Checking for gaps and flash frames - Premiere Pro Tutorial

In my opinion, one of the most embarrassing things that can happen, when you're finishing a project, is discovering that in your sequence you have a gap, or, sort of a black flash frame. And you're probably seen this before, as you're watching your sequence down, all of a sudden you go, whoa, what was that! And chances are, it was a one, maybe two or three frame gap, or black hole. And it's really embarrassing to let a project go out the door with that problem. So in this movie, I want to show you a couple techniques for getting rid of the gaps and minimizing them as a problem. So first up, I want to show you probably the easiest way to identify gaps in a sequence. But before we do that, let's just go ahead and watch part of the sequence down and see if you notice a problem. >> But today's economy is challenging. If you're falling. >> Did you see that? It was just a split second, but right up here, there is a black hole, and that's not a good thing. Now, of course you can sort of manually scan through your sequence and try to find black holes, but there are a couple easier ways. So probably the most straight forward way to find a gap in your sequence is to simply come up to the Sequence menu here and down to Go to Gap. And you'll notice that there's four different options, Next in Sequence, Previous in Sequence, these two options will identify gaps in your overall sequence. But you can also do this on the track level by identifying the Next in Track and the previous gap in that track. Now you'll notice that Next in Sequence and Previous in Sequence have default keyboard shortcuts but Next in Track and Previous in Track don't. Personally I find the track options to be kind of more the way that I like to identify gaps. Sure, it's nice to identify overall in the sequence, but I'm very OCD when it comes to black holes, or sort of these flash frames, and I kind of want to identify them on a track level. So, the next thing that I want to do is to make some keyboard shortcuts for Next in Track and Previous in Track, and to do that I am going to go up to the Premier Pro menu here, and down to Keyword Shortcuts. Now, I find this option in the Premier Pro menu because I'm on a Mac. If your on a PC, you'll find your keyboard shortcuts in the Edit menu. So, I'll chose Keyboard Shortcuts here, and then let's come down to the Sequence category, right here, and then scroll down just a little bit further, and there we have the item Go to Gap. I'll scroll that open. And you'll notice that I have Next in Track and Previous in Track and both of those, of course, don't have any shortcuts associated with them. So, I'll simply just click right here and let's make next in track Shift+G. Now, Premiere Pro's going to tell me that that keyboard shortcut's already in use. It's used by Clip Modify Audio Channels. That's fine for me. I don't really ever use that command, so I'm going to change it. Next I'll click into Previous in Track, and let's make this Option+G. Again, G for gap. Okay, so I've made those two keyboard shortcuts. I'll go ahead and click OK. Let's back up to the beginning. Now when you use the Next in Track command, how you have your tracks targeted sort of determines the identification of those gaps. So I want to make sure that V1 is targeted here, which it is. I only have two video tracks in this sequence. But all my main video is down here on V1. So I'm going to go ahead and use Shift+G, and the next thing you know, I'm right to that gap. If I press it again, oh, there's another gap. There's another gap. Oh, boy, there's even another gap. You can see I was pretty sloppy in building the sequence. If I use Option+G, yep, I can navigate back to the previous gap. Lets go ahead and zoom in, and you can see for sure that right there I have a one frame gap. Now, how do you fix the gap when you identify it? Well, that's totally your choice. Depending on where you are in the finishing process, you can simply do a ripple delete to remove this gap. But in this case I know it's just probably a sloppy trim, so I'm just going to come in with my Trim tool here and manually close that gap. Now, I like the Next in Track and the Next in Sequence commands, but for some reason I don't find them very visual. Sure, getting to the next gap is really easy using these keyboard shortcuts. But there's a visual way that I want to show you how to accomplish the same task. So, I'm going to zoom back out here, and what I'm going to do is go ahead, down in my Project Panel, and click on this button to create a new item. And I'm going to go ahead and create a new transparent video layer. This guy right here. And when I do that, it defaults to my frame size, and all that kind of stuff, that's fine. We'll go ahead and click OK. And it's been placed here in my Project Panel. Next what I'm going to do is drag it out to my timeline, and I'm actually going to put it up here on video track three. I'm going to make this a little bigger, something like that so you can see it, and I'm going to drag it all the way so it matches the duration of my sequence. Next because I have two video tracks, I want to be able to check the gaps on both tracks. So all I'm going to do is add a new track. Yep. Just one video track. I don't need any audio tracks. There we go. I'm going to Option+drag this transparent video track up to video track four and let go. So now I have two transparent video tracks. You're going Rob, what are you doing here? Well, this is where it gets cool. So next what I'm going to do is grab my video tracks on v1 and v2. And then using the keyboard shortcut option and the up arrow, I'm going to nudge these two tracks up. Like that, and then like that. Okay, what did that accomplish? Well, check it out. If I nudge back down, I'm left with some sort of gaps in the transparent video. Now I know right here on video track two, which corresponds with v4, that this whole bit was blank. So I'm just going to go ahead and delete that. I also notice down here on video track two, there was a big gap right here. That's of course between my titles. I'm going to delete that. But let's go ahead and zoom in here real quick, and let's check out what happens on video track three. Right there. You notice that? Oh, there's now a visual indicator with that transparent video track that I made, that there is a gap right there. So without having to use the track commands, I can quickly visually see where a gap is with this nice kind of pink layer. Now, the really cool thing is, if you go ahead and target that track, I'll target video track three and go back to the beginning. Using up and down arrows you can quickly navigate to where those gaps are because those are just like any other clip that you have in your timeline and the playhead will snap to those locations. So you can see there are quite a few ways to identify gaps. Of course, you can use the Go to Gap commands for the sequence, or overall on the track. But then you can also use the sort of visual way of using a transparent video layer, or maybe even an adjustment layer, to get a visual representation of where the gap is on your sequence. Once you've identified the gap, the choice is yours how you fix it, either by trimming and closing down the gap or maybe doing something like a ripple delete.