November 20, 2018

Video Editing in Adobe Premiere Elements

In the previous post we got started with Adobe Premiere Elements. This post is a reference of sorts to share some of the things I learned about video editing.

Again, if you want to see Premiere in action, I highly recommend Kelsey Brannan’s course Premiere Elements Fundamentals. If you don’t have Pluralsight, you can find tutorials for the topics covered below on YouTube. A picture (or video!) is worth more than words here.

Time to get into the weeds of video editing, working with audio, applying special effects, and sharing your work!

Common video editing

Ripple trim edit

Why: trim one end from a clip

How:

  1. Enter the desired ending time marker in the CTI (current time indicator)
  2. Hover over the end of the clip
  3. Drag to the left until you get to the CTI. The trailing clips will shift down automatically.

Split

Why: turn a long clip into two clips based on a split point

How:

  1. Move the CTI to the split point
  2. Click the scissor icon in the time line (Ctrl-K shortcut)

Rough cut

What: trimming and splitting clips so you can move and place them to tell your story

Beat marker

What: makes it easier to trim video to line up with audio (make the trim “snap” to certain time value)

(Probably won’t use this one)

Video transitions

Why: fade a video in/out, apply special effects

Notes:

  • Use sparingly; you don’t need something for every clip
  • Dissolves are most common
  • You can download additional ones
  • Most of the time you want the “between” clip alignment
  • You can change the duration of a transition by dragging the transition’s endpoint in the timeline
  • You can copy/paste the same transition to other places in your timeline

Insert black video

Why: transition to something other than the next video clip (e.g., fade to black)

Classic titles

Why: adding opening/closing titles to your video (e.g., rolling text for credits)

Default text

Why: add simple text (title) to your video

Notes:

  • From here, you can change anything about the text (position, alignment, font, color, gradient, drop shadow, size)
  • The “Style” tab has a variety of preset text settings

  • There are preset animations (e.g., slide out by line), or you can use video transitions like any other clip
  • Title clips show up as assets for your project

Motion titles

What: pre-made templates with stylized text, graphics, and backgrounds that you can customize

Notes:

  • You’re kind of limited to what comes in the template (e.g., may not be able to pick your own color)
  • You may need to set the background to “transparent” so the titles appear on top of your existing video
  • Lower-third: industry term for introducing a person on-screen (name and title)

Adding graphics

Why: add a static image to your video (e.g., logo/watermark)

Notes:

  • If you have lots of these, make a “Graphics” folder so your Project Assets library doesn’t get cluttered
  • Premiere will automatically “videomerge” the graphic with the video happening at the same time; you can disable this so you can treat them as separate events in the timeline
  • To make a graphic stay around longer, change its duration in the timeline
  • To make a watermark/logo, set the location to the corner, change the opacity to 70%

Keyframing

Why: change some value (e.g., position, scale, opacity) over time

How:

  1. Move the CTI to the end-point
  2. Click the stopwatch icon (“toggle animation”) in the Motion tab for the item you’re moving (this defines the end point)
  3. Set the CTI to the start point, then make your change (e.g., move an image)

Notes:

  • Applies to text, video, and images
  • Clicking “toggle animation” to turn it off will remove any keyframes
  • You can add keyframes in the timeline by expanding the video clip (expand triangle icon), then Ctrl-click to add a keyframe

Pan and zoom

Why: use a simple animation with an image without dealing with keyframes; this draws attention to certain parts of an image. This is also called the Ken Burns effect.

Notes:

  • The Pan and Zoom tool gives you two numbered boxes (where P&Z starts, where P&Z ends)
  • If you want to point out multiple things in an image, you can add more frames and P&Z to them

Audio editing

Narration

You can record directly into Premiere using the Narration tool with minimal setup.

Recommendations:

  • Get an external mic for better quality; there are several available for $50-100 (e.g., Shure, Blue)
  • Use headphones when editing video

Note: Enable”Mute audio while recording” so sounds from your computer don’t get picked up by your mic

Noise reduction

Why: remove background hum from your audio clips

Notes:

  • Adjust the strength wisely as it can knock frequencies out that will distort your audio
  • You can also keyframe effects over time if you don’t want to apply the same level of reduction for the entire clip

Music and sound effects

Premiere Elements comes with available music scores and sound effects; these are downloaded with the application.

If you’re sharing your video, you’ll need to worry about copyright and appropriate attribution.

An example place to get audio files is SoundStripe.com ($10/month).

Audio mixing

What: blend sound tracks (narration, music, audio from the video clip) together to make one single, coherent track

Why example: lower the music volume while narration plays

Note: The Smart Mixer lets you select which tracks are disabled, background, or foreground; it adds keyframes to the music layer to adjust the music levels so narration can be heard.

Audio transitions

Why: fade audio in/out

Notes:

  • “Constant Power” results in a smoother fade; “Constant Gain” results in a more abrupt fade
  • This is just like a video transition (you can change endpoints, choose clip alignment, etc.)
  • Right-click on audio layer, fade in/out; you can adjust keyframes
  • Right-click “Ease In” to make the change non-linear

Special effects

Time remapping

Why: alter the speed, reverse, or make freeze-frames

Notes:

  • This is a wizard to visually create “zones” of time
  • “Frame blending” blends adjacent frames to make the transitions smoother
  • Freeze Frame lets you select how many seconds to freeze for; you can also export this frame so you can treat it like a photo in your Project Assets

Shadow/highlight

Why: fix “washed out” visuals

Color correction

Why: change the color balance (e.g, “too much blue”) in visuals

Note: if there’s too much of one color, add the complementary color (e.g., too much blue? add orange)

Brightness vs. exposure

Why: visual too bright or dark

Notes:

  • brightness = all tones equally
  • exposure = affects highlights (lightest/brightest)

Applied Effects

What: templated visual corrections (e.g., old film)

Green screen

Why: you have two clips to merge, one with a green background that will be replaced by footage from another video

Notes:

  • Have your green screen footage on one video channel and your replacement footage on another video channel
  • How to… Effects, Video Merge, drag onto the two clips
  • You can select an average color and change the tolerance to better knock out the green in the original footage
  • To make it more realistic (if your green screen is a foreground-only shot), you may also want to blur the background video

Motion tracking

Why: track static objects in a moving shot so that you can “stick” things to areas of a video that move

Notes:

  • This is best seen in action
  • Premiere doesn’t track perspective, as this is done in Adobe AfterEffects

Shake reduction

Why: stabilize handheld video footage

Notes:

  • Trim the video as much as possible, as this takes up lots of memory/time
  • “Quick” does every other frame; “Detailed” does every frame
  • If your shot pans faster than the frame rate and you have a rolling shutter

Exporting and sharing

Quick Export

Why: fastest way to export your video that will play on the most devices

Note: uses MP4 H.264 codec at 30 fps

Device-specific export

Why: you are targeting a computer, TV, mobile, or something custom

Notes:

  • Select the highest resolution, then choose high quality
  • TVs no longer support 4×3 aspect ratio (only 16×9)
  • The higher the bitrate, the higher the quality

Online

For online export, HD 1080 with High quality is most common. You can upload directly to YouTube, Facebook, or Vimeo without leaving Premiere.

Other items

You can also export just the audio. If only working on Apple products, use AAC format; otherwise use AIFF for the highest quality.

When you’re done with your project, choose File > Project Archiver. This is for putting things on your external hard drive for longer-term storage.

Up next

Time to take the knowledge and practice on some sample footage before getting set up for the real deal.