Lessons

Lesson Info

Adobe Premiere 101

So let's go through Premiere and for those of you at home who are following along, everyone in our studio is following along, actually on the computer, I'm gonna just go through some Premiere 101 really quick. Pretty much everything I say will be multi-platform. So, if you're following along with a different editing program, you probably should switch, but if you don't, I don't mind. So, let's open up Premiere and I wanna just talk about some workflow things and just go through just the basic layout of Premiere and what each thing is used for. So when you open Premiere for the first time, you're gonna get something that looks like this. Of course, you want to click on New Project, if you have an existing project, you can obviously open it up from there. You don't need help yet, I'm here, so calm down. So, let's click New Project. Now, here's what's gonna happen. Okay, where are you going to save your project is right down here with the Browse button. So you can save the project anywher...

e you want. I'm gonna save it on my desktop for the sake of this demonstration. I'm gonna get into where you should save certain parts of your project in a second. So, I'm gonna save it on my desktop, you guys save it wherever you can find it. When it comes to editing, now this is tough for me to actually say seriously, but organization really is the key. I'm the most disorganized person when it comes to, you know, if you see my office, it looks like a lunatic lives there. But when it comes to editing, you have to be really, really conscious of file numbering, file naming. We used to have an employee that worked for us who didn't understand how to name files. So, he would name things that, he would name a file like, Really Thirsty, because he was thirsty at the time he named the file, and then when we let him go and I tried to go back into his projects and find something, what does Really Thirsty mean? What is, you know, Smelly Socks mean? So, name it something that anybody, basically, how you should name files is so that if you die, somebody can go into your computer and find exactly what they're looking for. That's the rule of file naming. I can't say I always practice what I preach, but that's sort of the idea. And then of course, the date afterwards. So, I'm gonna choose the desktop here. All of this stuff, you do not have to worry about. We don't really go into time codes unless you are using videotape. We don't capture video from a camera with the DSLR, so we don't have to worry about that. Scratch Disk, this really, really, really, really, really important. You have two options here, you can be really organized like I just said and save your... Video previews and audio previews the same as projects. So, what that means is wherever you store the project, I just save it to my desktop. So, this is going to save the video previews and audio previews, which I will get to what that means when we get inside the program. You can save those in the same location as your project which a lot of people like to save it to the hard drive where all the footage is so it's all in one folder, which makes total sense. And if you wanna do that, go for it. I do it a little differently, and here's why. I'm gonna read this footage off of the hard drive here and I'm gonna save the project onto my desktop. And the reason why I'm gonna do that is because if I am reading my footage off of this drive, and then I go to render, which basically, when you're rendering, your writing files to where this scratch disk is, that's exactly what that is, you are now reading and writing to the same drive at the same time, which our tech expert-- IT expert. IT expert says that you are splitting the power of your hard drive in half and now you're limiting the program to the speed of the hard drive as opposed to using the hard drive of your computer and the hard drive of your actual hard drive. So, Jeff built my computer at home and he put a 1.5 terabyte hard drive inside of my computer and called it, Scratch Disk. So, I save all of my render files to that drive and it's just a big pile of junk and you know, every six months I clear it out. They're not permanent, you don't need them. Yeah, so whenever you're either designing your computer or using your computer, put wherever things are being rendered on a different drive from the footage. And that'll be an investment of $100, hard drives are cheap. You will wanna put your rendering drive on something that's the fastest thing that you can get if you can like USB 3.0 drive, or an internal SATA drive, or something like that. Because when you're writing to it, it'll speed things up. USB 2.0 is fast enough to read from the drive, but your render on your fastest drive. And that actually is a good point, if you're editing off a hard drive, you definitely wanna get, you can do it off a USB 2.0, but you wanna be at 3.0, 800 FireWire, I know Thunderbolt now has drives. I haven't used one yet but I hear they're rocket fast. So, internal drives are the best. The bigger your project becomes, the faster your hard drive's gonna need to be. So, if you're doing a two-hour documentary, USB 2 is not gonna cut it. At some point, you're gonna want something faster. So, just be conscious of that when you're buying hard drives. Really, the whole world is going to USB 3. and faster anyway, so you're not gonna have to worry about it in a little bit. So, what did I say about naming? So, we're gonna name this project so we can find it later, and we're gonna name this, let's see, what's a good name for it, Kevin-- Action Man. Yeah, oh, Action Man. Action Man_CL, for CreativeLive, and what's the date today, anybody know? 16th. Okay. Hello, I just pressed Enter by accident. Okay, so I did that by accident, I pressed Enter. Now, when you actually save it and press Enter, this screen is gonna pop up here. And I am going to make it so that you guys can see it here. I hope they can see it. Okay, so what's happening, all that's missing here is just, the resolution of my screen is blocking some of it, but all that's at the bottom is OK or Cancel. So, when you open up your Premiere for the first time, this is what it's gonna look like after you've named your project, and your scratch disks and all that, and what this is is just a bunch of video codec, what does that mean? It's the same thing as photography, JPG, PNG. GIF. GIF. PSD. PSD, whatever, it's just a file extension. It's the codec in which your video shoots. So, if you're using a video camera, most likely, it's gonna see DVCPRO, if you're using a C300, you're gonna be in the MPEG-2 codec. Most of us are using DSLRs, so you don't have to worry about what any of this stuff means. All you have to know is you're shooting on a digital SLR. Now, you know you shot everything on 1080p, most of you did. Most people probably wouldn't even mess with the 480 settings. Some of you might have shot 720p, now let me make this point. If you shot something in slow motion on a DSLR, you're automatically, you shot it at 720p. If you've shot 50 clips and two of them are 720p, do not select the 720p because two clips are in slow motion. Always pick what the majority of your footage is gonna be, that's the rule of thumb. So, I'm gonna drop this down. We shoot everything at 24 frames a second like I said, and then we're gonna give the sequence a name, so I'm just gonna call it Base, and I'll tell you why in a second. Ross, if somebody's shooting something for broadcast, they know it's gonna go on TV, do you recommend them shooting at 24 frames a second or 30? If their client says, "We're gonna put "this on television," and requests the 29.97 frame rate, which