Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

Getting your project setup in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, this is going to be our first project. We are going to take some video captured on a camera, stitched together here on our Timeline. This handsome man is going to talk about our course that he's making. We are going to fix the color, we're going to fix the audio. We'll add some lower thirds and some background music. Let's have a little listen. "Hi there, my name is Daniel Scott, and I'm an Adobe Certified Instructor." Add some happy background music. There'd be some bullet points as well, be a fade out at the end. Correcting audio, correcting the colors. It's a nice simple project to get us started. Figure out our way around Premiere Pro. All right, let's get going. 

All right, so open up Premiere Pro, and yours is going to look something like this, won't look exactly like mine. What you might get faced with is a bunch of intro videos that you can watch. You can skip those, that's my job. So we want to create our first project. You can do it by, over here you can see the word New Project. We'll go to 'File', 'New', 'Project', either way, get started. This new project window will open, let's give our project a name. It's XD Intro course. I'd like to give mine a date, so we're going to put in the date. Just of when it get started. 

The other thing you need to do is the location, where do you want this file to be? I'm going to click 'Browse', and what we'll do is we'll put in our Exercise Files, let's go to Project 1, and just dump it in here. We don't need to worry about any of this other scary looking stuff, just click 'OK'. Now your Premiere Pro might look a little different from mine. So what you need to do is go to 'Window', go to 'Workspaces'. Make sure Editing is selected, if it's not give it a click, then go to 'Window', 'Workspaces', and we'll hit this one that says 'Reset to Saved Layout', click on that. We just kind of rejig everything to kind of get it back to, at least, so everyone looks the same. That's a handy one to remember when you accidentally go and freak this thing out, and everything flies to the wrong place, and you're like, "I'm lost." Go to 'Window', go to 'Workspaces'. Make sure it's on 'Editing', just go to 'Reset Saved'. Hah, back to normal. 

Let's get started by importing some footage. Let's go to 'File', let's go to 'Import'. I want you to go to your 'Exercise Files'. Go to the 'Project 1 - Talking Head'. In here let's bring in '01 XD Intro.mp4', click 'Import'. Now let me introduce you to your project window. Basically this is all the file set that you bring into your project. What we want to do now is actually turn it into something called a Sequence, or a Timeline, they kind of mean the same thing. So over here, this is just like the raw footage. To make it into, like an editable Timeline that we can start editing, and cutting, and adding other videos to, you click, hold, and drag it over to here. 

Now first thing I might acknowledge is that yours might be looking like this. So I switch between List view and Icon view quite a bit. You're probably on Icon view. This is a really handy view. The cool thing about Icon view is, you can kind of-- I'm not doing anything, I'm just hovering my mouse over it, and I'm just kind of like sliding it across. I'm not even sliding, I'm just moving my mouse back and forth. You can kind of scrub through the footage. Footage is another word for the video that you've brought in. You're going to get an idea of what's in it. So doesn't--

Let's all go to, let's be on this Icon view to get started. What we want to do now is create our sequence/Timeline, by clicking, holding, and just drag it in this area down here. It just makes a sequence for us. So over here, in our Project window, it's taken my mp4 and created a sequence, and it's used the same name, which can be confusing. So this is the sequence, this is my video. How do you tell the difference? Kind of-- see this little icon here. If you hover above it, says, I am a sequence, and over here it says, I'm a bit of video and a bit of audio. So the sequence, whenever I make a new one, I try to make a habit of going in, and double clicking the word down here, and giving it a different name, so that it's clear what it is. 

So I'm going to call this my XD Intro Sequence. I don't often call it sequence, I just add that, just for this course, just so that we can learn, so we remember what we've done. I hit 'Enter' on my keyboard. So here's my sequence with a video on it, and that's just a video by himself. Over here in my little Timeline you can see, this is my video. Let's add a second video to it, to make it a little bit clearer how this sequence works. 

So to do it, simple, watch, 'File', let's go to 'Import', and let's open '02 XD Intro', click 'Import'. There we go, so I've got my 01, my 02, and my sequence. What I'd like to do is add both videos. I've got 01, you can kind of see their name there. Let's click, hold, and drag 02. Just drag it so it's just afterwards. You might-- you don't really want it here, nothing wrong with that, but we'll talk about it later, but try and get it on the same channels here, or same tracks. 

