From the course: Premiere Pro: Documentary Editing

Logging interviews with markers - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Premiere Pro: Documentary Editing

Start my 1-month free trial

Logging interviews with markers

Markers are one of several ways that we can really annotate our footage right inside Adobe Premiere Pro. They work something like Bookmarks, or post-it notes. Just a very simple way to tag the things we want, specific areas in an interview so that we can find them later. Let's see how it works. I want to open up the interview with BD in the viewer, it's our longest most important interview, so it makes sense to start there. And then I'm just going to play, and I'm going drop a marker with M where there are good beginnings of bites. Let's listen, and then we can discuss what we hear. (female speaker: So I'm going to start, and if you could kind of introduce yourself and the farm and what kind of produce you grow here.) (BD Dautch: Okay. My name is BD Dautch,) So that's going to be my first marker at my name, let's backup, so we can get right on it. (video playing) And then I'm not going to worry too much about his um, where he starts. I just want to mark the beginning of what he is saying. So we drop a marker in there, and we can see it over here in our marker's window. We can also write what it's for, right here. And what I like to do is use the language of the person speaking, so if he says my name is I'll just start it with that. And we can't see it too well over here in this box, but I know what I wrote, and we can also expand that box if necessary to see more of it later. So then we continue, and we're really listening for strong beginnings of bites, sometimes they'll come close together, sometimes they'll be a while, let's listen again. (BD Dautch: Okay. My name is BD Dautch, and I have Earthtrine Farm, and we've got about 10 acres in Ojai and 5 acres in Carpinteria that we're farming on. It's all certified organic by CCOF, which is a certifying organization. And we grow about 100 different--) So, I'm not so concerned about the details of organic, but when he starts a new idea, we grow. In fact, let's listen to it a little bit more. (BD Dautch: ...herbs, vegetables, flowers--) This is something I think I could use as its own bite, so I want to work my way back to where he starts that new sentence, we grow. (BD Dautch: ...which is a certifying organization. And we grow--) There it is again, leaving my playhead right around there, I also want to take a look at the waveform monitor, here it is. Audio waveform, and sometimes I like to place my markers by getting exactly where that word begins, and I can see it here. So. (BD Dautch: And we grow--) So right around there, again, I am not too worried about the and, we can work on that later, but again, M and then just the beginning of his sentence, we grow, and we work our way through the interview just like this. You may not want to live totally in the waveform here, because you could miss something in the visual what someone is saying. So I move back and forth between those, I mark things that are the beginning of a good sentence that I think is usable, and I'm not too strict about this, so if something is repetitious, or I know I've marked that idea better somewhere else I don't mark everything just for the sake of marking it. I mark things that I think I really may use. So you can see that I've worked my way all the way through this long interview, and you can see all of the markers here in the Marker's pane as they worked out, you can jump to any of the markers by clicking on them here and listen to this cool thing I found right at the end of the interview. (BD Dautch: ...which has a small town feel, but it's a big time market. Makes it one of the best in the world.) So it was right at the end, we may or may not use it, but that idea of one of the best in the world, I mean that's a bite that might come in handy, so it does go to show you even if things are getting a little slow toward the end of the interview, make sure to listen to everything, you never know what you might need. I have already worked through the other interviews as well, so let's just load them up and look at a few highlights. Here we can see some of the good bites from John Downey the chef and what I realized when I did this was a lot of his best stuff does come at the end, so I like this one about the quality, guess it's about the middle. (John Downey: You know, it's the quality of the produce that you can find, the freshness of the produce that you can find, the variety, and the care that goes into producing it.) So that was something I really liked from this interview, I was also paying attention like this bite's, to places that connect in this interview where he talks about the farm and the farming and the farmers. Also again, don't worry about his, "Ah, uh," we're not looking for that right now, it's just the heart of the content that we're looking for. So, lots of good stuff here, and I went ahead and did all of our running gun interviews as well. They were shorter, but it was good to look at them and put some marks down. Let's look quickly at Owen. Here we see Owen, he was real flat at the beginning--I think I would rather look at his picture. By the way, I wouldn't use the audio waveform when you're doing this running gun stuff, there's too much that can happen in the shot that you might need to know about. The light could change, person can move out of frame, so I always look at the interviews with this running gun stuff. And yeah, this bite here that starts eating local, this was like when I listened to it, I was like, that's a keeper, that's going to make the cut, and see if you know what I mean. (male speaker: Local is the way we should be eating. I mean, there is no reason for us to go 500 miles. We don't need anything from Iowa or anything from farther than what we can do here. So the farmers market here allows us to have a product from, say, 70 miles, 50 miles, you know, from, say local.) So clearly, that's a big part of what we're talking about in this piece, and it just goes to show you never know where you're going to find it. When I heard that, I was like, that's a keeper. So that's annotating interviews with markers, I think you can see how it's going to be very easy to jump to the things that we need later on. I think it's also clear that as much as I'm annotating and making markers, the most important things I tend to remember, I'm not going to forget this great bite about eating local, it's too important to our piece.

Contents