is 30, the you would shoot it at and you would edit it at 30 as well. So, 25, if you're in Europe, I know, actually, this is worldwide, so I should mention this. If you're in Europe, you're at 25 frames a second for PAL. For broadcast. No, no, that would be their film frame rate, is 25. So, that's for all of you in Europe. For those in America, 24, it's relatively the same thing anyway, just based on your territory. So, we click OK, and then boom, Premiere's screen opens up. Now, if you've never seen an editing program before, you might be overwhelmed. Just like the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says, "Don't panic," 'cause this is actually very, very simple. So, first thing I wanna talk about is the timeline, which is right here, alright? It's the big part. The timeline is pretty much where everything happens, where you're gonna actually make and arrange your film. And when you are making and arranging your film, you're gonna bring pieces of your footage down onto the timeline for editing. Now, on the top half, you can see there's three video tracks, there's three audio tracks. You can go up to 99 of each one. So, if you wanna see how far you can go, good luck. I've actually never hit the limit. A lot of times, I try to condense down how many tracks I have so that I don't have to expand the screen like this. If you're doing a dual-monitor setup, which I highly recommend as minimum for editing, you usually put your timeline, if you have a big project, on a separate screen so you can see from top to bottom what the timeline looks like. There's a couple ways to set that up and I'll show you in a second. So, the top half is video, bottom half is audio, and there's a few ways to add new tracks. You can just drop footage into the negative space on the top and it'll automatically add a video track for you. And same thing goes for audio, you can drop and add an audio track into the negative space of the audio, and it'll just automatically add audio. This is just your play head here and you can scroll through your footage, you scrub through it pretty easily and then obviously, if you play, it's gonna move and follow along where you are. Right here, this little hand I have here on the thing I'm moving, this gray part, this is your work area. Now, your work area is pretty simple, it's whatever you have this selected on, so let's say I moved it here, it would only export to the end of the work area if I'm gonna export something. Also, if I'm gonna render something, which I'm gonna get to what rendering is when we actually have to render something, you're only rendering your work area. So, where your work area is is essentially, if you're gonna do something to the project, it's only gonna happen inside of the work area. So you can extend the work area and the work area will automatically extend itself as the project gets bigger. It's only if you shrink it down smaller than the project will it not do that anymore, so keep that in mind. Now, above the timeline, oh, and I wanna make this point. File, New, Sequence. And once you've made the sequence settings for yourself, you never have to touch it again. Click OK, and what just happened here? I just added another sequence to the project. So, there's no limit to the amount of sequences you can add to a project. Why would you do this? Why would you have multiple sequences? Well, there's a few reasons. If you're doing a bigger project, a lot of people like to shrink it down a little bit. So, in a movie, for example, when we did the How to Photoshop Everyone movie, or the movie I showed you the trailer for yesterday, I made every scene its own sequence, Scene 1, Scene 2, Scene 3, Scene 4, so there were 75 sequences when we were done. When I was done with the project that I had all the scenes edited, I made a totally new sequence, and when you make a sequence, it actually is stored over here in the bin which we're gonna get to in a second, and you can drop sequences inside of the scenes. There's no clips in there, do it won't let me do that but I will show you once we have clips. So, it's called nesting sequences. I can put Scene 1 sequence inside of a new sequence and it'll show up as big blocks as the set of hundreds of clips across time. So, keep that in mind 'cause nesting sequences is useful for a couple things. I'm gonna delete that sequence so we don't have that in our way anymore. Now, up here above the timeline to the right is your playback screen. Everything you do in the timeline can be viewed right here when you play it. So, that's pretty simple there. You can press space bar to play it or you can actually just use the controls here. Here's the thing about keyboard shortcuts, I don't really use that many of them. So, I'm not saying don't learn 'em, don't memorize them. What I'm saying is you don't need them to physically edit and you don't need them to physically edit well. There are some you need to edit quickly, but you don't need them to be a good editor. You just need it to be a fast editor. And there's a lot of keyboard shortcuts but you know, there's a few that you really wanna know. And I will get to them as we keep going. But one cool thing about Premiere is that if you put your mouse over any part of any button, the shortcut will pop up and tell you what it is. So, that makes it very easy to learn, and then of course, the more you do it, the better you'll remember it. To the right of the timeline is your audio meter. When you're playing what's on the timeline, you'll see this start to go green, go red, and you'll see it display the audio levels. That's how you know what your audio output levels are. Let me see those, the headphones. Get a pair of headphones and I'll tell you why. A lot of times, I'll edit with speakers out loud, and I'll just, you know, edit as a I go. But when it's time to actually master audio, you're gonna need a pair of headphones because you wanna be zeroed in on what the audio is. Don't judge audio by the speakers. Judge audio by a combination of the headphones and what the audio mixer says. If you think something sounds good in your headphones, and it looks low on the meter, it's low. There's no question about it. So, just because it sounds good doesn't mean it is good. You need to listen to clean sound with the headphones, just like recording, also, use the meter to measure it. It will tell you, it will not lie to you. So, you wanna have your output, your optimal output levels should be at negative six. So, that's where things should be peaking and as Jeff mentioned yesterday on recording, it's not different than editing. Between negative six and zero is that buffer area if they go into zero. But if they go above zero, it's gonna blow out, or as Jeff likes to call it, overexpose. Overexposing your sound. Yeah. Not a technical term, my term. Yes. Okay, so now, let's talk about the bin. The bin is super important and this is pretty much where you're gonna spend most of your time when it comes to editing and this is where all the file are stored. So, you see the sequence we made is already here. When we bring video clips into the program, we're gonna bring them in right here. When we bring audio into the program, we're gonna bring them in right here. If we were to bring JPGs into the program, we'd bring them right here, you guys get the point. Everything you bring into the program is gonna be stored right here. So, how do we do that? There's a couple ways you can bring things into the program. You can go into Media Browser and the Media Browser tab, basically, you're allowed to access any hard drive attached to your computer to bring things in. So, I go to my Expedia Drive here, I go to the CL Shoot, I