Lessons

Lesson Info

Advanced Editing Techniques: Preference Hacks

Let's take a look now at some preferences. We've been looking at preferences throughout the course, but let's focus on the handful of ones that we did change and some that we haven't that I like to change, that, to me, makes the editing experience a little more efficient and a little smoother. So again, on a Mac you'll find preferences underneath, where it says Premiere Pro. Under a Window's version of Premiere, you'll find it at the very bottom of the file menu. Once you open them up, they're exactly the same on both platforms. I'm gonna jump right in here to General, and we've seen a couple of things that we've changed already. Your duration of your transitions. We talked about this, but we did not change it. And that is, whenever you bring in a still image, it will come in that at default duration. And you may have noticed that it comes in at five seconds. Okay? If you want it to be shorter or longer, you can change this. You can also bring it in terms of frames, if you're thinking ...

in frames. I got a lot of people who do animation, think in terms of frames. And the way this works, again to refresh or reiterate, is whatever the setting is when you first import a still image, that's the length it will always be in your bin. You can always make it longer or shorter once you bring it to the Timeline. If you change this, any subsequent images that you bring in, will have the new default duration. Again, it's completely nondestructive. You can always stretch, but don't think that if you change this number, things that are already existing in your project pane will automatically change to that duration. If you have 100 clips and you want to change them back, just go ahead select delete, reimport them after you've modified this and said, "Oh, I want these to be 10 seconds long "so I don't have to stretch them all out." So that's one I like. Everything else is smaller. I always turn on this shortcut, and I'm gonna zoom in again so it's a little sharper. Snap playhead to Timeline when Snap is enabled. What does that mean? Snapping, which can be turned on and off, remember that's the S-key, is usually for clips to each other. But you'll notice by default when you move the playhead close to the edge of a clip, it doesn't snap to the end. We've been using the up and down arrow keys to jump between edit points. If this is turned on, as you bring the playhead close, like a magnet, it will snap to the edit point. Depending on the type of editing you're doing, sometimes you want that, because you don't get those flash frames. But sometimes you want to get close, and you're finessing audio, and it's really annoying is as you bring it close it's always snapping to it. Again, it's a personal preference. I usually personally leave it on by default, and then if I'm in a critical situation where I'm doing audio and fine-tuning, I may either toggle snapping off, or go here and toggle it off temporarily. But I just wanted you to be aware of that, in that, you know, why is the playhead not snapping, if snapping is turned on, because there's a subcategory in preferences which you need to activate. Playback, return to the beginning when restarting playback. That's a looping issue. We saw out of sync indicators. If that's turned off by default, that's the little things where you can say, "Oh, the audio's out of sync from the video." Again, some people find it annoying to have it on all the time, but it is valuable if you think there is an audio sync issue. This is an interesting yet very dangerous checkbox, and I do want to address it. So remember, and I'm sure you remember, but it's just a turn of a phrase, that when we brought things in that were a different size, images, we had a choice of setting to frame size, or, no I'm sorry, Scale to Frame Size or Set to Frame Size. And I said, well the problem with Scale to Frame Size is it rasterizes it, and it's hard to make it bigger or smaller. And that's why we always used set. Well, this is a setting that if it's checked and you bring in photographs, or even video that's a different size than your sequence, it will automatically scale it to fit when you drop it in. But it's scale, so if you looked at the Motion tab, it always looks like it's 100% of its original size, which is a little confusing. So I personally leave this off. I always try to use Set to Frame Size, because then I can see if I've actually blown it up or shrunk it when I look into that Effects Control tab. But maybe there are times that I wanna use it. Somebody just gave me a whole bunch of stills, I want to cut together a real quick video. I import them, they're automatically scaled, so when I drop it in the Timeline, at least they fit the frame. And maybe I do that Automate to Sequence that we learned earlier, and I put it to music and five minutes later I'm done. That's a reason I was able to justify this checkbox. In