What you can do is click on it, and just drag it, so kind of like butts up at the end here. Just some basic Nav to get started, because you might be like, "I can't put my 02 in because I can't see it", or enough room to put it on there, so we're going to look at zooming in and out. So what we're going to do is, we're going to click anywhere down here in our Timeline, because-- you can kind of see, it gets that blue line around the outside. 

You can see, if I click up here, blue line around there, blue line around the outside of that. I want the blue line to be around my Timeline, then if you look down at your keyboard, you've got plus ' +' and minus '-'. They're generally along the top of your keyboard at the end of the numbers. You got a + and a -, or might be labeled as =. Try tapping those, ' + ' to zoom in, and ' - ' to zoom out, obviously. I just want you to zoom in, kind of like this so you can see bit of the end here. If you couldn't before, you should be able to now go through and drag in number 2. 

So the one weird thing about that though is, if I have this selected, my Program window, which shows me kind of what's appearing in my video, if I hit ' + ' there, it'll zoom in on the Timeline along the top there, and kind of not do what you want. So you just got to be very careful where you have selected, just keep an eye out for that blue arrow, well, the blue blocks around the outside, click down here, ' + ', ' - ', easy. 

Now for some reason you don't like that or can't do that, you can use these little weird rubber bands down the end here. I hate them, they're really weird, but some people like them. You can see, I can grab the end here and drag it out. Drag it in to kind of zoom in and out, that's lovely. I can grab the center of it to kind of like scrub along. All right, that might be the way you do it, there's nothing wrong with it. Most people use the + and -, but it's just some people in my class, they're like, "No, I like it that way." Use the weird rubber band stretchy thing. 

All right, next thing in terms of basic navigation is, can you see this little thing here? He's called your CTI, your Current Time Indicator. Depending on what tutorials you're following, I think, technically it's called the CTI, Current Time Indicator, that is your Playhead, it's wherever your-- If I grab this little kind of weird half diamond thing, drag it along, it's showing me where I'm up to in my Playhead. So if I hit 'Play' here, watch, moves along. So this is your CTI Playhead. Click it, hold it, and drag it along, just to get used to scrubbing along the Timeline, because what will happen is, say I drag along to here, and I hit my little ' + ' button, it's going to zoom in to wherever that is. You can see, I can zoom right in and I'm starting to see, the audio for my voice, and ' - ' to zoom out. So move it along here. ' + ' to zoom in, ' - ' to zoom out. All right, basic stuff; let's get into becoming an actual editor. 

So to be a fully fledged editor, which you're going to be in about 10 seconds, you need to actually start slicing your footage up, because at the beginning, there's me. So I've put it right at the beginning here, hit the 'Play' button. You can see me-- because I film myself, I had to get the camera going and then go sit down, you'll notice, I've just noticed that my fly's down. A real professional. There's a lot of like me, wiping the sweat over here. Lots of great stuff. There's a false start, watch this, I kind of dragged my Playhead to the beginning here, hit 'Play'. You don't have the audio through this video here, you can drag it along and listen to it. You can kind of see that I said, "Hi there", and I just didn't do very well, so I started again. There's a lot of restarts or second takes. You can kind of see, roughly where I get to about here, so drag it along, just before I start waving my arm, drag the CTI, to about just before I start waving, and we're going to grab our editing tool. This is the main one you're going to use in Premiere Pro, it's called the Razor Tool. In your toolbar, the fourth one down, click on that. Click once, kind of anywhere in here, along with this little blue line where your CTI is, and you've made your first cut. Let's grab the Selection Tool, this top tool. Click on this first bit, hit 'Delete'. We've made our first edit, tada, you're a Video Editor. Not a very good one, but you got to start somewhere. 

