Premiere Pro For Beginners - Learn Premiere Pro in 10 Minutes!

Hey everybody, I’m Adrienne. I’m so glad you’re here. Today I’m going to take you step by step through everything you need to know to edit a great video in premiere pro.

If this is your first video of mine, then welcome! I have almost 20 yrs of experience in video production and I started this channel in an effort to start passing along all of my knowledge to all of you. 

I do have a pdf if you are looking do some video recording of your own but you’re having trouble figuring out how to set up a recording space in your home that is moveable and not a permanent setup in your home. I have guidelines and diagrams below, at the bottom of this page.

And of course if you’d like to see more I hope you’ll subscribe.

And now let’s get started editing!

Premiere Pro is open.

In the top left corner you see New Project. Go ahead and click New Project.

In the new window, also in the upper left hand corner is where you are going to name your project.

Please please, always always always, name your project.

Right next to that you can see Project Location. It’s really important to pick a location so you’re not left hunting for this project if you need to edit it in multiple sessions.

There are a couple of different ways to import footage. The first way is in this window, on the left. Click through Documents or Desktop or wherever you saved your footage on your computer. When you have navigated to the correct location, check the box next to the folder in the middle window. Then all of the footage in that folder will import into your new project.

On the right you have a window with Import Settings. Click New Bin (a bin in Premiere is the same as a folder). If you want all of your footage to be stored inside of a bin in your project in Premiere, you can do that here and give your bin a name. All of the footage that you’ve selected to import in the center window will be automatically filed in that bin in your project.

Below New Bin you’ll see Create New Sequence. In Premiere a sequence is the same thing as a timeline. If you want to go ahead and make a sequence so that it opens when your project opens, you can do that here. An important thing to remember if you create a sequence here is that any footage that you’ve selected to import will also automatically lay out on that sequence when your project opens.

Now go down to the bottom right, find the big blue button, and click Create.

Welcome to Premiere Pro! Let’s take a quick tour and see what it is you are looking at.

You can see in the bottom left that your bin was created, and if you open it you can see all of the footage you selected in the previous window was imported into that bin.

Another way of importing footage is to drag and drop. Open the Finder Window, drag a folder of footage over to where your bin is in Premiere and drop. You’ll see that when you add this way, the folder structure you created is maintained in Premiere.

Something to check is to make sure you are in the Editing Workspace. Go to the top right of the screen and click the small, square icon with a dot on the top right corner. Check Editing.

Now let’s take a quick tour of Premiere and what it is you are looking at. There are 4 main windows in the default editing workspace. On the bottom left you have the Project Panel. On the top left is the Source Monitor. The source monitor is where you can preview your footage. For example, if you go back down to the project panel and double click on a clip, you’ll see that it opens up in the source monitor, and that’s where you’ll be able to watch it. On the top right, you have the Program Monitor. This window is tied to the Timeline, located right below. And finally, the Tool Bar is located to the left, in between the project panel and the timeline.

There are a lot more workspaces and tools that are available to use, but today we’re keeping it simple. We are going to stick with the default editing workspace and we’re only going to use 2 tools - the select tool and the razor tool.

I want to show you another way to make a new sequence. Go over to the project panel, right click, New Item, Sequence. Doing that will open up a window of timeline presets for you to choose from. If you don’t know what the frame rate or resolution of your footage is, so you’re unsure of which preset to select, that’s fine. Go back to the project panel, right click on a clip, and select Make Sequence From Clip. The new sequence will appear on the timeline and that is where you edit your video. The clip you selected and used to make the new sequence is the clip that is laid out on the timeline. Don’t worry! If you want to, you can always delete this clip but doing so won’t delete the sequence. The timeline won’t go away.

If you want to do something like zoom in on timeline, you have a couple of options. You can drag the bar along the bottom of the timeline, click the +/- key, or hold Alt/Option while scrolling with the mouse.

I like to make the tracks bigger than the default size. This is because I like being able to see an image of the footage in the clip on the timeline, as well as the audio waveforms. To do this you go over to the left side of the timeline and double click next to Video 1 and Audio 1.

There are 2 different ways to play your timeline. Either hit Spacebar to play or move the playhead around to scrub through the footage.

Now you’ve laid out your footage on the timeline and you’ve decided what you want and what you don’t want to keep. This means there are clips that you want to cut out. That’s when you use the Razor tool. You can either go over to the toolbar and click on the razor, or you can press C on the keyboard. You can also not use the razor tool to make your cuts. Move the playhead to the place where you want to make a cut and click either Control/Command K.

A little tip: moving the playhead to exactly where you want to make a cut will help you to be very precise.

Now that you are done making your cuts, you probably don’t want the razor tool anymore. To get back to the select tool, go over to the tool bar and either click on the Selection Tool or click V.

Since you’ve made all these cuts, you have clips you’d like to delete from the timeline. These clips could be something like a pause or a mistake. Simply select the clip and delete.

Now as you can see, deleting clips on the timeline creates a gap. How do we get rid of that gap? Hover over the gap, right click, and then click Ripple Delete. When Premiere closes the gap, the program takes all the footage on the timeline and moves it to the left.

Side note: If you have made a mistake that you want to fix, click either Control/Command Z to undo.

Next, let’s go over to the project panel, select a clip, and double click on it - this will open it in the source monitor. Now what you’ll want to do is select an In and Out point. These are the same as a start and stop point. Take the playhead in the source monitor and scrub to the middle of the clip. Click I for in. Then scrub the playhead along to where you want your selection to end and click O for out. Then grab the image in the source monitor and drag it down to the timeline. You’ll see that by dragging the clip down this way, you bring both video and audio onto the timeline.

However, sometimes I just want the video or only the audio from a particular clip. To do this, go over to the bottom middle of the source monitor and hover over the Film Strip Icon for drag video only, and the Waveform Icon for drag audio only.

Alright! You have edited your video! Now it’s time to export your video and show it to your audience!

To export your video, go to the top left and click Export.

In this new window you can see on the left that you have several options like Media File, YouTube, Vimeo, Twitter, etc. We will just stick with Media File for now. Go over to File Name (you want to give everything a unique name so you’re not hunting for it because you can’t remember what it’s called). Always always always pick your Location for the same reason. Below location you’ll see Preset. If you open the preset list, you’ll see you have lots of options, but today we are going to stick with Match Source - Adaptive High Bitrate. And your Format is h.264.

And finally, go all the way down to the bottom right of the screen to the big, blue button, and click Export.

Congrats! You’ve just exported your very 1st video!