Lessons

Lesson Info

Useful Tips for Editing an Interview

Let's talk about some other useful things when editing and we're editing an interview here. A lot of times I'll bring things into my sequence and I'm not really precise on how I bring it in. I just kind of slug in a chunk and I wanna do my fine tune edit within the sequence and I use a lot of different techniques. The primary one is trimming. We talked about slipping and sliding. Those are two types of trim edits but sometimes you just want to trim the head and the tail of the clip. And as I indicated earlier some of this material I've covered in other classes but there are some folks who are watching just this class and I wanna make sure that these valuable techniques are exposed to everybody. I'm gonna go ahead and if I'm playing a clip one of the things I can do and one of the things a lot of people do is they just kind of razor blade part of it and cut it out and that works fine. If that is how you work, that's great. You might go over here, select the razor blade tool, keyboard sh...

ortcut C, you might go ahead, cut the clip out, switch to your selection tool, select it, delete it, you have that, delete it. Lot of steps but it works. Well, let's progressively remove some of those steps and you can progressively absorb what you want so if I wanna cut everything out here and instead of going over and grabbing the razor blade tool I can use the keyboard shortcut of Command-K as in cut spelled wrong. That will razor blade a clip. I want you to see something. That was not highlighted, my audio. So it only razor bladed the tracks that are active tracks. So think of it this way. Everything to the left is when you bring something in, every one of these things when it's highlighted affects what's already in the timeline. That's how you can think of track targeting. So it didn't cut the audio. I have two choices. I could go back and select it. I'm gonna use the up arrow key to go there. Command-K cuts whatever's active. Shift-Command-K cuts everything whether it's active or not on all of your tracks. If I go over here or I put that and I have something on this track, this track, and this isn't even selected, Shift-Command-K for misspelling of cut. Boom, I just put a razor blade between all of these tracks. So no need to go to the C key. Sometimes you'll cut something, Shift-Command-K, and I know right now... Almost hit the mic! That that is really a continuous edit. It's called a through edit. It means that when I play this, there's no hiccup there and maybe I wanna merge it back together. Well if I wanna know what are my through edits, I can go back to the wrench and one of things I can say, is I can say "show through edits." And while I'm here, I do want to point out, you can also show duplicate frame markers. Which is really nice if you are using a lot of footage in a documentary and you want to see if you've used the same clip twice. So let me go ahead, I'm gonna turn both of those on actually. I'm not sure if I have any duplicates, but it's likely, yeah, I do, because of the way that I edit. So I can see right here, this part of Colin's clip and that part of Colin's clip they've both been used twice. So it's a nice way to see if you have redundant information. If you have another clip that you've used twice, it's gonna be a different color. Let's go ahead, option drag that. See, that's a different color. So it's great if you want to see if you've used a whole clip twice, but sometimes it's just a little bit of an overlap. But the other thing that I turned on was show through edits. So now, whenever I have two clips next to each other that really are continuous time code, or they're continuous I'll see this little bow tie and I'll know that I really don't need a cut there. So what I can do is, I can simply select that edit point and hit the delete key and glue them back together. So it's a nice thing. You turn this on and off as you need it. Some people just turn it on at one point in their edit, go through and reconnect all their through edits, and then they turn it back off again. But again, it's one of those things that we really never look at, but once you know it's there, you'll find valuable, valuable use for it. So back to where we were, where I was showing you how you might trim a clip, and you cut it and then you select it. Yeah, I could put the cut there. I hit delete. There are ways on a Mac, option delete will not only remove it, but also close the gap. It's called a ripple delete. I believe on Windows it is shift. I'd have to look that up. I'm gonna have a PDF probably in about a week, because it'll take me a week to recover from just this three hours and those 19 cups of coffee. But I'll put the Windows and the Mac keyboard shortcuts for those folks out there. And we'll get that to you as soon as possible for those people who buy the class. But I'm even too impatient to do it that way with Command-K to cut, and then select and then shift delete. And by the way, if you want to select a clip, we've talked about X marking the spot. That puts an in and out point. But if you hit the D key, the D key will actually select the clip that is below where the playhead is parked. See how that's highlighted? And it did not connect the audio, because that wasn't turned on. I'll do that again now. The D key will select whatever clip is below. Which is great! It's now the active clip. What I really wanna do, is I wanna trim some of this. And let's go ahead and focus a little bit more, I'm gonna zoom, in a little more detail. I'm going along and I'm playing. And