hindsight, I probably would never do that. I would still bring it in, and I'd rather select everything and right click, and go ahead and probably do the Set to Frame Size. Because I would wanna tweak it. But, I want you to realize that if you check that and you bring things in, you'll be wondering why is everything coming in as a perfect fit, and now when I need to zoom in and blow it up, I'm going above 100%. This might be turned on. So I recommend not turning it on. The next one is important to me, and hopefully will be beneficial to you. Throughout the course, we've been opening up bins, going deeper into another bin. And when I initially showed you that and I double-clicked it, the bin opened up as just this floating pane on top, and I said that's very annoying, so what we could do is we can hold down, on a Window's it's Command. And I believe it's Control on a PC. We've been holding that down, and we've been stepping inside. I also showed you that if we held down the option key, it would open up a second pane to the right, or a third and whatnot, which works just fine. But, the truth is that I never, never open this in a new floating window. So I actually changed the default workflow, and you can pick whichever one you want. But I was just picking one of the two, is whenever I double-click, it's gonna just go ahead and dig deeper into the folder without opening it up. So now, Command and nothing work exactly the same way. And I'm gonna actually close this out just to show you. Now when I'm working here, and let me step up a little bit. I'm in, of course, in a place where I can't see my my bins, there we go, Tilde. Oh, that's because maybe I don't have any bins here, on what I'm working on? My own worst enemy. Okay. Let's go ahead and make a bin, and put them in! New bin, grab this arbitrarily, throw this in, bing. The old way, it would actually create this wonderful floating noisy thing. Now if I double-click it's just as if I held down the Command key, and I don't have to think about that anymore. The only gotcha is when you go to a machine, and somebody hasn't done that and you start editing on it, it's like wait a second, why is this working so weird? I'd definitely change that in preferences. Some people like to be able to dig in. Some people like to just have an additional pane open. Either way, I think you're in better shape changing one of those. Let's go back into preferences and into General while we're there. Zoom in a little bit. So I switched to open in place. I don't want to talk about like every single keyboard shortcut, because every single keyboard shortcut, I'm sorry, every single preference doesn't need to be changed, and you don't have to know what every one is just to start editing. So I just wanna talk about the ones that I like. So we have the Snap to playhead, the out of sync, the other one that's important is underneath Auto Save, and we've talked about Auto Save briefly, that it does make a back-up copy every x number of minutes. Now the default is, it will do it every 15 minutes, and it will keep up to 20, and then when it gets to 20, it just throws the older one away. What do you set them at? Depending, you know, what's right? There is no right. What there is, is there's your personal style, and what are you cutting? If I'm cutting a one hour documentary, I don't need to save it, a version of it, every minute. Okay, it's not that big of a change. So I might leave it every 15 minutes, maybe even every 30 minutes cause I'm doing it over months of time. And 20 versions is fine. If I'm cutting a 30 second spot, a 30 second commercial, I might be changing a lot between 15 minutes, so I might go ahead and say, you know something, save it every five, save it every three. And I might want to save more copies. Maybe I'll make that a hundred versions. They're small, the project files, remember they're blueprints to the house. They're not the, all the house stuff. The tricky part is, is that when it's saving, it may cause the machine to hesitate while it's thinking about everything it has to save and writing down the database of what your project file is. So if you have a really big show, like a documentary, with hundreds and hundreds of cuts and hundreds and hundreds of clips, and every minute it's trying to save, you're gonna get really frustrated that your machine keeps interrupting your train of thought. So you should pick a number that works for you, and you can change it very easily. If you need to go back to these Auto Saves, they're located in an Auto Save folder, usually it's stored with the project, cause that's the default unless you've changed it, and you can go back. And they're basically named by the time that they're saved. And I actually use this myself, because I went back to some of the starting points of the lessons we covered, because I had changed everything. And I wanted to have a clean copy for us to put up for the people who are downloading the