Hello and welcome back to our filmmakingcentral.com for Premier Pro CS4 video tutorials. I’m Dave Basulto.
Once again we are in Premier Pro and today we’re going to import some footage and create our first sequence. Without our sequence down here we have nothing to render or make video for the web or send it over to after effects or do anything, un-core DVD, we can’t do anything without our sequence so this is what we’re going to create, what our masterpiece is going to look like.
We are also going to add a couple of transitions and take a look at some video effects although we will be getting deeper into that on another lesson. So first we need some footage. So what I tend to do is just highlight my footage folder and on my mouse or my pen from Wacom I right click and I choose import.
I can also do Command-I on the Mac and I believe Control-I on the PC and it will find your folder and choose import there as well. And of course, you can always go to the top and choose file import on the top bar menu. Well, I got this little import failure but when I see at the end here what the file is, it’s a .DS_Store, it’s some art beats footage file that comes with it when you have the whole collection. It has nothing to do with what I’m doing. It will not affect me in any way so I’m just going to click OK.
So now, I’ve clicked down. I can see that I have all my footage there and actually let’s drag this down a little bit and there it is. All my art beats golf footage and up here I can press Play and there I can see a little thumbnail about what’s going on. I can click and hold and drag and there it is my preview area and I can see it there. Also, I’ve only get it into my preview area. All I have to do and I will close this out is double click on it. My Wacom pen is highly, highly ready to go now although it’s a bit tough one.
I can double click and it goes in right in there. Now let’s say you have a bunch of footage in here that you brought in and you want to get it out of here you can always go close for this specific one or close all to close them out. And there will be a list right here and below and in fact let’s add a couple more. Now, you can see I have a list of all the source material. So I can easily switch in between the two whatever I want.
And like I said I can just click close all and it will take them all out of there. That’s really handy if you’re doing that, I can do sequence or just moving on to different types of stuffs and boarding the projects and you don’t want always clips you want to start fresh. It’s very handy.
So once we have that in here, so we have some footage and this is just little panning shot of the green and what I might want to do is maybe just go from about right here and now talked about in and out points really quick. Let’s say that here’s our footage and we want to just capture from here. Well, we could bring it, I will extend this a little bit. Okay, we could bring it down into our timeline, just drag it in and then let’s say we wanted to just move it a little bit here, trimming it and all I’m doing is holding down on the key on the mouth button and just dragging.
You see this little E with a line through it that means you can cut, which way you're going to cut depending on which way E the is. I will go over here, the E is backwards right. So I could just do something like this and I say okay, I like it right about there and then I could just drag it over and everything is fine and handy.
I don’t like to work like that of course and most editors don’t either they use and out points. So an in point, let’s say we want to start right here where I can see this car coming in and all I do is either come right here and press that to set my in point. I’m trying to get out of this so you can see how other ways I can do it. I can right click. I’m just going to click right out of here. I’m going to right click in this area. It will tell me to go to the set in and out point or clear it so I’m going to clear it for a second.
Let’s me see we have nothing there. Now what I do is just use I and O and I’m going to highlight over this. You’ll see set in-point I, set out-point O, very simple to remember in and out. So I’ve press-I and then I scroll down a little bit and maybe that’s all I want right there. So I will press the O. So now I’ve just got this amount of footage that’s going to come down in here and then I can certainly just click insert and there it is and this button right here is insert.
And what insert will do by the way is wherever your current time indicator is and that’s this line with the blue right here. It’s going to insert your footage so, if for example I say my current time indicator is right here and I press the insert. Now, you see it cut in between and put it inside of there. So if you want to do that, that’s great if you don’t and you want to have the footage at the end of the last clip, then you need to have the current time indicator there.
Of course, you could just always just click and drag the footage down to wherever you want. Let’s get out of that for a second. The other button down here that’s important is the overlay button. So if I’m over this area and I click overlay, it’s going to over lay it on top of the other footage it’s just not going to cut the footage out. It’s going to overlay it on top of the other one so which might work if you want to use some kind of transfer modes and we’ll first look at that later in more advanced session.
Okay, so we’ve got our first clip in here it’s just great and now we’re going to look for something else, let’s see. We need maybe this one. Let’s take a look at this one and I’m just going to drag it in here. And so we’ve got that and then we’re zooming now, we’re kind of establishing the golf course which is really fun, makes me want to go out and play golf.
And now, it’s a zoom shot, so now I’ve got two pieces of material in here and let’s say I want to keep them and keep them going. I just have to go to the end here. I have to play bar end and pick another pleasing material. Do you know the establishing shot or something like this? Really cute so now I just press this button and I’ve got some more footage at the end here.
So now I’ve got three clips in here and I’m really happy and I want to do show my client. So what I’m going to do is start adding some transitions because I just don’t want any hard cuts like that and then maybe down here is another hard cut. I want to do some kind of fun transition so I’m going to click down here in the effects panel which is four panels here media browser, info, effects panel and history.
We’re going to the effects panel and enter video transitions, I’m going to choose a dissolve and let me just make this a little wider. And so the first one I’m going to do is I’m going to use a cross-dissolve, I’m going to Click-Hold-Drag, bring it over here. I’ve got a little problem because it seems like it’s only on the right side and I will give you an example of what I mean.
If I go to the last clip down here, click and drag, it will split it. That’s easy to fix than the first one. Now I kind of think that’s an insufficient media this transition will contain repeated frames. I get this sometimes. It usually happens when there aren’t enough handles on each side of the video. So what handles do are allow you to grab and give you a little more room so that you can do transitions and different cuts and stuff.
I haven’t had any problems with this which is really great, so I click OK and here is my transition. If I just click and we look into play monitor you can see we cross this all right over. And although it says these repeated frames it must be very subtle because I certainly don’t see anything, very simple.
Now if you want to do some changes on the transition, if you double click on it, it will bring it up into your effects control panel here and let’s say maybe the first part it’s cutting it off and you want to make it a little longer or shorter. All you have to do is drag it or shorten it. You can also move it, so let’s say you want it not to cross dissolved until the very end which sometimes happens because maybe you’ll have some audio here that it’s getting faded out before the person is done talking and you want to keep them talking, so you might want to do something like that.
Highly configurable so you can do pretty much anything you like. So pretty simple to add footage to your timeline and to add transitions and next we’ll look at a little bit of key framing and zooming in and out and using the panel and I will show it to really quick. The effects control area, we’re going to take a look at this in the next video. Thank you for watching. This has been an introduction to Premier Pro CS4 here at filmmaking central. I’m Dave Basulto.
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