go to Video, hello, there we go. Okay, so I click the video and you can see all the clips right here in the Media Browser. I could bring those clips into the program from here if I wanted to and it would be very simple. If I drag and drop onto the timeline, it'll automatically show up in the bin, it'll automatically copy. Another way you can bring clips into the program is you can go to File, you can go to Import, and then obviously, a Finder window comes up and what is it for Windows? Explorer? Explorer window comes up. Ergh, makes me tingle. You can bring clips into the program here and then of course, you select a bunch of them and then Import. Here is the easiest way to do it and here's the way I would do it. I would honestly just go back to the project here, wait a minute, I have two of them, so let me click that. I'm gonna go back to the project, I'm gonna go to the Finder window, I'm gonna go Expedia, CL Shoot, Video, and I'm just gonna take that folder and I'm gonna drop it right there and the file's importing. Now, when files are importing, it's very important to have a cup of coffee because what's gonna happen is you see at the bottom of my screen, it's generating a file peak for all these files, Premiere is very interesting the way it works. And it's unlike any editing program that I've ever used and I've used them all. I've used Vegas, I've used Avid, I've used Final Cut, I've used every program there is. And the reason I like Premiere so much is one of my big criticisms with a lot of the other editors is the files of the program, the video files that are in the program are actually linked to where they are in the hard drive. And so, what does this mean? Let's say you're a busy person and you're editing, editing, editing, and an email comes in and you have to click off of the screen for a second and check your email. When you go back to the editor and click back onto the screen, there's gonna be sort of a delay. You might get, for Mac, it'll be the Spinning Wheel of Death, the beach ball, for Windows, it might be the hourglass or whatever you've customized it to be, which is a pain in the butt. And sometimes, it can actually cause the program to quit if you have a big-- Our studio audience is shaking their head, "Yes, we've experienced this before," and I'm sure a lot of you at home have experienced this before. The way Premiere works, which is interesting, is it creates a Peak file and that's what we stored in the beginning of the demonstration. Where we storing those Peak files, it's actually sort of a middle man to the hard drive. So, it references those Peak files when you're playing back while linking to the hard drive. I know scientifically, that might not make sense, but basically, what happens is when you click back onto the program from checking your email or something, it's instant. (hands clap) There is no delay, and that makes it really easy. Another thing that really is cool in how that works is rendering. So, if you've never edited before, you'll see what rendering is in a second and basically, it's like taking out the garbage. You're gonna have to do it at some point, right? None of use like to do it, but you do have to do it and it's probably the longest process of editing and we have an After Effects guru in the audience here and he's probably thinking to himself, "You don't even know what rendering is "so you haven't experienced my life yet." In After Effects, you really gotta render. You can't play anything in another editor if it's not rendered. It'll literally pop up onscreen and say, "Unrendered," you can't even view it. In Premiere, you actually can view something unrendered which is unlike any editor. So, I like to say rendering is sort of optional, and I don't render anything until I absolutely have to because it does slow down the process. Before, when I would edit a big project, we'd call it a render party where you get a big sequence edited and then you can't watch it back because a lot of times, in editing, you wanna keep watching back, watching back, watching back, and make sure you got the flow going and everything's perfect. So, we would have what we call a render party where we would render something, it would take 45 minutes, we'd go watch an episode of Breaking Bad, we'd come back, and boom, everything's rendered and then we can watch. Rendering, for those of you who are a little confused with what that means, it's the process of applying any changes or making the video suitable, the computer has to go look at the footage and render or process the footage so that it becomes watchable for your screen. And whenever you're adding different effects or doing titles or things like this, certain things to clips-- If you make any change to a clip in the way it's viewed, color, titles, scaling-- Scaling. Anything, you have to render, question? So, how does that differ from the live preview at the top when you're scrolling through it? Does the live preview not have the video changes on it? Right, exactly. Okay. You make the changes, that's a great question, you make the changes to the clip on the timeline which is separate from on the preview screen which I'm about to show everybody what the preview screen is. I'm gonna come back to that question, yes? When Adobe is rendering something, is it then putting it back in the storage device that you've placed it, or is it creating a Peak file for it? It's where you set that scratch disk-- Scratch disk. Scratch disk, right. Wherever you set that is where it's storing it. Okay. And the reason why I say they're temporary is because if I've made a two-hour movie or even a commercial with a lot of effects, it's gonna have a lot of render files. Right. that's why I have a 1.5 terabyte drive in my computer, one, I do a lot of project, two, I do a lot of big projects. But when I'm done with a project, I delete the render files because you don't delete the files, the footage, because you can't get that back. But the render files, they're temporary because when you're done with the project, you don't need them anymore. 'Cause they're just the directions. Yeah, if you did have to go back and export it, you just re-render it and it just creates new render files. So, rendering is, again, it's like taking out the trash. You take the trash out, put it in the big garbage, they come, they pick up the garbage, and then it's gone. But you can always fill the trashcan back up if you want to. I don't know if we made this point, but I just wanted to make sure everybody knew, if you're new to the process of editing, your actual footage itself the way it came off the camera, Premiere never alters that ever. It stays the way it is forever. It's the process of creating render files and project files, and other secondary files that allows you to build a film, add the effects, change things, and then export that without ever, it's called nondestructive. Damaging, yeah. Yes. Without damaging the source file which, that's a great point in which we're about to get to in a second. Okay. So, we have the video, now we wanna grab the audio and the music, I've made a little music folder for everybody, I'm gonna drag, I'm gonna drop that. And you can see it's really quick that Premiere imports it, so it's not a long process and it does its Peak filing. One thing that's happening, you can work through this Peak file, the conforming process, you can do it. It may slow your machine down a little bit depending on how much RAM you have, see that? Look at that, my startup disk is almost full. We'll clean that out at lunch. Oh, SSD drives, this is actually a good point. The reason why my scratch disk is full is not because I store everything on my computer, it's 