- Are you editing in Adobe Premiere,
and looking for the easiest way to speed up
your editing workflow and create better videos, faster?
In this video, I'm gonna take you through
my top five editing tips,
for Adobe Premiere Pro.
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Hey, it's Justin Brown here from Primal Video.
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So let's jump into it.
Now Adobe Premiere is an incredibly powerful option
when it comes to video editing software.
I use it for the bulk of my professional projects,
alongside Final Cut Pro, for many of our weekly videos.
Premiere has a huge range of features,
and its integration with the rest of the Adobe suite
is a massive advantage.
Over the last few years it's gone ahead
in leaps and bounds, has even drawn me away
from my previous go-to editing software Avid,
for lots of our longer documentaries
and broadcast content, too.
So if you're already using Premiere,
or you're thinking about switching to it,
and you're looking for ways to get better results
and do it faster,
in this video I'm gonna run through
my top five tips for editing in Premiere.
And make sure you stick around til the end
because I'll show you how to get free access
to our more advanced guide,
running through the ultimate process
for editing videos faster,
no matter what software you're using.
So let's jump into the tips.
Now one of the things that I really like
about video editing is the range of control
that you've got over your editing system.
So some people will prefer to use just the mouse,
and like to click and drag everything,
other people will go the other extreme
and will be 100 percent keyboard shortcuts,
and really have their editing dialed in with that.
Then you've got the people who like to edit
with a combination of both,
or even with a stylus or a pen as well.
But what I'm essentially saying here
is that there's so many different ways
and different options that you've got to,
really do the same thing.
But this first tip, or this first shortcut,
is something that I think that everyone should know.
If you don't already,
this is something that can really speed up
your editing process and really help you get
from a heap of footage down to something
small and manageable really really quickly.
And it's called trim top and trim tail.
Or trim top and tail.
So what these keyboard shortcuts that you do
is with one key press,
it will let you do what would take
four or five steps if you were going to be using a mouse.
Or without using these keyboard shortcuts.
The two keyboard shortcuts are Q,
for trim top, and W, for trim tail.
So pressing Q on your keyboard, trim top,
what it does is it makes a cut in your timeline
where your playback head is,
and it will cut everything back to the previous cut
in your timeline.
So, to the left.
Q is on the left, W is on the right,
if you're physically looking at your keyboard,
so Q is gonna remove everything back to the left
of that playback head back to the previous cut,
it will delete it, and it will close up
the gap for you, all of that with one key press.
So if you were using the mouse,
you'd have to click, you'd have to add cuts
in your timeline, then have to select the clips,
and delete them and then close the gap.
So all of this is done with one key press.
So the exactly the same, then for trim tail.
Which is W, on the keyboard.
Pressing W will make a cut in your timeline
where your playback head is,
and remove and close the gap of everything
that's in between the playback head and your next cut
in your timeline.
So these two keyboard shortcuts
will save you a heap of time in cutting down
a load of video footage to something small
and manageable really, really quickly.
The second tip I've got for you
is all around playback quality.
Now this is something that if you're running
Adobe Premiere on an older system,
or a less powerful computer,
or you're totally putting Premiere under the pump,
you've got a heap of footage in there,
it might be really high resolution footage,
or off some really professional cameras.
What you can do is lower the playback quality
in Premiere so that you're able to get
some of that performance back so that you can edit
fast and efficiently.
So this is something that was added into Premiere
a long time ago but there's a lot of people
that still don't know that it exists.
So what it is, under the playback monitor,
there is a little drop-down box
to change the playback quality.
And you can lower the playback quality
from full to half to a quarter,
to an eighth, to a sixteenth, depending on
your project file type,
and the type of footage that you've got in your timeline.
So this is something, as I said,
that's going to increase the performance that you have
while you're editing, because it's going to take
the load off your computer without having to
render the full quality versions
of your videos as you're editing.
Now obviously if you do need to have
full quality playback at any point,
you can easily click the drop-down
and switch back to full as needed,
so that you're getting that true representation
of what the end result is going to be.
So maybe if you're going to be using it for color correction
or for any effects, then you'll want to kick it back
to full to get that preview
of what it's going to look like,
but then when you're back to editing,
you can kick it back down to half, quarter,
eighth or wherever you need to,
to be able to edit smoothly with your footage,
and your system.
Tip number three is to use the built-in presets
in Adobe Premiere Pro,
because they are that good.
A lot of other video editing applications
will give you built-in presets for exporting,
exporting to YouTube,
to Vimeo to Wistia, to wherever,
some online platform,
but what you'll find is that the export quality
of those presets isn't fantastic,
and they normally require some tweaking
to get the best results out.
