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Taking Control of Your Timeline

Lesson 2 from: Advanced Editing Techniques in Adobe Premiere Pro

Abba Shapiro

Taking Control of Your Timeline

Lesson 2 from: Advanced Editing Techniques in Adobe Premiere Pro

Abba Shapiro

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Lesson Info

2. Taking Control of Your Timeline

Lesson Info

Taking Control of Your Timeline

I wanna show you how some changes you can make to your timeline display to make things more efficient. We are used to using our timeline and this is what I wanna focus on. I'm gonna zoom in here. So some basic things, let me throw some clips into this timeline so we have some elements to work with. I do have this one clip here. I'm gonna jump over, just grab some elements. Take a look see what we have that's pretty inside of our video clips. We have some with audio, some pictures. I'm just gonna just grab a bunch of clips that we'll be working with. I'm gonna select them. We'll go with that. We'll go with this. We'll go with this background. So I have these five clips ready to bring them into my timeline. I'm not gonna just drag them into my timeline. I'm gonna bring them in using a special technique. If you'll notice down here in the bottom right hand corner there's a little thing that looks like a stack of papers. That's "Automate to Sequence". This is actually something that's prett...

y cool. So if I wanted to I could bring all these clips in and I go "Automate to Sequence" and it will actually give me options on how I want to bring them into my timeline. So if I have a bunch of photographs, if I have a bunch of video clips, I can say, you know what bring 'em into my timeline I don't need to drag them in one at a time. It will bring them in in one of two orders. Either the order that I clicked on them, so I'm holding the command key and selecting them, or if I wanted to, I could bring them in in the sort order. So if I sort them by length if I sort them by name, if I sort them by start time, it will use that as the reference. Okay so I can choose how I want them to be brought in. And the other thing is do I want to bring them in as an override edit? Do I want to bring them in as an insert edit? Do I wanna add transitions? This is really good if you have a bunch of photographs. Let's say you're given a hundred photographs and somebody says, "Make us a slideshow "and put a dissolve in between each one". You can just grab all hundred and drag them in and it will put them in in sequence. Now you can be even trickier when doing this because let's say you have a cut of music. And if you have a cut of music, you could go ahead, and I'm gonna hit cancel for now because I don't have a cut of music. Because we're gonna find a cut of music. So I'm gonna show you yet another, I think I'm gonna go back here. I'm gonna look for my music cuts. Search. And I can search for music. Folders with music in it. These are some wonderful music cuts from Creative Live. There we go. I have no idea what this music sounds like. Life is a mystery. I heard there was a song like that. I'll take two just in case. Go ahead, bring them in. Bring this full screen. So I got a couple music cuts. Let's see, let's surprise ourselves, see if we have audio. I'm wondering, is that being heard? No no s o. As I said, this is gonna be a little bit kind of like fast and furious because I love when things will go wrong in this session. Because guess what? Things go wrong in your sessions you're like, "I don't know why this isn't working". So if you're not hearing audio and this happens a lot in Premiere. Of course the first thing you're gonna check is do you have your audio volume turned up? So I can check to make sure that my volume, but there it is, it's going out, should be going out I think to the USB. This one? And the second thing I wanna do is I wanna go into Premiere and this is where things, people get messed up and they can't hear their audio you need to go in "Preferences + Audio Hardware" and you need to tell Premiere what Audio Hardware you're going to. So I "Default Output". You want to go into here. And I am betting if we are lucky that we should be hearing some audio. (bass guitar music) So that's the trick. Make sure your audio volume is turned on and if you don't hear it check Audio Hardware and make sure it's being sent to the right output. And you might be thinking well I'm not in the studio it shouldn't happen to me. It can happen if you're switching between headphones and your speakers. Or if you have bluetooth headphones and your speakers. And suddenly it's like going to this bluetooth that doesn't exist. So that's a really useful thing. So that's one cut of music. Let's take a quick peak at the other cut of music. (rhythmic metronome music) This is gonna be my favorite cut. But actually this is a good cut to work with. I'm gonna grab this cut of music. Gonna drag