'cause I have a smaller solid-state drive inside of my computer. Jeff can probably explain the technology of solid-state drives and why they're almost necessary for editing. If you can afford it, and they're really not that expensive, at this point, you can get 128 gigabyte drives for $125 or less. The SSD drive works like a computer memory. It does not have any mechanical parts, you know, hard drives spin. If you were to open it up, you would see a spinning platter and there's, just like the old record players that had the needle that had to move on the record player, there's a mechanism similar to that on a hard drive that has to move in and out, in and out, in and out constantly to read the information off it, whereas an SSD drive is all computer memory. So, it can just say, "Fetch me this information," (fingers snap) and it delivers it pretty much instantaneously. So, what we do anytime we get a new computer is we either buy it with an SSD drive or we buy it with the hard drive and immediately just take that out, buy an SSD drive to replace it. And then load the operating system back on because it, you will not believe, it'll feel like you're getting a brand new computer. Yeah, you can revive almost an old computer with some RAM and an SSD drive and make it feel brand new again. So, I highly recommend it. One thing, I got a couple questions on my Facebook the other night, why Premiere over Final Cut? I'm assuming everyone' asking me that about Final Cut 7, I'm not gonna acknowledge Final Cut X as an actual program, so I'm not even gonna mention it. 'Cause Final Cut 7 is a great program, here's why Premiere is better, there's a few ways, a few key ways. Number one, Final Cut is only gonna access two gigs of RAM and one processor, correct? Four gigs of RAM. Four gigs of RAM, one-- It's a 32-bit, yes. One core, yes. Okay, one core. Premiere will access all of your processor, all of your RAM, so putting 16 gigs of RAM on a desktop, 32 gigs of RAM, will actually matter when you're using Adobe Premiere. If you're using Final Cut 7, it won't matter at all. Yeah. It makes your computer better, but it won't make the in-program experience better. Premiere is a 64-bit program which allows it to access more cores and more memory and in fact, you cannot load Premiere on your computer if you have a 32-bit operating system. So, I guess the first thing you should do is make sure that you have a 64-bit operating system loaded because that's the only way to run Premiere. And Adobe made that choice when they came out with CS5. It was kind of risky because 64-bit computers weren't necessarily the norm at that point, but they realized that in order to have the power to make users happy and people who edit that that's really where they needed to be. Things have caught up to this point where most people, when you're buying a computer, it's a 64-bit operating system now. Another reason is the H264 codec, in Final Cut 7, is not a native codec. So, let me just explain codec here. Output codec is basically what delivery file format it would be, so H264 is a very common, the most common delivery format now, and what YouTube wants. You put on a DVD, it would be an MPEG-2, there's a whole slew of output codecs, something where when your film is finished, that's how you deliver it to whatever format you're trying to deliver it to. An input codec is the native codec in which you edit in, DVCPRO, ProRes, a lot of these codecs, all native in all editing programs. H264 is actually an output codec and the reason why, I guess, Cannon really started this whole thing with the 5D Mark II, shooting it in H264, I don't think they intended people to take this camera and make movies with it. I think it was sort of a happy accident. It was definitely an accident. So, what happens is they took this very high-quality, it's compressed, it's very compressed, high-quality H264 codec, and they intended people to record clips of it and then upload those clips directly and not edit it. So, it was causing Final Cut problems all over the place because when you drop an H264 file into Final Cut, you automatically have to render it. The render times are about four times what they normally would be on a native codec. Premiere CS5 came out, and it was native in CS which is what caused the whole Final Cut/Premier battle to sort of become a little more even keel, and then Final Cut X came out and you know, the rest is history. I know that if I were some of you out there hearing Ross talk about codec or whatever, you're like, you're probably, your heads are like, "What is going on, what does any of this mean?" Don't get scared off. If you have a Cannon DSLR, it's gonna record in H264. Again, codec simply is the same thing as a photo format, JPG, PSD, GIF, whatever, it's H264, it's gonna record that. If you have an older Nikon when they first came out with the video capability, it'll be MPEG-2. But Nikon quickly realized that in order to stay even in the market, they needed to change that. So, anything since the original Nikons that came out with video capabilities, they've moved to H264 also, so you're just gonna stay H264 all the time. When you upload to YouTube, you don't know this, but they're using H264. Really, Premiere Pro is a program that came from a legacy of movie making and videographers, which is why you have all of these different opportunities to use this codec, or that codec, or that codec, or that codec. It's kind of built in from a lot of what was happening back before the DSLR became the de facto, standard way for beginning filmmakers to really get into this game. So, that's the only thing you really need to understand. Okay, so let's keep going into the Premiere, this overview here. So, we see we have our video, we have our music, and we have our audio down here. Here's the one screen we have not talked about yet which is probably one of the most important. So, here's our footage. Now, when I double-click-- How did you get that again? How did I get what? Get to that screen? I double-clicked it. Double-clicked what? I double-clicked the video folder. The video folder, okay. So, the video folder pops up. Now, you can do a couple things. If you wanna stay organized and you don't want this like just hovering in the middle of your screen, you can take these little dots right here that are next to the word, Bin, grab it, and then you can drop it right where you want it and it becomes part of this little tab that you're making. So now, the video bin has it's own tab over here. And you can lay your screen out however you want, you can move your timeline up here, I'm not gonna do that. You can move the source screen down here, you can move and rearrange it and save your layout in Workspace, and basically, you see there's different workspaces for all different types of editing. So, if you're gonna do color correction, and you click Color Correction, when we get to it, I'll show you, it would change the layout of your screen to be ideal for color correction. For audio, it would be ideal for audio editing. For effects, it would be ideal. So, you can always reset your workspace back to the way it was and then Editing CS5.5, is what it was on 5.5, and then Editing is what I have it set to do right now. So, let's go into the top screen here. So, let's go to, I just wanna double-click a clip here and show you what happens. I'm gonna quit this so it doesn't pop up. Okay. If I double-click a clip. Which one are you doing? I'm just double-clicking the-- The very last one? That's actually the very first one. Very first, okay. So, if I double-click a clip, now, if you are on a machine that has less power and you think you need a little help on the power, this