But what Adobe Premiere does really, really well
is that their presets are awesome.
They're really high quality,
they are exactly the best bit rates,
the best resolutions, the best settings
that you need for the different platforms.
The best example here I've got for you
is with the YouTube preset,
the preset for 4K, for 1080, for 720,
they are awesome.
They are exactly what you want to be uploading
to YouTube for the best results.
Now when we move the editing of these YouTube videos
from Adobe Premiere over to Final Cut,
we actually had a few comments come through
with people asking why we then had
a drop in quality, yet we were using
the same 4K camera,
we were still editing in 4K,
and still exporting in 4K,
but somehow the quality was dropping.
And that's because we were so used to
how good the presets for exporting were
from Adobe Premiere for YouTube,
for 4K export and for 1080p export,
in Premiere, that we just assumed
that the ones in Final Cut would be as good.
But after receiving that feedback
we looked into it and the Final Cut ones
are a lot lower bit rate.
Now this definitely isn't to say
that you can't get good-quality results
editing and exporting out of Final Cut Pro,
it's more saying, looking at the two presets,
the built-in presets which is where most people
gravitate towards, and use,
for exporting to YouTube, as example,
on both of them,
the ones in Adobe Premiere are at much higher bit rate,
much higher quality, optimized file,
for delivery to YouTube.
So I think you should definitely make use
of the built-in export presets in Adobe Premiere Pro
because they are really good.
Now if you do want to customize them up,
and tweak things up and increase the bit rate,
or lower the bit rate,
then you can use the export presets as a guide
or as a starting point to make your changes off.
My fourth editing tip in Adobe Premiere
is to use adjustment layers.
Now if you don't know what an adjustment layer is,
it's probably one of the highlight features
that Adobe Premiere has,
that a lot of other editing applications don't have.
That most people don't end up using,
because they probably don't even know it's there.
So essentially what an adjustment layer is,
and what it allows you to do in your video editing
is it's an invisible layer,
that you can drop onto your timeline
as you would a normal piece of footage,
that you can apply effects or color grades
or really anything to,
and it's going to then flow through
to all the clips that are underneath that layer.
So think of it as transparent layer
that you can apply things to.
So where this comes in handy is if you want
to color correct a big chunk of your video files,
you can actually apply the color correction
to the adjustment layer, and all the clips
that are underneath that layer
will have that color correction applied.
Where this is really cool is that this adjustment layer
can be cut and edited and picked up
and moved around your timeline
exactly the same as any other clip in your timeline,
so that you don't need to apply it across
your whole timeline, you can copy and paste it,
move it and only use it in certain sections
or in certain camera angles,
or you've really got a lot of control over it
and a lot of flexibility,
but this is a really, really cool feature
and a really powerful feature
to be able to apply things to multiple clips easily,
and then adjust the length of that adjustment layer,
to really dial in and adjust
where those effects on that adjustment layer are applied.
And that leads us to my fifth tip,
which is saving your effects as presets.
Now if you're gonna be editing similar sorts of videos
over and over,
or you're spending the time to create effects
or color grades or anything that you want to
then use again in later projects,
you can actually save those effects as presets
so that you can use them multiple times in your project,
or reuse them again in other projects as well.
This is a really really simple one,
but again, a really powerful one,
if you're not leveraging this and using this
in your editing it can save you a heap of time.
So all you need to do is make the color adjustment,
or make the effect adjustments in the effect controls panel
once you're happy with how everything is,
you can right-click on that effect,
and choose save preset.
Give it a name, click okay,
then it'll be saved down in your effects panel
where you can just click and drag,
or apply it to as many clips as you'd like.
So this is really powerful
if you're going to be creating some sort of
picture and picture effect,
or a size adjustment or a transform,
or even a color effect or color look
that you want to apply to multiple clips.
You could just apply it to a adjustment layer,
as we spoke about earlier,
but you can also save that preset
to be reused in either multiple clips,
or across multiple projects.
So that's another one that can save you a heap of time.
Okay, so there's my favorite five tips
for creating better videos faster,
in Adobe Premiere.
Now if you're looking to take your editing
to the next level again,
and eliminate a huge amount of rework,
and wasted time in your editing process,
then definitely check out our free guide
that we've put together running through
step by step the ultimate video editing process,
to prevent issues and save a huge amount of time
while you're editing.
It's called the Primal Video Method,
and you can access it now using the link
on the screen, or click below,
in the description.
I'll see you soon.