learned it in the earlier video, be like, "I'm not going to use it." Let's just make a tidy version, I'm like, "I don't use the eyeball enough." So what we're going to do is, we're going to say, we're going to right click in this gray area again, we're going to go to 'Customize', and this is really weird, if you've ever tried to change this, you might not have, but it can be really weird. 

So what we want to do is, I'm going to move the eyeball, it will always show this top line. So if you don't want to see it on this top line, you need to move it down, so you go, "Ugh, Ah…" You can't drag it down, you've got to drag the icon version of it, down to the next line, you're like, "That seems weird," it totally is. You'll get baffled a little bit, but just know that you have to act, have to operate this thing to change it, so you're like, video, I like the video, it's called v1, with track name. Let's say that I do want to, I want that up here, because it's part of my zen. 

All right, you don't do it up there, I get confused too. I want that there, you're like, Sync Lock, I want it around, but let's say I just don't, oh man. Drag it down here. So this is going to be like a mini version, that's a slightly bigger version, and this is when it's fully open, and you can start seeing keyframes down here. So this seems like a really good use for it. If you're totally lost hit reset and forget I said anything. 

Let's click 'OK'. It just means that when it's bigger, you can see it all, but when it's set to like minimal view, the view that you like, you're like, "Oh, that's nice." You can still see the video name, that brings me on to another part of the zen, it's renaming. So know that you can see it, you need to be able to see the Video 1 to rename it. So if you can't, you need to make it bigger, because, if you right click, and it's grayed out, it means you haven't made the track big enough, but because I've moved mine to the top, I can see it there, I can say 'Rename', and this is going to be my A-roll. We're going to have, of course, B-roll, B-roll, even. 

You can do the same with your audio tracks, because there's lots of stuff down here. We're going to need to do some zen cleaning. Let's do the same thing down here, right click, 'Customize'. So there's a lot more down here, so if there is things that you use all the time, you can-- come on, auto save, but just know that anything in this top line, or this top line here can be moved. So you can say, actually, I don't use Sync Lock for audio, maybe you do for audio, and you do use mute, but you use solo, but not very often. Just going to go down to Layer 2. Audio 1's going to come up, don't drag him, say with A1, he's going to come over here. 

I'll put it this invert, I never use the voice over thing, here in Premiere Pro, I very rarely. So you are going to go down to the second line as well. So on this top line I just have Sync Lock, and I have my track name. Actually, let's put mute there as well. Why is it mute there? I think it's tied in there, it's jammed in there, using the same position for some reason. I don't know why, it's a little weird, let's click 'OK'. See what happened, kind of worked, my Sync Lock's gone, right click, go to 'Customize'. I leave this in there because it is problematic. It's both of those two, now it's working. 

So now, look a bit tidier down here, what are you liking, you're thinking, and let's say our music track, we just want to be-- I'm not too worried, that music with the audio, we do need a bit more space to see, because we want to see, and kind of time things. How are we feeling so far? A little bit of zen in there. For this instance I'm actually going to make it a little bit bigger just before, there you go, just so that I can see the thumbnails. 

So I can turn them off, who remembers where that is, it's in one of these two, right, in here. Let's go to 'Show Thumbnails', and turn it off, because we're looking for zen. Also, see this line in the middle here, we're going to look at that later on, and turn it back on, but for the moment let's turn off our keyframes, that's what that is, get rid of the little line, let's get rid of the effects, that was in there too, fixed badges, clip names, I'm probably going to leave that in there, that seems quite useful. I'm going to leave the keyframes for my audio, because I adjust the audio quite a bit using keyframes. 

Last one is, I'm going to select them all, and you guys are all going to be labels, of Violet, or some other color, just to get a bit of zen, not zen enough, but it should be zen enough as Caribbean, but it's too tied to audio for me. I'm going to use Teal, oh, Tropical ocean, look at that. Now the coloring is mainly just here for show, to make it look cool on the intro bit, because every time you add something new, it's going to remember its color, and you can go and change all these colors, but you might be fighting, fighting a battle, because every time you import something it's going to come through new. 

You can go and change the colors in your Preferences, depends on how much zen you need out of this, coloring those labels Just top it all off, and to make everything-- oh, one thing, I've got this here, subtitle, you're like, "I don't have that on mine," we do this later on in the course, mine's on now, because I've already prepped for this course. 

So there's a lot of things that kind of-- anyway, if you have got subtitles, because you might be coming back to this video, and you might have subtitles there too, you can kind of right click in this gray area here, and, nope, see it says here, Caption Track options, click on that and say, Hide all Caption Tracks, oh, even tidier. Look how tidy that is, and now I can have like loads of space, oh, don't change tracks, loads of space here, for my actual work. 

Our program monitor's nice and big, and to finish it all off we're going to save this Timeline layout down here, by hitting the little wrench, and we're going to say 'Save Preset', give it a name, this one's going to be called 'Dan Short Job'. It's not going to record everything in here, mainly just the heights, let's click 'OK'. That is how we potentially find our kind of calm working area in Premiere Pro. Now just to recap, we only learned two new things in here, we learned how to delete all the tracks, remember, you right click in here and say, delete, is it track, no, click 'Tracks', and that will allow you to delete all the empty ones. The other thing we learned is, we can reorder them, and we also learned that reordering them, by going in here and saying-- customize, is not that friendly but worth wrestling with. All right, on to the next video.