All right, next thing we're going to do is click it and drag it. So I've clicked it once, and just dragging. You can drag any part, it's better to drag the top part of it. If you drag the bottom part, this is the audio part of the video, and this top part is the video, if we drag the bottom part, you can adjust the volume, and do its own weird stuff. Don't do the weird stuff, click, hold, and drag this along, until it kind of snaps at the beginning here. So it's kind of stuck at 00:00

Drag it along, right there at the beginning. So the next bit of editing is going to be chopping it off at the end. So you're going to play it through, and when it gets to the end, we're going to hit 'Stop'. I'm going to show you a little shortcut. We're not going to-- we're going to do a few shortcuts throughout this course. I'm going to start with this one, the spacebar key on your keyboard. So look down your keyboard, spacebar, hit it once. It's the shortcut for this button. Because you do it so often, you can see, if I hover above it, says space, start, stop. So spacebar on, spacebar off, to start and stop it. So play it all the way through until it gets kind at the end, I'm going to do the same, and where I feel like it finishes I'm going to hit my 'Spacebar' to stop. There you go, kind of got to there, roughly. Doesn't have to be perfect just yet. I've stopped it, I'm going to grab my 'Razor Tool' again, remember, 4th tool down. 

If that happens, you see that thing flash, that's the Auto save. Premiere Pro is pretty good at, saving your project as you go through. We're going to grab the 'Razor Tool', click on it once. 'Selection Tool', click this part that I don't want, hit 'Del'. Then I'm going to shuffle this over. We're going to do the same thing for this next bit. Now the cool thing about Premiere Pro is-- I'm going to zoom in on my little Timeline down here. What was the shortcut for zoom? ' + ', that's right. As long as it's blue around the outside, by clicking anywhere in here, or the clip, doesn't matter, zoom in a little bit. 

You can see this audio waveform, and that's, do a lot of your editing to this audio waveform. So what I would like to do is, grab my CTI or my Playhead, at the beginning, hit 'Spacebar'. I realize, false start. Drag it along here. If you-- sometimes what-- some people see my intros and are like, "It's really good." They don't realize I had to do like 50 false starts to get my flow going. There you go. Persistence, Dan. So I'm going to get right to the beginning of this, but I can kind of tell this is the bit without actually knowing, so--

Dragging the center of this kind of stretchy thing is quite useful. At least now until we get into a few more shortcuts, and I can kind of tell by the waveform that I continue on my merry way, so this is probably the final cut or the final shot that I want. So I'm going to drag it to about there. Grab my 'Razor Tool', thank you, Razor Tool. Click, and I can just go over here, and actually probably just guess that that's probably the end, and just click once. Go back to my 'Selection Tool', delete this first bit. Select this last bit, and I'm just hitting 'Del' on my keyboard. Then this guy, I'm going to click the top part, not the bottom part, and drag it along, because if you drag the bottom part, often, messes with the audio, remember, just drag this top part, and you my friend have edited our first video, at least the first part, welcome to the club. 

I'm going to zoom out a little bit so I can see my whole Timeline. I'm going to drag the CTI all the way to the end here. I'm going to hit 'Spacebar', and watch it all the way through, I'm not going to but you should. Actually I'm going to drag my CTI to here. There's my little cut across, this is a straight cut. You've done a bit of editing, you've done a transition. That, believe it or not is a tradition-- transition, and probably the one you're going to use the most. Just a nice straight cut between two different shots, and if I'm honest, 80% of my time in Premiere Pro is exactly that. Razor Tool, cutty cut, drag it up. We will learn a few speed tricks to kind of speed that part of it up, but that's, yeah, you're a Video Editor, people. 

Now one thing I want to acknowledge before we go is a little bit of weirdness, there's a lot of weirdness in Premiere Pro, to be honest. What I'd like to do is show you what might happen, you might have done already, is I got my sequence, I got the two video files over here. This is my Timeline, over here is something called the Program Window. Program Window is a fancy name for-- this is what's actually going to be exported. Anything that kind of plays along in here is the stuff that's going to go out at the end. You're this other window, called the Source Window. 

So if I double click on 01, if you're a double clicker, you've probably already have found here. Double click it, you're like, "What is this, what is that?" If you've opened up Premiere Pro before and got a bit lost, this can be a little confusing. Your Source monitor is just a preview monitor, scribble that out. Instead of saying Source, say Preview, this is where you preview stuff, and over here's the stuff that actually goes out, this is your finished product. That looks weird having two of them, and all doing the same crazy faces. 

What I find, for new people, is if that's scary just click on 'FX Controls'. For no other reason than to hide your Source monitor, you're like, "Hah, just leave that there." You can go back to that later on by clicking it, but for the moment it's nice just to have the Program window up Your Timeline down the bottom here, and this Project window, with all your files. All right, nice and simple, let's get into some more editing in the next video.