Editing the audio interview in Premiere Pro

Hey everyone, in this video we are going to cut up our interview, we're going to take our 10 second long kind of straight interview, cut it up into some bits that we can start using, down to about 40 seconds. Let's jump in. 

To get started we need to find the interview, and you really need to just have a listen through it. So it's in your Audio bin, called Interview.mp3, double click it to open it, in your Source Monitor, and just listen to it the entire way through. So whenever I'm doing a project like this, I'll listen to the interview all the way through, and then come back and do a rough cut, rather than trying to do it all in one big go. You need to get a sense of how this thing kind of balances out, and where the good bits may or may not be, but I'm not marking it, I'm just listening to it all the way through. 

The other thing is, is often I'll listen to a little bit, just to make sure, the audio is good, but I don't mind if they speak in chipmunk voice, so I'll stick at the beginning here, and we're going to go back to some of our shortcuts. So remember, looking at your keyboard there's that J, K, L keys. You rest your three fingers on them quite often when you're editing. So 'J' goes backwards. Weird. 'K' is stop, and 'L' is forward, plays once. So you tap it once, it just plays a normal view, 'K' to stop. If you double tap 'L' it plays in chipmunk mode. 

"I've got nothing…” “I'll take a shower and brush my teeth.” So I find I'm happy listening to it, and just tapping it twice, to go to mild chipmunk, I can't go any faster than that, I can't really understand what's going on, but I often listen to everything in chipmunk view, and be surprised when that goes back to normal, when they go all kind of slurry and drunk sounding, but it's their regular voice, because I've been listening to it at super speed for so long. Pause the video now, play through it, have a little listen to it, it's about 10 minutes, and you can watch it in chipmunk view if you like, and then come back and we'll do some editing. 

So you've listened to it, a few little things just to mention, is that, at the beginning there he asked what's for breakfast, there's a few kind of random things. It's basically just to get Amin talking, for sound check, to make sure that the microphone is recording right, it's not too low, it's not too loud, there's no background noise, and also to get Amin a bit more comfortable with the interview process. So you can imagine it's pretty stressful. So you want to get him kind of laughing and kind of joking, just try and release some of the tension in his voice. 

So that's why he started talking about, he had nothing for breakfast. "I don't know…" Obviously, not going to be included in the interview. Another bit was-- where is it? It's about here. - Let's have a little listen. - "What it was like…" "How hard it was, just things like that." "And say, and start the phrases, say, when I first started Parkour…"
 
So we asked him to start with the phrase, basically this particular video, we don't want an interview-- uh, we just want the interviewee. So Amin's going to start asking basically himself the question, and answering it, so there's no need for an interviewer voice. I'm recording him, otherwise we'd have to introduce the interviewer, and that's not what this is about. So it's very common to have that, so he'll answer his question. "Well when I first started doing Parkour…" Instead of asking him a question he just kind of answers, kind of suggests what he's about to talk about and then answers it. That's the role of the interviewer, and often it's the Sound Engineer or the Director, or, if you are doing it all, you're going to have to practice a little bit about making sure that there is some context when people start answering your questions. 

Anyway, next we're going to do is start cutting it all up, and get a rough cut into the Timeline. Now to do this rough cut, because we are going to follow along together, I need you to grab the exact bits that I do. So we are going to practice copying and pasting time codes. It's going to be good practice, mainly for copying and pasting, but I want the same footage in here. So what I've done to make it a little easier, is, in your Exercise Files, inside of 'Exercise Files' under 'Parkour', which is 'Project 5', in your 'Copy' folder I've got this Parkour Interview time codes, open that up. 
Basically we're going to copy this first bit, just grab it all. You'll notice that they don't start at 00:00. They've started their time code four hours earlier, or five hours earlier. You can set your sound equipment and your camera equipment to all kind of start at the same time. So even if there are individual machines you can kind of have a joint time code. It's a bit hard core but that's why it starts at a random time. 

What we're going to do is make sure your interview.mp3 is open. Click in here, paste it in, hit 'Return', and it should jump to the exact position. Now, it won't work-- well let's get this one going for the people that it did work. We're going to set our in point, remember, I on your keyboard. Now we need to jump to the out point. If yours didn't work it's probably because you've got that selected. It won't work if you have this space over here, because Premiere Pro doesn't know what to do with it. So you've got to make sure you grab just these letters. 

So none of these. I'm going to do the second one, and grab just the numbers. I'm going to paste it in here, and hit 'Enter' on the keyboard. Maybe that's what I did in the next line as well, hit 'Enter' on your keyboard, and then hit 'O' for my out point. That's the first chunk I want. What I'm going to do is-- you can't drag audio into your timeline; weird. You're going to drag the, just this little icon down here. Make sure you're not dragging it to here because that's not going to work. Why is that not working? That's right, it has to be on the audio track, so that's going to be my first one. I'm going to zoom in a little bit just to get a sense of it. 

"I started doing-- when I first started doing Parkour…" "… jump so far and do all these awesome tricks." So I'm kind of purposely giving you a rough cut. We're going to tidy it up later on, I don't want it to be perfect just yet. So we've got our first chunk, let's go through and just cycle through all of these. I'll do one more with you, then we'll speed it up. So paste, 'Enter', 'I' for input, or, if you're not liking the shortcuts you can use I for mark in, and O-- just these icons down here. You can get a bit of a flow going. Copy, over here, paste, set your O, your out point. Drag this in, and just bunch them all up together, rough cut. I'm going to speed the rest up. 

Cool. The last one I haven't put in because you might use this other method. So remember, you can use your up and down arrows, to kind of flick down here in your Timeline. So make sure you're down here, and your Timeline selected, you can get to the end, and you can use another shortcut, which is, in our case it doesn't really matter, if it's insert or overwrite, because we're at the end, but remember, your shortcuts, are full stop and comma, or, Americans call it period, I think. Let's go to that one. 

So you can get a bit of a flow going. Now what you would have noticed is that-- have a little listen to where we're at, what we've got. You'll notice that I've cut bits out, and in this particular interview I'm not afraid to move things around, mainly because it's this-- it's the type of thing it is. You just got to be really, I guess I want to draw your attention to, changing the way that the interview comes across with editing, you can get into trouble, from the talent, or from the public, but in this case it's pretty-- there's no sensitivity in here, and we're just trying to tell a story, we're making Amin look better, by cutting out all the ums and ahs, and the interview process was just a bunch of questions. It wasn't a particularly strategized interview string to not be edited. It's meant to be edited. So I've cut little bits out and strung them together, to kind of make it feel more fluid. Okay, that's my disclaimer, let's get into the next video.