How to Edit Videos Faster in Premiere Pro
Are you editing in Premiere and you feel like it is taking you forever to get through your projects? Below I’ll walk you through 5 very easy tips to speed up your editing workflow.
You have a wide range of control over your editing system. Some people exclusively use the mouse to click, drag, and drop, while others use keyboard shortcuts as much as possible. Then you have people who are in the middle and use both the mouse and keyboard shortcuts. There are even some of you who like to edit with a stylus - I am not one of you. The great thing is that there are many different ways to do the same thing - edit video footage.
This 1st tip is a good one for everyone, regardless of whether you are a mouse or keyboard shortcut user. It will allow you to quickly go from a big mess of footage down to something much more manageable. Trim your top & tail. So there is a keyboard shortcut where, with 1 press of a single key, you can accomplish what would otherwise take 4 or 5 steps. The 2 shortcuts are both ripple trim - Q for trim top and W for trim tail.
What you do is place the playhead at the point at the beginning of the clip where you want to cut. Let’s say you had some bad takes and the best one that you want to keep is at the end of the clip. Place your playhead at that point and hit Q. This will delete everything from the location of the playhead, left, to the beginning of the clip, and then it will ripple delete so all your footage on the timeline moves to the left and you aren’t left with a gap to remember to close. Then let's say you did this great take, and then left a bit of dead air at the end, so you want to trim that, or the tail, of the clip. Place your playhead at the point at the end of the clip that you want to delete and hit W. This will ripple delete everything from that point on the timeline to the end of that clip, and again, closing that gap for you.
The next tip is dropping your playback quality. This applies to those of you who are maybe editing on a less powerful machine, or you have really high quality footage from professional cameras, or you just have a metric shit ton of footage you are wading through. Lowering your playback quality will help relieve some of the stress on your machine so Premiere can function better and you can edit more quickly.
At the bottom of the Program Monitor you have a drop down menu that will allow you to change the playback quality. It is currently set to Full, but if you drop it down to something like ¼, you can see the playback isn’t quite as crisp. But that’s the point. Now Premiere doesn’t have to fully render your footage, so it’s going to be able to respond more quickly to your editing. And of course if you want to change the playback back to full quality, just change the drop down menu back to full.
Next, export your footage using the Premiere presets.
That’s right, they are that good. You can either export at Match Source - Adaptive High Bitrate, or you can choose one of the YouTube presets for your next YouTube upload. Adobe did a great job determining the best settings you need for your export, for each platform.
The next tip is to use Adjustment Layers. What is an adjustment layer, you may ask? It is this cool feature that Premiere has that I don’t think a lot of other softwares have, and so a lot of you may not use it, or even know it’s there. Again, this is also a feature that can help if Premiere is getting bogged down and needs more power to allow you to edit more quickly.
Go to your Project Panel, new item, adjustment layer. Drag this onto your timeline above your clips, and you’ll see nothing. An adjustment layer is transparent, but you can apply effects, like color grading, to this layer. Whatever effects to apply to the adjustment layer will impact the clip below it.
So let’s say you have high resolution footage and a lot of it that you are dealing with in Premiere. You do your color correction and grading on your clips first and then you start editing, but it’s not going well. Your machine is super laggy, so you drop the playback quality, but it doesn’t make enough of a difference. You aren’t editing as fast as you would like. Try deleting lumetri from your footage, make your edits, and then add an adjustment layer. You can apply lumetri to that and then color grade your footage. One thing that is really cool about an adjustment layer is that it can be dragged out as far as you want on your timeline, you can cut it using the razor tool and move it around just like any other clip, so you have limitless options, really. You can use it only on certain sections of your video, or only on certain camera angles, whatever you want. It's a really powerful tool that allows you to apply things to multiple clips easily, and then really dial in where those effects show up on your footage.
The last tip is to save your effects as presets. This matters if you are going to be filming the same kind of videos over and over - Hello - or spending time creating effects or color grades or anything that you’d like to use again in a later project, you can actually save them as presets so you can use them later. If you aren’t leveraging this feature, start now! It will save you a ton of time!
So I have gone ahead and color graded this footage - you can see lumetri here in the effects panel. Once you are happy with it, right click on that effect and hit save preset. Give it a name, hit ok, and it’ll be saved down in your effects panel. This can help with your size adjustment, a picture in picture effect, or something like what I did, a specific color look.