right here, you can change the resolution of how it's playing back. So, you can go to 1/4 which will actually play this back at a 1/4 of the quality of what you shot it. This'll make it play smoother, but it'll also affect the integrity of the resolution, not on the actual file, just what you're actually seeing in this screen. So, if you're on a machine that might be older or you haven't updated it yet, this is probably where you wanna be. If you have a powerful laptop or a powerful desktop, you can go to 1/2 quality, that's probably where you wanna stay. On my laptop, that's where I'm gonna stay. On my desktop though, I do have a lot of power on that and I would go to full quality and I see it exactly how I shot it. And when you get to parts of like color correction and making effects, there's a reason why you go in and out of some of these different quality parts. On your desktop you have three screens, right? Three screens, yes. Three screens, and when you're editing with multiple screens, you're able to take any of these individual windows and drag them over to-- Yes. Other screens? So, let's assume that these are the three screens. So, this is my playback screen, everything I see on the timeline, all the way on the right, I have everything else in the middle. So, if have the timeline, I have the source screen, I have the bin and I have the Media Browser, the effects, all on the middle screen 'cause that's where you spend most of your time so it's right in front of me. And then all the way on the left, I actually have where all the video files are so I can see that in full screen, and the reason why I have that is because a really cool thing about CS6 is if you take your mouse and just drag it over a clip, you can see it play, and this is huge-- You have to hold down on the button? No, you just literally-- You literally just drag. You just drag your mouse-- Wow. Across it and you can see it. So, a lot of times when we're shooting a lot of clips, we see there's mistakes in clips or, "What clip is that?" They all look the same as the thumbnail, but what the contents are are very different. So, it saves you time. A lot of times, you'll be clicking and have to run through it. And you know, we used to do that in the Final Cut days where it would be like looking for a clip and we would use iView Media to browse clips because it was so much easier, whereas Premiere put this in, maybe it was on my suggestion, I don't know. It was my suggestion. (laughing) We actually asked them to make an interface where you would be able to see the first frame of the clip and then two seconds in, then 10 seconds in, so you can kind of see it, and this was their kind of way of implementing that. Which was a better idea. Yes, it saves you so much time because obviously, the clip's always, when you're looking at it, it's always just the first frame. So, it saves you so much time to be able to scroll through a clip really quickly and remember, if you're filmmaking, you're not making 12-minute clips. You're gonna have, you know, five, 10, 15, 20-second clips and you'll be able to see how that thing evolves and then whether or not it's useful for your film. And actually, you can play it too if you just click the clip and press your space bar, you can actually play the clip in real time right there in the bin, then you have a timeline you can drag through as well, so there's all sorts of ways to do this to see what's going on there. When you start to play like that, you actually have a play head that you can drag back and forth. Yeah, and you can actually press your space bar and play it-- Right. In real time. You have a question? Just curious, because this is the same technology that's in the new Lightroom, obviously, and in the new Lightroom, you can also reset the thumbnails so if there's a really important part of that clip and you wanna remember that's the reason you're saving that clip, you can reset the thumbnail. Have you been able to do that here? I've never done it, I wouldn't be surprised if you could, but I actually never have done it. I would just relabel the click, actually. Oh, okay. To do it that way. I categorize, especially the type of things I shoot, I categorize by Wide, Medium, Close, B-Roll. Okay. In different folders to do that. But that is a good question and I will look into that. So, when I double-click a clip here and it pops up in my source screen, essentially, what I'm doing in the source screen is sort of a better version, I'm gonna make this 1/2 quality so my computer doesn't explode. It's a better version of previewing down at the bottom, so I would play it, and just to see where I want. So, let's get to a clip that actually matters. Oh, so we wanna start with Kevin in the scene already. So, I would make an in point here. So right there, where I have my mouse you see marked in, and you see in parentheses, the letter I, so if I press I on my keyboard, it makes that little blue dot and actually, the answer to your question is you can change the thumbnail 'cause it's gonna start on the in point, always. Okay. So yeah, I don't know why I didn't answer it that way the first time. So, I would start right here. Now again, I wanna make the point that what I just did does not affect the actual file. It only affects it in the program. So, once I've made this and I play it, and I find out where my-- And you're playing by pushing the space bar-- Yes. Anytime you're in the source window, you press space bar to start and stop, start and stop, correct? Actually, anytime I'm in any screen, space bar is play for anything. Okay. Yeah. So, what you saw there is a mistake. You see Kevin got up and we wanted to start over again. And so, I know that I don't want my clip to start there so I'll drag back to when he comes into the scene, cross his legs, I'll make an in point here, and I'm just gonna wait... I'm not really sure why I can't hear the audio 'cause I can't hear my computer. And let's say I want the out point to be there. I would click the out point there. So, you see this little blue highlight here? The blue highlight is what's selected. So, when I drag it from, basically, I would hold my mouse down and drag it from here to the timeline, that's what comes. Okay, let me do that again. If I drag it here, and bring it down to the timeline, just my in and out point, what's in between my in and out point, that's what's gonna come down in the timeline. Same thing will happen if I drag it from the Media Browser, or from the bin. Once I've made my in and out point, that's what will come no matter where I drag the clip from. Is there a way to tell in the Media Browser that you've actually already selected an in and out point? There's a way because it changed the thumbnail and of course, once you've clicked the clip, you can see the thing highlighted in yellow. Right there, yeah. Yeah, well now go to your other clip right there, and you see that, click it. You see there's a little yellow speck there? Yes. That's your in and out points, so that's what's selected. So right here in your bin, you can see what's selected by the little-- Why don't you click on that just a little bit just to show how it changes. Oh, okay, I see what you're saying. So, if I go here... Which one do I have selected here? I don't know what's going on. Well, hypothetically speaking, it would work. Oh, there it is, there it is, okay. So, I'm on the wrong clip. So, if I were to click that, yes, so as I make the in point and out point, it extends into the bin, so you can always see what your in and out point is right there. I'm not sure why I can't hear audio. That's kind of key. So, this is probably the most common thing you're gonna do in