I say to myself, I need to move everything to the left of where the playhead is. Okay? I want to cut it, I want to select it, I want to delete it, and I want to close the gap. And I want to do it with one key. Q. Upper left hand corner of your keyboard. It will delete everything to the edit point. Now I see a through edit here, but that still is an edit. I wanna just lop that off the beginning. I threw down this sound bite with Tim just waiting, chit chatting with me. I hit the Q key, boom! Cuts everything off at the beginning, closes the gap, and now I'm ready to trim off the end of the clip. Play to the end of the clip, bum bum bum, bum bum bum, he looks around, yes, I crashed it a couple of times, before he looks down. Next to the Q key is the W key. That will lop off the end of the clip. Boom. So you can go through a bunch of clips on your timeline. Just throw down interview bites, just with lots of extra handles. Q and W will trim off the head and the tail of that clip. Now you wanna make sure, if you have like 40 minutes, and you hit the W key at one minute, it will cut off the other 39 minutes. It will cut off until the next edit point. So just keep that in mind. There's also a variation on that, and let's see if I can do that. First of all, let's see if that's a through edit. Nope, not any more. So that's Q and W. You can do shift Q and W. Let me make sure it's on the selected track. Here we go. Would be good if you could see what we're doing. Shift will actually do a extend edit from the previous clip. So if this is parked here, and that's my active window, and I go ahead and I hit Shift-Q... Oh, not enough media on that clip. That would be the downside. It will actually do an extend edit. Believe me on that one, believe me. You can believe me. I thought I threw a bunch of clips in here that I actually did not have to worry about and I guess I've been adding stuff. Shift. There we go. See, it extended that clip there. Instead of trimming it, it just kind of moves the edit point. And let's talk about that. Because that's where we're getting into some of the other trimming points. If you have your regular selection tool, okay, the V key. You probably are aware that as you put it to the edge of a clip you get this little red trimming tool and this allows you to add or remove media from the clip in the timeline as long as there is media. If you have the little triangle, fall sunset, can't add anything even if I had space, because there's no more media. We saw that earlier in the class. So that's a regular trim tool. The problem with the regular trim tool is, I can go left and make space, but if I go right, I'm gonna run into this wall here, and it won't let me trim it any longer. So what we want to do is switch to our ripple trim tool. And you can go down there, click and hold, and you can see ripple edit tools. Which is the B key. And what the ripple tool is, is if I hold down the command key, or if I switch to the B key, and let's switch to the key. B as in bring with me, that's an example I've used before. And that is something I learned from a buddy of mine, Jeff Greenberg. It's a great little keyboard memory and I'm gonna give him credit every time I use it. And when I hit the B key, you notice that that is now yellow. It is not red. And if I go ahead and I move this to the left, it trims it and it closes the gap. Red will leave a gap, yellow will not. It brings the next clip with me. The other thing that it can do that's really nice, is with the red trim tool, I couldn't go any further to the right, because I run into the next clip. But with a ripple trim, I can move it to the right, and it just pushes everything downstream. So I tend to like to do that. Okay, that's the B key, and then I would switch back. If you find yourself doing this a lot, and I do, that this is the primary way that I trim, I don't want to even have to switch to the bring with me tool, the B key. I want it to be the default whenever I'm using my selection tool. And so I go up into my preferences, I'm gonna go up into General, and I'm gonna go specifically to trimming. And in trimming, there is an option that says "allow the selection tool to choose roll and ripple trims without a modifier." so now, by default... And this caught me, because I didn't have it set by default in my previous class when I was trying to teach a roll edit. Now when I hover over, do you see that it already is the yellow key, it already is the ripple trim? And if I put it in the middle between two clips, it becomes the roll edit tool and I can move that back and forth? I don't have to use a modifier key. I don't have to switch to the roll tool, which is an end key. I don't have to switch to the ripple tool, which is the B key for bring with me, it's there. If I do want to do a traditional trim, I can hold down the same modifier key that did it the other way, and now it goes back to the red one and I can do an original trim. Not a ripple trim. But to me, I am constantly ripple trimming, and so that is one preference that I like to change, because it really speeds up my work flow. As we're moving through some of these trimming techniques, if I wanted to select the closest edit point, I can hit Shift-T, I believe that is. Selects the closest edit point. Once that is selected... The up and down key, by the way, will jump to the previous or next edit point with it selected. So if the closest one really isn't the one you want, you use the up and down arrow keys and now I can start trimming with my keyboard. So for instance, and this is where sometimes the gibberish of