Editing with Adobe Premiere

When you first start Premiere, you have a choice between selecting an A/B editing workspace and a single track editing workspace. A/B is recommended for beginners, but there is no reason why you should not go the professional way. You can always start another project in A/B editing, though switching between them in the middle of a project is not recommended.

In Premiere, you collect source material into the project window and arrange them into bins. The two video windows are combined in the monitor window, and are called source and program. The sequence is in the timeline window and effects and transitions are in separate pallets on the right side. Needless to say, you can reorder them.

Premiere lets you bring in video and audio directly from a DV camera. 

Right clicking on a bin will fetch a menu from which you can import source material. You can import video in most formats including avi, quicktime and mpeg. You can also import stills in a number of formats including tiff, jpeg and targa and bring in audio like mp3.

Select any item from a bin and drag it to the source monitor. It will start playing there. Once it has reached the point from where you want to insert it in the timeline, click on the in-point marker. You may need to stop the video and you also have frame-by-frame control over the clip. Once you have marked the in-point, play the video forward till you reach the point where you want to end the particular clip, and click on the outpoint marker. Now click on "lift" to send the clip to the timeline. 

If you have shot different clips in one video tape and want to sequence them (may be in a different order) you have to import the entire video and then cut it into smaller clips that can be reordered along the time line. You do the cutting using the razor tool (last one on the first line of tools on the tool bar).

1. Project Window, where source material is collected. 2. Source video monitor. You can play source material and select in and out points. 3. Program monitor. Displays video from the timeline at the current point. 4. Fine-tune effects from here 5. Information on the currently selected item in the timeline 6. Video and audio transitions 7. Timeline. Change the scale by clicking on the lower left corner. 8. In-point marker. When source material is playing , click this to select the point from where video is to be included in the timeline 9. Outpoint marker. Clicking on this selects the last point in the timeline for the clip 10. Lift. Clicking on this sends the marked clip to the timeline. 11.  One video line. You can put multiple clips here or into multiple such lines. 12. Audio and video in different colors indicate they are not linked. 13. A transition 14.  Volume adjustment line (called rubber band) 15. Video opacity adjustment (only for video 2 and above) 16. Tool bar

Video has accompanying audio such that when you move a clip to the timeline, the accompanying audio moves to a corresponding audio track.If you want a different sound track, first unlink the audio from the video. Do this by selecting the clip in the timeline and right clicking on it. In the menu that pops up, select unlink audio and video. The unlinked audio and video appear in different colors and you can delete either video or audio while retaining the other.

If you click on the small right pointing arrows placed to the left of the names video 1, audio 1, etc. on the time line, adjustment options for tracks in question open up. You can adjust volume levels, panning of audio tracks and opacity of all video tracks barring track 1. Transitions (applicable to only track 1) can be dragged from the transition palette on to video track at the joining point of two clips. You can adjust duration of clips or of transitions in the timeline by selecting the selection tool (first tool on the tool bar) and dragging edges of the clip from either end. You can get frame level accuracy by setting the timeline scale to one frame.

You can add scrolling or non-scrolling titles at any point in the video. Go to project window, look for the row of icons at the bottom and click on the third icon from the left. The create dialogue will open here. Select Title and a drawing window will pop up where you can create the Title and give it scrolling effects. Once you save the title, it automatically becomes available in the project.

You are ready to output the sequence once it’s complete. Premiere 6.0 gives you several output options, including to tape, Quicktime, Windows Media, RealMedia AVI and various other streaming options. To output work, go to file and select Export timeline. Here you get many options to which to export to. (Export to mpeg is not supported and you’ll have to buy third- party tools to do so). Select the export mode, click on settings to fine tune output and click on save to output your work. Some options may require more settings or the use of a Wizard.

Krishna Kumar