Cut Faster in Premiere Pro with Purposeful Trims (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: When you're working in Adobe Premiere, I think one of the keys to editing efficiently and quickly is to know as many different ways to make a cut as possible, and to understand why those cutting techniques work the way they do. I'm Nick, and I'm going to show you how to cut in Premiere quickly and with purpose. The editing tools in Premiere, and in most video editing applications, are based on the analogy of editing film. Of course, with 24 or 30 frames per second, one single shot would be much longer than this piece of film. But let's imagine this short piece of film is one shot. And whether it's film or video, we always have some material at the beginning and at the end of a clip that we don't want to use. And that gives us a chance to cut a clip down to exactly the part of the clip that we do want to use, and then of course add it to a sequence along with other clips. But when we make those cuts in Adobe Premiere, those cuts are non-destructive, which means all of these little bits that we cut away can be put back at any time as if you had never made the cut. In Premiere, I have my source clips in the project panel, we'll build the sequence in the timeline, and we'll see video playback in the program and source monitors. I have several clips in my project, I'm going to drag one to the new item button, which creates a new sequence starting with that clip. For my first cut, I'm going to drag this line. This is called the playhead, and I'm going to drag it to where I want this clip to end. I want to remove everything after the playhead. You can choose the razor tool from the tool panel, and then you can click anywhere on your clip. But if you've already placed your playhead at exactly the right spot, and if the snap option is enabled, you can just click directly on the playhead to make the cut right there. Then you can go back to the arrow tool or the selection tool, and you can click on individual pieces to select them individually. So I can select the piece that I've cut off that I don't want, and I can hit the delete key to remove it. To continue building a sequence, you can drag more clips onto the timeline. When you see the white triangle on the edge of a clip, that means you're looking at the full original clip, and it has not been trimmed. So I might use the blade tool to cut from the beginning and from the end of this clip, then go back to the selection tool and select the pieces that I don't want and delete them. To join two clips in a continuous sequence, you can just move one right after the other, and it helps if the snap feature is enabled. With that on, clips will just snap together when you move one close to another. And now that we've seen how that works, we can get into faster techniques. Here's something that you can't do with a real piece of film. What if you could just fold over a piece of film like this, and imagine that everything that we folded over is gone, trimmed away. But by pushing or pulling that tail, we can get it right to the cut point that we want. You can't really do that with film, but you can do that in Premiere using a selection trim. Make sure the selection tool or the arrow is selected, and place your mouse cursor at the end of a clip, and it will change to this red trim tool. Or if you have multiple clips joined next to each other, make sure the arrow is pointing at the clip that you want to trim. Then you can hold your mouse button down and drag the edge of that clip to where you want it to be, which trims away everything else. And that was a much faster way to change the start point and end point of the clip. But literally every cut you make in Premiere is non-destructive, which means you can always bring back the material you removed. Looking at our imaginary piece of film, there's this section that we folded away, but you can push or pull on the tail to bring back some material, or remove more material. This part that we folded back is called a handle, and we can always restore material from the handles at any time. In our Premiere sequence, of course the trim will stop when you hit the edge of another clip, or if you reach the full limit of the original source clip, the end of the handles. But with the selection trim, you can very quickly, very easily trim the start and the end of a clip. The new start point is called the in point, and the new ending point is called the out point. And even parts of clips that you've edited before using a blade cut can be brought back using the selection trim. And of course you can move clips close together to close the gap for a continuous sequence. Next, before we get into other cutting techniques, it's going to make things much easier if you can trim a clip down before you even put it into the sequence. And with film, you might use a blade or a splicing block, but we'll just do this quickly. Trim the beginning, then trim the end, and you can do that separately without disturbing the rest of the sequence. Then when you're ready, you can add that trimmed clip to the timeline with your other clips. In Premiere, to trim a clip before you put it into the sequence, you can double click on a source clip in the project panel, and that opens that clip in the source monitor. And we're going to trim this clip by setting in points and out points right here. Of course you should take the time to play the clip, or move the small playhead here to exactly the point where you want the clip to start, and you can even use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to get it exactly at the perfect frame. And when the playhead is exactly where you want the clip to start, you can click the button to mark the end point, or more easily you can tap the letter I on your keyboard to mark the end point. Then move the playhead to where you want the clip to end, and click the button, or tap the O key to mark the out point. Marking where you want the clip to start and end is like cutting the beginning or ending of a film clip with a blade. But there's more versatility here, because you can move the playhead and mark a different end point or out point until you're sure. You can even move your mouse cursor to the end point or the out point until you see that red trim tool, then you can actually drag the inner out point just like in the timeline. And once you have the trimmed clip, we can see different ways to add that