Join Chad Perkins for an in-depth discussion in this video Making preliminary edits, part of Premiere Pro CS5 Essential Training.
What I'm going to do here is I'm going to take this clip and I'm going to add it to our Timeline by just dragging it and dropping it here, making it start at the first frame. And then I'm going to hit the Backslash key. That's the slash that's tilting backwards above the Return or Enter key on your keyboard. And that makes it though so we could see the entire clip at a glance. So basically takes the zoom of the Timeline, so you could see the entire clip. And as I play this, you'll see that we have a lot of extra material in the beginning of the clip. (Wind) Okay, so they're just kind of standing around for a while.
Let's move a little bit further in time and see how things are going. (Inaudible dialogue) Okay, still kind of standing around. A little bit farther. (Whirrrr.) (Male speaker 1: Ooo! Look at that!) And a helicopter goes through the shot. A little while longer, and we'll try that there. (Whirrrr.0 (Male speaker 2: That was bad.) Okay, talking about the helicopter. A little farther on, and somebody walks in front of the camera. So we are not quiet ready to start yet. So it's about 50 seconds into this clip before they even get something that we could even begin to edit.
So the first 50 seconds, this is really just a waste of time. My point here is that in the Timeline when you have tons of other clips and tons of other things going on usually, this is not the place to be making these huge gigantic cuts. So what I'm going to do is show you how to make an edit before you even bring a clip to the Timeline. I'm going to select the clip, click it to select it and then hit the Delete key to remove it. Now I'm going to go back up here to my Project panel and I'm going to double-click this clip. That will open it up in what's called the Source Monitor. That's by default the viewer on the left hand side. So the Program is the final project that we're making and the Source is basically a way that we can edit the material before it gets to the timeline.
So I'm going to scrub in time about 50 seconds or so, and it likes he's about to start going. Maybe like right here, (Male speaker: ?or if you're thinking about visiting California,) (Male speaker: then booking your trip through Explore California's the only way to go.) Okay! And it looks like he's about to start right there. Now, I usually like to leave a little bit of extra room so we can have some room to play with when we bring this down, so I might back this up just a little bit and then we're going to do something called creating an in point.
And that's going to be done by clicking this little button here. We could press the letter I on our keyboard also, and that basically says that this is the part where we want the clip to come in at. So we have the beginning of the clip over here on the left-hand side, but the part that we wanted to actually put into our program is the in point of the clip. Likewise, the point we want to stop taking stuff from the clip is the out point. So there is this zoom here, and I don't think I'm going to use anything after that zoom. So what I'm going to do is go up to right before it's zoomed and this is probably the last usable frame that we could possibly want to use.
And so I'm just going to press the letter O to set the out point. Now the clip is this long, not this long. And so what I can do now is put my Current Time Indicator into position at the beginning of my program where it's all zeros here, and then I'm going to click this button here, which is an overlay edit, which is going to just plop this right down on the Timeline there. And now we don't have those extra 50 seconds of helicopters and people walking in front of the camera, and we don't have the end with this close-up that we can't use.
So this is usable stuff. We still need to edit it, still need to tweak it, but now it's more of a process of refinement rather than getting rid of minutes of junk that we'll never use. By the way, another little trick here is that once we've made it is kind of cut, we've set an in point and an out point, I can drag this back to the Project panel, and that will create something called a sub-clip. So it will be almost like a piece of the whole that we can then use later on, as we see fit. So it doesn't really duplicate the clip on our hard drive. It just made another reference of the clip.
If I click the initial clip, you could see that it's-- well, the in points and out points are a little bit longer here. So I'm basically like trimming the end point to go back to beginning, and trimming the out point to go back to the end. And so now I have one clip of this that is 2 minutes and 8 seconds long, and we have another clip of this, which is still 55 seconds long. So we have the original and then trimmed. So if we wanted to go back to this original and get another piece of the video in the beginning or something like that, then we can continue to use this as like the master and this one as just that one clip.
This is especially good for like a documentary situation where you might have a really long interview with somebody, and you want a master shot like this where you can just continually take pieces, but then you want also like little blurbs that they'll be using, and you want to just keep taking sub-clips from that one long clip over and over again. So that's how you create preliminary edits with the Source Monitor.
