From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2018

Editing clips with the Smart Trim tool

From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2018

Start my 1-month free trial

Editing clips with the Smart Trim tool

“

- [Narrator] A new feature in Premier Elements 2018 is Smart Trim. Now, this is a workspace for taking a longer clip and selecting some of the best segments from it. Now this kind of editing can of course be done using other tools in the program. For instance, earlier in the course we did something similar using the Clip Monitor. But the new Smart Trim tool makes the process much neater and more intuitive. And if you'd prefer, it even does it automatically. So let's select a clip, go to Add Media, select from Files and Folders. I'm going to select a long clip, Bicycling Sequence. We'll click open and then we'll add it to our timeline. Select the clip on the timeline, go over to the toolbar on the right, select tools, and from the tool menu select Smart Trim. Now you can see the program has already made some automatic selections for us. There's a preset menu over here on the left and you see that by default it's set to Actions. So the program has selected what it thinks are the best photographed action sequences in this video clip. We can change those presets if we select People, and anytime you do change your presets you're going to get a popup like this warning you that the old selections will be thrown away so we can pick out new ones which makes sense. Now with the People preset selected these are the only segments it found. Most likely these are little segments. Let's go ahead and move the play head over there that have identifiable faces in them, there we go. We can also select a mix of the two. Once again we'll hit OK. Those scenes can be thrown out, we'll get new ones. And here's a nice selection of action and people. There's also a tolerance level that you can set with the slider. If we move it to More, it makes more selections. If we set it to Less, it selects fewer. We'll set it right in the middle for now. We can also of course make manual selections or adjust the selections that the program has made. So for instance, if I select this clip, you notice I get trim handles that I can move in and out to narrow or widen my selection. Also, in the upper right of any selected segment you'll see a little checkbox. And if I hover my mouse over that, that changes to an X. I'm going to click on that, that clip is removed. We can manually make selections by moving the play head to a position, right there for instance. And either click on the plus sign here on the camcorder on the play head or click on mark manually. It gives us the same thing, it creates a little segment that we can set the width of or the length of using these little trim handles. Now once we've made all of our selections from a clip or at least approved the ones that the program has selected, we can output these selections to our timeline. If you look over here on the right you can see we can either export them merged as a single clip with transitions between each segment or we can export them as individual clips here to our timeline also with transitions between them. Now that transition option you'll see is over here on the lower left. But let's go ahead and export to the timeline as individual clips. Here on the timeline you can see the individual segments with a transition between them. (rock music) The Smart Trim tool makes it very easy to preview your movie or your video clip and then select the best segments from it. It's very easy to use and a very nicely designed tool here in Premier Elements 2018.

Contents