keyboard shortcuts in my brain sometimes get a little bit tricky. That's not what I want to hit. So I'm holding down the option key. And I'm actually doing a roll edit one frame at a time. Okay? If I did this by dragging it, you would see it up in the window. Then I'll hold down option or alt, and I'm trimming this one frame at a time and you don't see it that way. You just have to kinda know. The shift modifier key lets you trim by many. Many is such a random number, isn't it? You know? How many millions of dollars would you like? I'd like many. (laughs) Okay? And hope that many means a larger number to them than to you. But if you hold shift option, it will move it by many. The default is five. But if you were paying close attention as I opened the preferences for trimming, there is an option for... Come on, zoom in. Large trim offset. So many is five frames. But maybe, you know something? I'm impatient. I want to trim 30 frames at a time. Okay? That's good, I hit okay, go back here. Shift option... It's jumping a second at a time on these trims, okay? That's a roll. What if I wanted to do a ripple trim? I don't want to touch my mouse again. I have it already selected. I want to control the trim. T for trim, control for control. Control-T will toggle me through. And I want to zoom in so you can see this, the different types of five trims, Control-T. So I'm gonna go here, it's now a ripple trim. Shift option left arrow, ah! Jumping it by a second at a time. If I hit Control-T, switch that to a red trim tool. Oh, I would have to hit control and option. There we go. Now I'm doing a regular trim, but with my keyboard. So these are really really useful. These are great little trimming things to really finesse something. The final trim that I want to show you is called an extend edit. I'm playing along, I'm cutting to music, and right there is really where I need to make the edit. That's where the beat of the music is. And I could grab this and move it over, but I know this is already there. I've selected my edit point by simply hitting Shift-T. Now I hit the extend edit keyboard shortcut. The extend edit keyboard shortcut. It's the letter E. It will now move that edit point. It will roll the edit point to wherever my playhead is parked as long as there's enough media. And that's pretty quick and it's pretty precise. Okay, so the extend edit is one of those things that I really like. Especially sometimes if I have a whole series of clips, and I want them all to end at that one point, I can do that. And my brain is telling me there is a way to do this. I'm trying to remember the keyboard shortcut. But there's a way that when you do your selection, you can select just edit points. That's backwards, forwards, that's my pin, that's my... I'm gonna just see if I can do this. Let's see. Function. Selects the clips, modifier key. This is how I learn stuff. I just keep mashing keys. Luckily it happened the first time (laughs) I held down the command key, which is probably the control key on Windows. It allowed me to select multiple edit points as I lassoed them. Move my playhead, hit the E key. Well, it didn't move them all like the old nonlinear did. It just moved them all by the equal amount. Oh, that's because these are linked together probably. That's weird. You always like when somebody's teaching you something, oh, I've never seen that before! Yeah, that is weird. Because I threw everything off. Speaking of weird, let me show you some other things with this beautiful timeline that I bet everybody wants a copy of. Because nothing works as good as this. But there are a lot of times, again I have covered this, where you may want to unlink the video from the audio because you want to do something. In this case, let's just clean house a little bit. I think all of this is pretty distracting. Let's delete it all. So I have Colin talking here. Let's see if I can give this a color. Okay. And I want to do what's called a J cut. In other words, I want the... Assuming this is not a through edit and this is how you pretend it's not a through edit. You go ahead and you uncheck through edits. And you pretend that I didn't teach you this. Where is the "show through edits"? I'm looking. It's probably right in front of me. Well, not gonna worry about that. But zoom back out, go over here. So normally when you grab one, the audio and video move together, okay? But a lot of times, to make an edit smoother, you hear somebody talking before you cut to the next scene. Maybe it's an over the shoulder, maybe it's shot film style. And you want the audio to start before you want the video. This is great by the way if you're doing an interview. Because in real life, and this is one of the tricks I use when cutting interviews, is I'll hear the person speak before I cut to their face. And you see this on TV all the time, in episodic television. It prepares you for the edit and that way you don't notice the edit. You see this all the time on television. Sometimes you cut to a reaction shot while the first person's talking because that's the whole point. And then you hear them speak. So you don't necessarily always cut at the moment that they speak and that's why it's called the J and L cut because it kind of makes the shape of the letter J or the shape of the letter L. So I really want to be able to break the connection here and what a lot of people do is they'll select the clips, and they'll right click, and they discover this great thing called linking. Which I don't even know where it is anymore because I never use it. There we go, unlink. They unlink