it to the timeline. Gonna kill the clip that's here. So I have this wonderful rhythmic beat. And I'm gonna put in markers on the beat. Let's see, I really have a lack of rhythm but we'll see if it works. (rhythmic metronome music) So what I did is I put it basically on the beat. Now probably not the most exciting thing you've seen but because I've done that with these beats I can go back and I can select a whole bunch of clips. As a matter of fact, I am just gonna randomly select this whole group. But not the music. I'm gonna drag them to the little button here which we saw and I'm gonna say my Selection Order is fine. I want them to cut in at any of those markers. That's the cut point. Okay? And then if I wanted to I'm gonna say "Ignore Audio" 'cause I don't care about the sound of those clips. And we're ready to go. I'm gonna simply go "OK". Switch back to my timeline. And check out my edit. (rhythmic metronome music) Now I know, I know this is mesmerizing, but the point of this is, you have a real piece of music, you just sit there and tap to the beat you throw these clips onto the timeline and you have the first cut of your edit done. And then you can go ahead and tweak them but it literally will make a cut wherever there was a marker. Now when you were watching this you probably noticed I had a problem with some of this footage and this is sometimes what you have. I have a timeline that's 1920 by 1080. I threw in footage that was 1920 by 1080. I also threw in footage that was 720p, so it's smaller, and I threw in footage that was 4K, so it was larger. And this happens to people all the time. There also was an instance where I actually threw in a clip that was shorter and that's how they got that little gap there. So the first thing we should do is fix that gap. There we go. But if we look at our entire sequence and I'm just gonna step through my clips. Okay, up and down arrow will step me through my clips. So this is a 4K clip and I'm not seeing all of it. This is a 4K clip and I'm not seeing all of it. And then, that's a 720p clip and I'm not seeing enough of it. So what you can do is you can make an adjustment and you can do this all at once to save you time. If I select any clip, you're gonna be like humming this song in your head for the next, I don't know 90 minutes. But I can go to any of these clips and these are 4K so they're twice the size. If I right-click on them and I hit "Set to Frame Size" that clip will now fit perfectly in my frame. It has scaled it down. Okay so if I look at this it says it's 50% of its height. It has scaled it down so it fits perfectly. But I have some that are bigger, some that are smaller they're not even all the same size so what do I do? I will simply select all of my clips "right-click" I still have that option to "Set to Frame Size" "Click" And now, even though they were all different frame sizes when I go through, look at that they all fill the screen to their full original size. So it shrunk down anything that was bigger. It enlarged anything that was smaller. And that's a quick way to solve problems. This can happen another way. You may be working in a sequence and you're working away and you're working on a 720p timeline, you're throwing your clips in, you're making them fit and then suddenly you realize you're in a 720p timeline. You fix the sequence. You go back and you change it. So I might be in this sequence here and I'm gonna actually do it for you. I'm gonna do the reverse. It's 1080p and I go "Oh my gosh! "It needs to be 720!" Okay I don't want it to be export. But I go into "Sequence + Sequence Settings" and then I need to change the size of my sequence. So I'm gonna change this from 1920 by to 720p. And 720p is simply 720 by 1280 I believe. But I don't have to do the math I type in 720 for the smaller number. Hit "tab". Yes it is 1280. I hit "OK". And now it gives me a warning that something's gonna happen that's bad. And now a lot of these clips don't fit properly. So if I had changed this correctly, some of them might be too big and I, Well you know what? I think I might have been saved because they already had a "Set to Sequence" tag on them, "Set to Frame Size" so they automatically already changed. So that's kind of just a little cool feature. You wanna use "Set". You don't wanna use "Scale". Set is the new one. It actually scales it down. Scale is old, it just makes it 100 percent rasterizes and you'll lose resolution.

Ratings and Reviews

carla valencia
 

great class! easy to follow and very good tips.

perrault095
 

A lot of new information on a color correction and color grading for me. Abba's shortcuts are very useful. This class will speed my workflow. Highly recommend this class. I am very thankful to Abba for answering all my questions!

Shafi Mushtaq
 

Learned so much in like 1 hour only even though I'm watching in 2022! Still worth it!

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