Released
4/30/2010- Adding footage to the Timeline
- Creating dynamically linked content
- Making overlay and insert edits
- Moving edit points
- Playing a clip backwards
- Understanding pixel aspect ratio and frame rate
- Applying motion effects
- Cutting video to music
- Compositing with green screen and blend modes
- Correcting color
- Creating titles and lower thirds
- Exporting sequences
Skill Level Beginner
Duration
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Q: When attempting to open the project exercise files into Premiere Pro CS5, an error message appears:
This project contained a sequence that could not be opened. No sequence preview preset file codec could be associated with this sequence type.
What could be causing the error, and how can the files be opened?
A: There are a few possible explanations.
Lastly, if the projects are not importing into Premiere, try importing the video footage by itself, rather than the entire project file.
Q: How does one perform internal edits within a piece of video in Adobe Premiere? For example, if I have a single clip of video, comprised of multiple segments strung together, how would I go about removing gaps and/or cleaning up each segment and then assembling the clips in a desired order? Most tutorials emphasize laying down multiple clips on the Sceneline or Timeline, but not editing one clip of video.
A: To remove footage from a single video clip:
- Drag the Current Time Indicator (CTI) to the first frame of the segment to be deleted, click the Split Clip button in the Monitor panel, drag the CTI to the last frame of the segment to be deleted, and then click the Split Clip button again.
- Delete the segment by clicking on the clip and either choosing Edit > Delete And Close Gap, or pressing the Delete or Backspace key. That will remove the segment and the rest of the projectwill slide over to the left to fill the gap.
Q: I can't view the exercise files.
A: Most of the video clips in the training were encoded using H.264. If you are on a PC, you may need to download the latest version of the free
QuickTime player from quicktime.com. Be sure to install QuickTime with your Adobe applications closed. QuickTime installs a series of codecs on your
machine, and many Adobe apps require QuickTime components to function properly.
Q: Why are many of the video files H.264 if some users must download additional components to view them?
A: This is one of the most common video formats in the world right now, certainly for distribution. This is because it is currently the most optimal
way to provide high quality video at the low files sizes that we need to be able to distribute these assets online. Even though it may require an extra
download for some users, this is the best way to be able to get you the highest quality exercise files. There isn't another video standard that is
cross platform that is free and that works as well as H.264.
Q: What is the most effective way to import a JPEG into Premiere Pro (i.e. best quality resolution, best playback speed)? When I import a photo as a JPEG and add it to a sequence, only a very small part of my photo is shown, because of the high resolution of these photos. Should they be resized in Photoshop first? Will changing it using effects provide the quality I am looking for?
A: Images can be scaled down using the Scale Transform in the Effect Controls panel as explained in the training. You can also scale down the images in Photoshop to match the size of your sequence in Premiere. But I prefer to use the Scale Transform as it gives me more flexibility and allows me to "zoom in" (aka scale up) photos without loss in quality. You'll probably want to make sure that the proportions of the image match the sequence though.
Q: Does Premiere Pro offer Z-axis editing like After Effects?
A: Premiere Pro does not offer 3D as After Effects does, but you can use the Basic 3D effect in Premiere to simulate that environment.
Q: The exercise files don't work for me. I get an error message stating the sequence(s) could not be loaded and it returns me to the Welcome screen. I am using the trial version of Premiere Pro and the correct codecs do not seem to be included.
A: All the required codecs are included in the trial version of Premiere. You just need to activate the trial with your Adobe ID. If you don't sign into Adobe, anything with MPEG compression will be unavailable. Signing resolves that issue and restores all MPEG-based support.
Q: I'm receiving the
following error message from Premiere Pro. "This project contained a
sequence that could not be opened. No sequence preview preset file or codec
could be associated with this sequence type." How do I resolve it?
Additionally, when I try
to create a project, I only have DV sequence presets available.
Q: When I tried to open the exercise files for this course, the following message popped up.
"This project was last used with Mercury Playback Engine GPU
Acceleration (CUDA), which is not available on this system. Mercury
Playback Engine Software only will be used?"
What do I have to do to solve the issue?
Q: After loading a project from the exercise files for this course, the media appears "offline" and cannot be used. How do I fix this?
A: This issue occurs because the project was not created in your copy of Premiere Pro, so your copy does not know where to look for the asset files. To fix this, please see the video "Relinking offline media."
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Video: Making preliminary edits