Let’s Solve Some Mysteries in Premiere Pro!

Have you ever felt so frustrated by something happening in Premiere that you think should be so simple, but it’s not, that you actually just delete what you’ve done and start over?

Yup, me too.

So let’s go through each of the solutions together, one by one.

1. Have you ever tried to resize your mask and it doesn’t change proportionally?

   All you have to do is hover over the corner dots and then hold down shift when you see the arrows appear. You can see that the entire mask resizes now.

2. Ok now you have all this footage that you want to slow down and then add the warp stabilizer to it, but Premiere won’t let you. The program won’t let you change the speed and then add the effect, and it won’t let you do it the other way around either.

   There are 2 solutions to this. One is you can either add 1 effect, like the warp stabilizer, to the clip. Then nest the clip and make your 2nd change, like changing the speed.

   Or the other way is if you have footage that you shot at a higher frame rate with the intention of slowing it down in editing, just do it when the footage is in the bin in the project panel before you drop it on the timeline. So highlight your clips, right click and select modify and interpret footage, assume your frame rate, and enter in the frame rate of the footage you shot at normal speed. Now the clip is slowed down, so you can drag it onto the timeline and add the warp stabilizer effect it.

3. Here’s a question. Have you ever added keyframe to a clip, then gone back and shortened that clip, only to realize that your clip is doing something bizarre but you can’t find the keyframe that’s making it do that thing? Then you remember - oh yeah, I made keyframes before I shortened that clip. You know what you don’t have to do anymore? Drag the clip out, find the keyframes, delete them, and then shorten the clip again. Nope. Here’s what you do instead. Click on the 3 lines next to Effect Controls. This opens a little hidden menu. Then deselect Pin to clip. Now you can see your keyframes in the effects tab and you’ll be able to do whatever you wanted to do, like delete those lost keyframes. 

4. Have you ever recorded something like an interview, dumped your footage into premiere, dragged the footage to the timeline, and there's no audio? Where did it go? Panic not, my friends. 1st, definitely check your source monitor - does the footage have audio there? Yes? Ok, you remembered to turn on the mic when you recorded so that’s good. Next you check your timeline. Have you accidentally deselected your audio track? Just select that puppy and you are good to go.

5. Staying on the topic of problematic audio clips, have you ever had one go missing? You're re watching your sequence and all of a sudden there is a clip of a person talking with no audio. All you have to do is select the clip on the timeline and hit the F key. This will open this clip in the source monitor at the exact frame. Then you grab the audio and drop it on the timeline. If you want to link the audio to the video, right click and select link, or hit command L.

6. Next up is putting a 1920x1080 clip on a 4k timeline. The clip is too small and Premiere doesn’t resize the clip to fit the frame automatically. If you have a bunch of clips, you can go to the premiere menu, click on settings, media, default media scaling, set it to set to frame size.

7. Have you ever tried to copy and paste a clip on the timeline, but it winds up just messing up your timeline? Well here ya go - hold down option on a mac, or alt on a pc, and select the clip and drag it to an empty spot on the timeline. When you release the mouse, you’ll see that you’ve duplicated the clip and you haven’t ruined your timeline.

8. What about unnesting a sequence? How do you do that? A nested sequence is where you either have a bunch of clips all stacked on top of each other or you are just doing something kind of intricate on the timeline, you can highlight those clips, right click and hit nest. That will collapse all of the clips on your original timeline. If you double click on it you will open up that nested sequence on a new timeline. But what if you change your mind and you don’t want the clips nested. You can’t just right click and unnest. But what you can do is select the nested sequence in the project panel, and then go over to the sequence panel and deselect this button. Then when you drag the nested sequence onto the timeline, you get each individual clip instead of the nested sequence.