project files. So there's a lot of benefits, maybe you wanna go back and just open up what you did yesterday. It opens this up as a brand new project and you close the current ones. So you're not replacing what you're working on and lose all your work, it has a different name. Often you can go back and pull it out of that Auto Save folder, it's just a project file. Rename it, open it up as yesterday's version. If you've got to save it, yesterday's version. Very useful. Save to the Cloud. So we haven't talked a lot about the Creative Cloud. We've touched on it, but we have mentioned that there are things that you can save to your Cloud account when you have, The Creative Cloud with all the apps. If you're hooked to the net, and you have this checked, and you're logged in. Those are lots of qualifications, if, if, if. But logged in, connected to the net, makes sense. And you say save a back-up project to the Cloud, it will actually save a back-up of your project file, not all the media cause that's huge, but your project file to the Cloud, which you can access from multiple machines. And also in case you have a catastrophic failure of your hard drive, at least you have your project. You have the blueprint of your house, and you can go back and go to that back-up media that you've stored in a very safe location, bring that back into your computer. And now point to it, and rebuild your show because that's the creative thing you're doing. That project file is that hundreds of hours of brain power that you wanna not have to recreate. So, very good, save a back-up to the Cloud. I like that feature, it's not on by default. And if it works for you, it's a great thing. The last few things we're gonna cover, again for preferences, we have the Auto Save, under Media, we talked about creating the proxies. This is where you will enable proxies to be used, one of the places you can toggle it on and off so it will use them. If it's turned off, it goes back to the original media. It's just you need to tell it what to look at. You have a choice, you're in control. Okay? Some of these are, like growing files, that's broadcast. That's when they're recording the Emmy Awards live, and they're editing it. So literally, that quick time file is growing as they're working on it. So that's not something you guys would deal with. But again, it's a product that can be used from film to broadcast, to consumer and corporate, for everybody's needs. And finally to being able to enable proxies. Everything else I leave the same. We looked at Trim, there is sync settings. And that goes back to the Cloud, and we've talked about this. If you are logged in and you do have internet, you can have it automatically backed-up, your preferences, to the Cloud. All the workspaces you've created and all the keyboard shortcuts. And you can have it do that every time you, to always upload your changes, or you can say always when I launch, download my latest ones, or the default is ask. And it's not doing this, cause I'm not logged in, so there wasn't a sync. But it's a really nice way that if you want to one, not lose things, or if you're working across multiple machines and you create a new set of settings here, and you want to use them at home, you don't have to put it on a thumb drive, figure out where they are, export them. You can just download them, and there's really a couple of great options. If you're sharing machines, you can have every time you quit, it just goes back to the default. And you would have to actually download your preferences. So maybe you're sharing a machine with somebody. But that's an important thing. You can get to it from multiple places, but that's where you would ultimately set it up. And then, of course, we're back down to Trim, which is what we saw. I'm gonna go ahead and hit okay, and so those are the preferences that I find very, very useful. I mentioned in the open that we're gonna talk about subclipping, explaining what it is, and showing you how useful it is, and how to do it. This is very useful for interviews, when you wanna break it into smaller chunks for you to think about. It's useful if you have been given, in my case, that underwater footage, which is actually a movie, and I want to be able to break it into smaller pieces. I want to break something long into something short. Let's go ahead and do it with our Camera Master here. I want to go ahead and subclip this. So, there's a few ways to do it. The easiest is, I'm going through, I'm playing, let me bring this and make this a little bit bigger, and as I'm going through I can mark an In Point, and then I mark an Out Point where I like this sound bite to be, obviously I just did this arbitrarily. And all I have to do, and I wanna show you the bottom a little bit, is I hit Command + U on a Mac, I hit Control + U on a PC. And when I do that, it says what do you wanna call this portion of this clip? So you could type in maybe what he's talking