editing, is bring clips up to the source screen, put in and out points in, and drag them onto the timeline. And it's actually as simple as that, editing. A lot of people think it's like super complicated. The actual... Physical task of editing is very, very simple. It's the idea and the process and the idea of building something from nothing that complicates things. So, an in and out point is a way of just partially selecting some of what you recorded to then end up on the timeline and ignoring the rest of that clip. Yes. It would be similar to cutting film? So that you only got a portion of something? Yes. But without destroying the original file so you can always go back and reference it. Cutting film would actually be destroying it. Right. Yeah, as oppose to this where it doesn't. Okay. Okay, so, now, let me get into the audio a little bit because we recorded external audio yesterday. So, we have onboard audio for this thing and I know it's existing because I see my mixer peaking right here. So let's go to the audio here. Audio is the same idea as video. You put in and out points in the audio and you can cut the audio. Audio, same idea, and actually, this is so very, happy accident that's happening here. Let's talking about lining up external audio. I'm gonna show you what PluralEyes does in a second, but for those of you who don't wanna get PluralEyes or in a situation, PluralEyes is not always the answer. And in this situation, it actually wouldn't be ideal. I wouldn't use it in this situation and the reason why I wouldn't use it in this situation is because it's dialog, and I would probably edit the film and then line up the audio. But if you're doing an event or something like that, if you're doing an event and you have, let's say you plug the zoom into a mixer and you have a seven-hour audio clip, and then you have 500 clips from all over the place. Obviously, you're not gonna line up all 500 clips manually, that's the time to use PluralEyes so that you let them do that. Wow, what are you doing here? So, that would be the time to do that. Now, for this situation, of course, a dialog scene, you can do it, but then you're editing off a different timeline. So, are we-- Try that, sir. (speaker loudly swooshes) Hello! Yay! IT guy, I'm just the artist, he's the mechanic. Actually, it's you guys back there, you guys get all the credit. I don't get anything. You get some of it. Sheesh. You get 1/4 credit. Alright, so if I wanna drag, let's say, okay, so one way you can do this manually without having to use PluralEyes, let's go to the video for a second and pick... Okay, this was nothing. (speaker loudly rumbles) And this was the first take. (speakers softly swooshing) Sorry I'm 47 seconds late, traffic. Is that a cell phone? No, no, it's a heart rate monitor. Traffic? I thought you only traveled by boat. Okay. Can I just point out here, can you hear the echo in the room from that footage? That was coming off of the road video mic which gave us a cleaner audio signal than if we would not have had that, but still, what is it doing? It's recording the sound as it's bouncing off the walls in the room, you can clearly hear that echo. Actually, what's really cool is you hear that echo and here is when we're close. [Woman From Video] Is there a point to this meeting? I'm glad you asked, because-- It's a lot better when you get closer so you can see how that works, but this is by-- But you still that-- Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah. That hollow-sounding echo off the room. But the point is that the boom mic obviously will be a lot better. No, it's a heart rate monitor. Traffic? I thought you only traveled by boat. Alright, so that's where my out point's gonna be. I'm gonna drag this clip down on the timeline here. Now, here's what you need to learn. And before you purchase a copy of PluralEyes, do this anyway because this is gonna get you good at reading audio waves which is really important for pacing the film. I'm gonna expand this audio track, see this arrow here? And I'm gonna see the wave, now I can see where the peaks are. Here's one thing, what I was trying to explain with all this is you can read audio waves, so you can see how I can see this audio wave in the source screen. I can make in and out points here and actually bring my audio down and the whole idea of this is so I can learn to read a wave and I can see where the wave matches up. In theory, if we had the right audio clip, you could match this up without actually hearing it. So, that was sort of what I was going for there. What I wanna show you how to do, and this might solve our audio problem-- It's working on my computer, so the clip's fine. No, I know that. What I wanna do with this audio clip here is I'm gonna clear the in and out points of my, I'm gonna make new in and out points here, okay, and I'm gonna show you how PluralEyes works. And this sort of eliminates the need for lining up audio in most situations. So, it's very simple. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my bin here, I'm gonna drag all my video on the timeline, I'm gonna take the whole folder. And the whole folder drags all the video, one after the other, all the way down in the timeline. Then I'm gonna drag the audio and I'm gonna drag it right here underneath. Onto an audio track. I'm going to right-click the track here, I'm gonna delete tracks, I'm gonna delete all the empty tracks here. So, when I go to video tracks, I'll say delete tracks, delete audio tracks, and I just have audio, all empty tracks, all empty tracks, and it gets rid of all the empty tracks. So now, I just have clips of, I just have tracks where audio and video are on. Can you just explain, you have two audio tracks there and one video track, but you only dragged audio onto one of those tracks. So, how did that happen? That happened because the audio that's attached to the video is its own audio track as well. So, you would have two audio tracks and one video track, and you want all your video on one track, and all of your external audio on one track, and then all of the audio that's attached to the video on one track. And then very simple, you just go to File, Export, Final Cut Pro XML, this requires you to save it, yes, I would like to save it, and I'm going to go into my project, and I'm going to save it. Now, very quickly, now I'm gonna go to my Launchpad here and I'm gonna launch PluralEyes. This is PluralEyes 2. This is an external program that works independent of Premiere. So, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to Open, I'm gonna go and I'm gonna find where I made that project, which is Action Man_CL_.xml. I'm gonna open it and when I open it, you can see, if I had 100 sequences in here, I'd be able to hit this dropdown box and actually select which sequence I wanna line up, and it's very important to understand you only line up one sequence at a time. I'm gonna click that, I'm gonna turn off Level Audio 'cause I don't want it to change my audio, I'm gonna Enable Multiprocessing so that it uses more of my computer's power. I'm not gonna click anything else here. There's a Try Really Hard button, I think that's just meant to be cute, I don't know, I'm sure it actually takes more time to actually line up the audio itself, 'cause sometimes, there is errors and things and usually if there's an error, it's your fault. You had a clip that wasn't compatible with PluralEyes or something happened. And here's what I'm gonna do, here's the magic, did you have something to say before? Yeah, I was just gonna say you can get PluralEyes, it's a $150 program for version 2.0, it's $199 for version 3.0, go to PluralEyes.com, it'll redirect you to