Premiere Pro For Beginners Part 2

Hey there, I’m Adrienne, I’m so glad you’re here! In this post I’m going to be talking about editing more advanced stuff in Premiere Pro! I have a Part 1 of editing in Premiere already up on the site as well as YouTube, so feel free to check that out if you are curious about more suggestions or just need to backtrack a bit. At the bottom of this page you’ll also find a free pdf download with easy guidelines if you are looking to set up your own recording space in your own home.

Now let’s get started by asking the question - 

How do I edit a sequence with a-roll and b-roll?

Let’s back up a second - what is a-roll? A-roll is your primary footage in a video. For example, if you are watching a YouTube tutorial, more than likely the a-roll will be when the person instructing is on camera.

Well then, what is b-roll? It is clips that you use to visualize what you are talking about.

They always say that it’s best to show, not just tell

In Premiere Pro, go to the bottom left of project panel and you’ll see different ways to view your files. I like the list view because the others just get too visually cluttered to me.

I’m going to double click on a video clip which will make it appear in the source monitor, and then set and in and out point to only take a portion of it. Pull that selection down to the timeline and lay it on a new track, over where I’m talking about something that selection is referencing.

Let’s move on to effects.

There are simple adjustments you can make to clips in Premiere right in the default editing workspace. Double clip on a clip in the timeline to open it up in the source monitor. Go to effect controls panel right next to the source monitor window. You’ll see some basic effects for manipulating the image, like position, scale, and opacity.

What if you want to add an effect that isn’t available in the effect controls panel, something like a blur?

Head down to the project panel and click on the effects tab. You can find an effect 1 of 2 ways, either toggle open the effects to find something that fits your needs, or you can search for exactly what you want in the search bar. I’m going to use gaussian blur. Once you drag and drop it on the clip on the timeline, you’ll see the gaussian blur effect in the effect controls panel. If you want to add more blur, all you need to do is increase the number.

So what the hell are keyframes?

Basically, keyframes are checkpoints that we add in order to direct Premiere Pro to do something from point a to point b. So let’s say we want to animate the gaussian blur we just added. Let’s go back to the effect controls panel and click on the stopwatch in front of the word blurriness. You can see the keyframe is created on the right hand side. This means that at this moment on the timeline, the blurriness is set to 0. Now jump ahead a few frames, change the value of blurriness, and you can see that another keyframe was created at that point in time on the timeline. Now play back the sequence and see what you just animated.

Now if you decide that you don’t want that effect anymore, you can simply click on it and then hit delete. You can also add literally as much effects as you want onto a single clip.

There is 1 effect that you can’t find in the effects tab, and that’s speed.

If you want to speed up or slow down a clip, you have to right click on the clip in the timeline and select speed, or hit control/command R. Anything above 100 will speed up the clip, and anything below 100 will slow down the clip.

Do you need to add a transition from 1 clip to the next?

I like to use the push transition sometimes in my YouTube videos. These are also in the effects panel. Search for push and pull it onto the clip on the timeline, but be careful! You need to add it to the spot where 2 clips meet.

Now let’s add some text to the video!

Head over to the tool bar and either click the type tool or hit T. Click on the project panel and start typing. Pretty easy! But if you want to make any changes, you need to double click on that text layer on the timeline to open the text clip up in the source monitor. Then look to the right to the essential graphics panel.

Next up is color correction.

You can go so deep in color correction or color grading, but we’re just doing the basics right now. Open up the lumetri color panel and open up basic color correction. I always use the eye dropper tool next to the white balance and use it on something true white in your project panel. Messing around with the temperature and tint values can get you very far away from what you want, very quickly. Then I up the saturation and vibrance a little bit.

Or you can use the auto button!

It’s new and should get you pretty close. If you don’t like what it generates, then try doing the white balance, saturation, and vibrance manually.

Editing music

Music is so important - it sets the tone, or the mood of your video. To edit music, the same rules apply - go through the same steps that you go through when adding video clips to the timeline. Double click on your music file to open it in the source monitor. Set in and out points if you wish, and lay it on timeline. To reduce the volume, which I literally always do, just double click on the clip, go to the source monitor, go down to effect controls, toggle open volume, and click on the stopwatch by level because you want the entire clip to be at a single volume, and then just change the decibels!