the clips. They can now go ahead and do a ripple edit there. And they're like yeah, I'm good. And they keep editing. And then somehow later on they move this clip, and they forgot to relink it, and now this is out of synch with that. Okay? And I would know that by the way, if I turned on this preference which should be all here, which says "show out of synch stuff." I'm in the wrong... It's that panel right here. I don't know what's going on here with my brain. Brain is gone. But there should be "show out of synch." Oh, they moved that up to here. Preferences. Timeline. Out of synch indicators. There we go. It's showing me that that is three seconds out of synch. If these clips are still connected, it would have shown it anyway. But I disconnected it, and that's all a problem, okay? So never unlink your clips. Undo, undo, we're back to where we are. Undo again. They are linked now. I just want to do a roll edit. I just want to affect the audio. If I hold down the option key, It's the alt key on Windows. It allows me to select just the audio or video. One way you might use it is just to select this audio and delete it. Okay, maybe you have audio with the video clip and you just don't want the audio. Instead of going unlink and deleting it, option, and it does it. I want to do something else. I'm gonna do a roll edit. But if I hold down option before I select the edit point, I can do the roll edit right there to this marker, okay? As soon as I let go of the option key, these clips are linked back together. So if I move this top clip, it's not gonna go out of synch. I do not need to remember to relink the media, okay? So never unlink. Hold down the option key and then do what you need to do. And as soon as you let up the option key, everything is back to the way it's supposed to be. It's a great little shortcut that will save your bacon. Okay? Any questions coming in as we are talking? Or are they typing so fast, their keyboards are on fire? You know, I think you mentioned this, but maybe you could just clarify. Judy B. wanted to know how you can do ripple edits frame by frame? Yes, so I will repeat that, because I do go rather quickly. So let's go back here, I'm gonna actually bring this all together again. So let's say I want to do a ripple edit. I select the clip. Now I selected it manually by clicking on it. When I showed it before, I did it all with keyboards by hitting Shift-T and control key to select it. But once it's selected, you need to hold down a modifier key, alt or option. And then the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard will trim it one frame at a time. And shift and option, or shift and alt will move it many, which I reset to one second. And because I have the ripple selected, of course it's bringing the clip with me. It's the same as the B key. So that's very useful. If I have a clip selected... Oops! I do that oops a lot these days. Zoom back out, move that to the right. I can also do a nudge, okay? Instead of holding option, I'm holding down the command key. Which is usually control on Windows. Now when I'm using the left and right arrow keys, it's moving this clip one frame at a time. When I hit another clip, it won't let me move it any further. But I can nudge it one frame at a time with the command, shift command. Again, shift will do many. It will do whatever that trim default is. So now I'm nudging it one second at a time. So that's actually pretty good. And speaking of moving things by very precise amounts, in general we move things by one frame at a time in video. Whether that's 24 frames a second, or 30 frames a second, or 25 frames a second, every time you hit that left or right arrow key, you're moving it one frame. And you can see that specifically when you look at the counter there. Actually, our counter is on this side. Move it one frame at a time. Sometimes you want to edit audio. And you want to edit audio at a much finer resolution. And you can do that in Premier. You can actually get it down to the sample rate of the audio clip. So if you want to do that, it's great, but there's a potential gotcha. As long as you know what it is, it won't hit you. So I can go down, I'm going... There's a couple places you can get this. But conveniently I'm going here, just because it's close to my timeline. So I go to the wrench. And I'm gonna tell it that I want to work in audio time units. I want to deal with audio. And I click it. And take a look at what just happened here. What was two digits is now 10,000 digits. One sample frame for audio. And I'll actually get people nauseous, I'll do that. Now when I move left and right, I'm moving 1/10,000 of a second which gives me some pretty precise audio if I want to get out that "um" or whatever. Where you get into trouble is, people accidentally switch to audio time units and then for some reason, they don't know why, when they're moving things a frame at a time, it's really not going very far. And you have to hit that button 10,000 times to go one second. If you hold the shift key, you only have to do it 100 times because the many for this is 100. But that still is a lot. So what it allows you to do is get very precise audio. This is the giveaway right there because those are the units and then when you're ready to trim something other than audio, you will go back, you will uncheck "audio time units," and now you are working back in frames. So again, that's another nice trimming thing. It's really meant for audio. You can't trim a frame of video by 1/10,000 of a second. It's a frame or it's not a frame. But audio is much more linear.