RedGiantSoftware.com. They purchased PluralEyes a few months ago, merged with them. So, when you decide to invest in this program, the first time you use it, it'll pay for itself, just in the amount of time it'll take you, and as we discussed with our Skype and our Expedia events that we did that had three days worth of audio, we must have had 24 hours worth of audio. Yeah, weddings, anything event wise, it's a necessity in my opinion. Yeah, so it's totally worth it. It can handle big projects, it can handle smaller projects, and it pays for itself. And here's what it does. See this button right here that says, Sync? Boom, and it's just gonna do its thing in the background. And when it's done, it'll make a copy of the file I just made and I'm gonna import that into here and it'll be this exact timeline that I make and all the audio will be lined up, automatically. And can you have multiple in and out points within the same clip? No. Okay. There you have it, everyone. There you go. (laughing) That was the shortest answer we had yet. You can make in and out points, drag it on the timeline, and then go and make new in and out points and drag it onto the timeline. So, you could take multiple in and out points from the clip, but you can't have, like, this section and this section and have it sit in the program like that. So, in other words, if you have your clip up in your source bin, in the source area where you're seeing it, you can't make an in and out point in one section of that, an in and out point in another section of that all at the same time and then drag both sections simultaneously. You can create the first set of in and out points, drag that on, and then create your next set of in and out points, and then drag that on. You can do that as many times as you need to. But it's always one set of in and out points at a time. Is that clear to you? If it's clear to you, it's probably clear to them. That's great, that's great. Got it. So, You There asks, can PluralEyes handle more than two audio tracks per sequence? Yeah, it can handle as many as you wanna give it. You gotta be careful with... Like if you have multiple cameras, let's say we shot an event and we had six cameras pointing at the same thing, you need Camera 1 on one track, Camera 2 on one track, Camera 3 on one track, Camera 4 on one track, Camera 5 on one track, Camera 6 on another track, and then the audio. Okay. So, it can handle as many tracks as you want, but if you don't have them separated correctly, it'll fail, it'll have an error. And like I said, if there's an error in this, usually, you can go back into your sequence and find out that you did something incorrect. There are some times that won't line up certain clips and you know, you go to find out that maybe it was recorded too low, or some sort of error, human error. Okay. And then from Denver, we have, "Can Premiere work with AVCHD format?" Yes. Thank you. They can work with any. Yeah. There's some other questions about codec. Michael, Michael Jordan, says, "Is codec similar to the RAW file in photography "but more like a JPG since it is "how the files are compressed?" Can you repeat the question? "Is codec similar to the RAW file in photography "but more like a JPG since it's "how the files are compressed?" Yeah, it would be more like a JPG than it would be a RAW file. The only thing raw about video is if it's uncompressed, or as we like to call, as little compressed as possible would be 4K. So, we're not gonna really be working with uncompressed video, pretty much ever, until 4K becomes the standard. So, an H264 file is essentially 24 medium JPGs a second. Is that Michael Jordan in Arizona, by any chance? I don't know, let us know, Michael Jordan. It probably is, let him say hi to you 'cause he was in our Italy Master Class in September. Oh, cool, very cool. Ciao, then. "When they finish a project, what do they archive," they, as in you, "source or rendered?" Sourced, because the render files are temporary, you can never replace the source files, you archive the source files, because temporary, of course, they're temporary, you can always recreate them. I have a question from Never Give Up. "When you upload files to the computer, "do you move individual files "or the entire folder for SD or CF card? "In another class I saw elsewhere, "the teacher said to grab the entire folder." Oh, great question, and I didn't do this. So, when you're going to, can I take that? No, I can't? We'll do it in the next session. When you plug a card into your computer and it's got a folder of video files, the first thing you do is, where those video files are stored, change the name of that folder. And it's very important because if you don't change the name of that folder, and you put that card back into your camera and you can actually play back the video, and what you wanna see when you press Play on your camera with the card is No Image, and if you change the name of the folder, it'll say, No Image and that tells you, "I downloaded this." So, yes, you change the name of the folder and then you drag the whole folder where you wanna go, not individual clips. So, what he just said is really important as a workflow issue, it's a way of double checking yourself to know that you downloaded the card 'cause we're all human, and of course, we've come up with this process because we've made some mistakes a time or two. So, if you go in and change that DCIM folder to any name you wanna name it, when you put the card back in the camera, the camera's looking for images in the DCIM folder and if it doesn't see it, it's gonna tell you, "No Image." That tells you, "I've already downloaded it," 'cause you know you manually renamed that. If you see the images, then that tells you, "Hang on, I haven't touched his yet." I just had a question about archiving footage. I've heard that it's preferable for you to continue to move your footage from hard drives over time. When you archive, do you just leave it on a hard drive, or do you try and... Investigate, just for like-- The first rule of thumb is, and everybody, this better make the quote list today, if your footage doesn't exist in two places, it doesn't exist. So, if you have it on one hard drive, on one hard drive only, and you don't have it on a second backup hard drive somewhere, then you might as well pretend it doesn't exist at all because that hard drive will fail. It's kind of like we all get old and die and we know that. Hard drives all get old and they all die. And so, you need to know that, and just like with our own lives, we can't predict when that's gonna happen, we can't predict it with a hard drive's life either. So, if you're gonna archive footage on a hard drive, secondary hard drive, this is your second copy, and this is the hard drive you use solely for archive purposes, which means the only time it spins up is when you occasionally plug it in to add some more archive things to it, it's got a pretty long life. I mean, hard drives die because they get used a lot. So, the answer is no, you don't have to keep moving it from hard drive to hard drive to hard drive. Your primary source, more likely than not, you'll end up over the course of time needing to expand that space anyway, as you know, we would get one-terabyte, then two-terabyte, then three-terabyte, then four-terabyte drives, that will be probably a natural evolution in your computer system anyway. Keeping it on the backup, as long as that backup's never used, you're gonna be fine. One more? Couple more. Couple more, okay? Bruce Serl said, "You just said we should shoot "in 24 frames per second, my understanding is "that YouTube will accept 24 frames per second, "or 30 frames per