about. Okay? Or if you're breaking up, somebody gave you that underwater video, this is the turtle, this is the otter, this is the diver. So when I do that, I give it a name, and then there's a checkbox here that says restrict the trim to subclip boundaries. Let me make one both ways, because seeing is a lot easier to understand what it means. Again, you always have flexibility, but sometimes you need to turn something off to go back to the original way. I'm gonna restrict it, I'm gonna say okay. And let me call this subclip one, sub clip interview one, that way I can search for the word one. And I'm gonna hit okay. It will put that subclip in the current folder that you have clip in that is active. So if you want it to go into a subfolder, you need to select that folder, and create a subfolder. Otherwise, we've learned you can move it around. So I restricted the edges, this is what a subclip looks like. It looks like a regular video clip, but if you notice it has these little brackets on either side. Okay? So I want you to see that icon. If I double-click this and load it into my project, I look at the duration, this is only 41 seconds. We know that the interview was nine minutes. So what I did is, this is just that one area of the clip. Okay? And I go to the end, and obviously that's not the end of the interview. It's just that one chunk, so it breaks it down to something smaller. I can again put In and Out Points to make it even smaller. But it allows me to organize this into smaller pieces so I'm not always hunting for, oh what was that great sound bite? Or what was that great visual? Okay? The original clip still exists in my project bin, I just now have a reference to a smaller section of it. So it's not like that master clip is gone. If I edit this in, and I'm editing in the entire clip, it's just the range of that subclip. And if I want to make it longer to stretch it, I would grab the edge, but wait a second. I know there's media, why can't I stretch it? That's because I put limits on the edge of my subclips. And there's times you may want to. Maybe you know for a fact that you pulled from a larger finished piece, and if you pull it to the left, you're just going to see the previous shot. And you don't wanna accidentally do that. Or you put a dissolve on it, and you don't want it pick up the extra media. So you want it to be definitively ending there. You can remove the subclip limits. I would go under Help to remember this sub, cause I normally don't put them on. Edit subclip, okay. I guess I would have to actually select the subclip, so I can't edit it to remove that. I generally don't put it in to start with. There we go. So I can go in here, and I can uncheck that in the clip. It says restrict, okay, and I'm good to go. Convert to a Master Clip, if you do this it'll actually turn this into a new self-containing clip that isn't affected by what it originally came from. It creates kind of a, like, as if you reimported this as itself. And that might be useful if you want to apply a color correction to the master part without affecting another area. Maybe the light had changed in the big one. Lots of things you can tweak here. You can change the duration and whatnot, but for the most part I want you to see that button. And if I wanted to create one of these from scratch without that, again, let me load in the original clip. Ah, let's use one of the skills we learned earlier. There it is, I can go down here. Remember all the previous clips that we used? Boom, I now have the full one. Go in, mark an In, mark an Out, maybe I wanna look at that in reference to the audio and see what he's saying, okay? Now I hit Command + U. We'll say okay, I'm not gonna rename it. I'm gonna turn that off, and we'll remember that it's turned off. And then we have the new subclip. Where did I put it? I don't know, but I can see very easily where it is because it has a different icon. Click to bring that into my source window, there we go. Do I have that? Did I open the right one? What did I do with my magical clip here? ♪ Do do, do do, do do ♪ Probably what it was doing it, because this is actually how they compress that longop stuff I talked about a few lessons ago. It had to create the proxies to fill in the video, so that took a second. And we know how patient I am, right? And this will happen sometimes. When you bring in highly compressed media, it actually is making these little, not proxies, but they're like WAV form files and picture icons. So that when you see the little pictures, it's not really looking at the original clip, it's looking at these little things it created. So that's what it was doing, it was creating that. Go ahead, bring this in. As a matter of fact, I'm gonna go ahead and hit the backslash, put my playhead right there, and so this is a subclip. And I chose not to put any restrictions on the edge, so I believe. And there I can go ahead, and I can stretch it to be longer.