second, but that it only displays 30 FPS, "and so will upconvert all 24 FPS video "to 30 FPS anyway, and that's at six frames per second "by doubling every few frames." Yes, he is correct, think of it this way. TV is displaying at 29.97, 30, as he calls it, and they don't shoot all the high-end TV shows in 29 frames a second, they shoot it in a film look, 24 frames per second, and you watch television all the time, and you don't see any sort of mistakes with that. It's a look, so just because it's upconverting it to be compatible with their system doesn't mean it's sort of changing the feel of it. So, stick with the film look and just whatever it's upconverting it, let it convert. Unless your client specifically says, "This is a television commercial, "and we want it shot this way," I would stick with 24 frames a second. Alright, we have a question from Vinny, Vincent, Ventura, California, "You talked about setting up your project "in the majority of what you shoot in, "and so, what's the best way to conform 720, "60 frames-per-second footage, "and stretching to the aspect ratio to 1080?" You're not stretching the aspect ratio to 1080, you're just gonna scale the image, and I'll get into what scaling is. But when you get into the scaling, you're gonna scale it to 150, and I will get, when I get to actually scaling some stuff, I will show him that-- Okay, great. The 720 will come in a box, and it'll be letterbox, so you'll see black on top, black on the bottom, and black on the sides, and you just scale that to 150 and it'll fill up full frame, and the resolution of these cameras hold up to the scale. So, that should be fine. Let's see here, Starting Video says, "Do they use any specific clouds for storage? "Or do you just use physical hard drives for storage "and put them in a safe or something?" We use servers, Jeff sets up servers between the offices and the houses and we store, my role is sort of, we wanna put the RAW files on a hard drive somewhere, but I always make a master exported file of every project, and store it in a portfolio folder, so I always have the master file of something, meaning it's an uncompressed from what I shot it, it's exactly the same codec and I haven't compressed it at all. So, for example, this project that we're doing here, what I'm going to export for our YouTube or a DVD is gonna be different than the uncompressed file. So, with the uncompressed file, why that's so useful is you can go back and compress that to be whatever you need it for, YouTube, Vimeo. So, actually, the first thing I do every time I make a project is I make an uncompressed file and then I actually compress that file specifically for any of the other outlets I want. We have pretty sophisticated setup since I used to be an IT manager at Invesco, so that was my former life. We actually have 100-megabit connection between the office and my house and I have server set up at my house and we sync everything everyday. But, if I didn't have that set up, I would definitely have a secondary hard drive, I wouldn't put it in a safe, I would take it to a friend's house and I'd be like, "Let me claim this section "of your closet for my hard drives," and I'd put my backup someplace offsite so that if there's a fire, you still have what you need. There's a question from Baldy Mick and you may have just answered that, but he'd just said, "How often does Ross save his project?" So, I don't know if that's while editing. Every five minutes. Every five minutes. Because it does it automatically. Oh, there you go. I have Premiere set to save every five minutes. Great. That may be my paranoid mindset, 10 minutes, 15 minutes isn't a terrible, save every five minutes, but I've had situations, you know, I can get a lot done in 15 minutes and if something happens to my computer or the power goes out, or something, then I'll be glad I saved it every five minutes. So, we just have a few minutes more before break. Is there anything for right now? We can take a couple questions, I wanna say that PluralEyes is done. Okay. And is successful if you guys wanna see how this works. Basically, this is what you make. This is what PluralEyes made for me, this is my sequence with all the audio magically lined up here and how you can tell is I'm gonna play this out loud and there will be no more echo. Well, she wanted to learn about Photoshop, right? So, she goes to the coffee shop and the coffee cup shop but. (man on screen softly mumbles) Well, she wanted to learn about Photoshop, so she goes to the coffee shop, the coffee shop guy shows her all about how to streamline her workflow and then-- So, all the audio's lined up here. Now, if I wanted to just hear what our external mic sounded like here, I will... Press Alt. So, what I just did is I'm holding down the Alt key, I guess that would work on PC, Alt, and if I-- Right-click. Yeah, if I hold down the Alt key and click it, it just automatically separates the audio from the video 'cause as you see here, if I move the audio and video, they're connected, so I don't want that. I just wanted to get rid of the audio, not the video, and then I play it. Well, she wanted to learn about PhotoShop, right? So, you can see. She goes to the coffee shop and the coffee cup chop but-- You can see that our audio is very low. There's two reasons for that. Number one, we recorded a little low. Number two, it's only coming out of one channel. So, here's what you have to do to fix that. It's not even a fix it's just the way when you're recording in the Zoom H4. So, I'm gonna go over to my Effects bin, I'm gonna do this again, I just wanna do this so I can show you the difference between the microphones. I'm gonna go to Audio Effects and I'm gonna go to Fill Right. Actually, I'm gonna go to Fill Left, I'm sorry, I apologize, I don't know my right from left. I'm not sure why it's not going down there. Excuse me, I have to fix something here. I'm not sure why it's not going. I'm gonna fix this in a second, hold on. So, before I try to finish this She wanted to learn about Ph-- Here's the first thing you can do. First, I gotta turn up the audio. There's two ways I can do that. This yellow line, if I put my mouse on the yellow line, you can see the levels come up. I can just hold down my mouse and bring up the levels there. Photoshop, so she goes to the coffee shop. The coffee shop guy shows her all about how to-- Oh, you recorded it in Stereo, apparently, you did. Streamlined her workflow and then the daywalker shows her about layers and then she goes to the geek and he sh-- You see how the audio got louder? Here's another way to do that. And in my opinion, it's the better way, here's why. Look at the wave, okay? When I jacked up the audio, what I did is I jacked up the whole wave. So, that's his voice and the background noise. A cool thing Premiere put in for us, we can right-click the clip, go to Audio Gain, and what this does, what's different is this is gonna try to turn the loudest sounds up, the peaks of the wave, which is his dialog. So let's say I just type in five. Watch the wave, see how it got bigger? That didn't happen when we turned the wave up and I actually turned it up six decibels the first time. This one, I only turned up five. And listen to how much cleaner it sounds. Coffee shop guys shows her all about how to streamline her workflow and then the daywalker shows her about layers and the she goes to the geek, and he shows her how to fix things and then, "Tony, oh, Tony," shows her how to add the art. And you can see everything is hovering between negative 12 and zero right exactly where we want it. So, our audio was recorded pretty perfect, but we just made that little adjustment and we're A-OK.