clip to the sequence. The easiest option is probably to just place your mouse cursor over the playback screen and drag it to the timeline. You could drag it over another clip on the sequence to replace it, or just add it to the end of the sequence. Or if you prefer, you can drag the video icon to drag just the video track, or you can drag the audio icon to just drag the audio track. But let's delete those and reset. Of course you can drag a clip anywhere on the timeline, but let's look at some ways to do this more precisely. Let's see an insert and an overwrite edit. An overwrite edit lets you put a clip directly over an existing clip, which overwrites the original and replaces it with the new clip. Notice how the original clip in this sequence is longer than the clip I'm bringing in. If we do an overwrite edit, the new clip is going to replace just a portion of the original clip. Back in Premiere, just so this will be easier to see, I'll right-click on this clip, and I'm going to label it as yellow. And I'll right-click on this clip, and I'll label this one as red. This is not required for the edit, it just helps us see what's about to happen. What we're going to do is called a three-point edit. A three-point edit is based on the concept of a four-point edit, where you set the in-point and out-point on your source clip, then set the in-point and out-point on the timeline. The idea being that the in-points and the out-points on the source will match exactly with the in-points and the out-points on the timeline. But nobody ever does a four-point edit because getting the exact same length between the in-points and out-points in the source clip and the timeline is just far too tedious. So instead, we do a three-point edit. First, to reset, you can right-click above the timeline in this ruler area, and there's an option to clear the in and out-points. Then set the in-point and the out-point on the source clip as normal. Then in the timeline, decide which is more important, where you want the clip to start or where you want the clip to end. Move your playhead until you get to that spot, then hit I on your keyboard if you want to set the in-point or start point for the clip, or hit the O key on the keyboard for the out-point if that's where you want the clip to end. Or if you don't set either, it will just use the playhead's location as the in-point. So if you just set the in-point in the sequence, that's a total of three points. The overwrite button in the source monitor will perform the edit. When that happens, this source clip will be added to the timeline, lining up the in-point from the source clip with the in-point in the timeline. The clip we just edited in is the blue clip, and because we did an overwrite edit, it wrote over part of the yellow clip. We tend to do an overwrite edit when you already have clips with a specific rhythm or timing and you don't want them to move, but you do need to drop in a new clip somewhere in the middle and you don't mind replacing a few seconds of what was there. Let's undo that, and instead we'll see an insert edit. We do not need to set three points for an insert edit. Just set the in-point and the out-point on the source clip so you've got the trim clip that you want to add to the timeline. And if you do have an in-point or out-point set in the timeline, just right-click in the ruler area at the top of the timeline and clear the in and out points. Then just place the playhead where you want the new clip to be inserted, and click the insert button in the source monitor. In this case, it inserted the clip where the playhead was, but it did not overwrite anything. It split the yellow clip and moved everything down in the timeline to make room for the new clip. Okay, now let's shift a little bit and talk about edits you can make when you already have clips in the timeline. Looking at some imaginary film clips, I want the first clip to be a bit longer. But if that clip gets longer, what happens to the other clips after it on the timeline? Well, one option is that we can have the next clip and everything after it move down the timeline to make room as we extend the first clip. This is known as a ripple edit. In the tool panel in Premiere, you can click and hold on a button to see more options, and we want to choose the ripple edit tool. When I get close to an edit point, my mouse cursor changes to a yellow trim icon, and the direction of this arrow is important. I want to trim the blue clip, so I need to make sure that the arrow is pointing at the blue clip. Then, I can drag just like using the selection trim tool, and as I do that, everything after that clip moves down the timeline to make space. That's a ripple edit. And you can use a ripple edit to make a clip longer or shorter. And there's also a way to do a ripple edit very quickly with a keyboard shortcut. I'm going to place my playhead here, just before this edit point. You can do a ripple edit to the next edit point, which basically sets the out point of this clip where the playhead is. From the playhead to the next edit point will be removed using a ripple edit, which means that everything after this point on the timeline will move back to take that space. You can do all this with a keyboard shortcut, and it will happen very quickly when I hit the W key. You can also do a ripple trim to the previous edit point. We can place the playhead after the edit point you're interested in, and a ripple trim to previous edit will set the end point of a clip to where the playhead is, and remove material from that point back to the previous edit, rippling everything else back to close the gap. This happens very quickly when we tap the letter Q. These types of edits can be done incredibly fast, but they can be a little challenging to understand. I think your best option is to get some sample clips in the timeline and test the ripple trim to previous and ripple trim to next edits. Okay, so that's the ripple edit, but the ripple edit pairs with another tool called the rolling edit. What if I need to make the first clip longer, but I also absolutely need every other clip to stay in place on the timeline? Maybe I've edited to music or to a certain timing, and I cannot let my clips move from where they are. Then the only way to make clip 1 longer is to make clip 2 shorter. As we adjust the end of clip 1, we want it to automatically make the related adjustment to the start of clip 2. This is a rolling edit. In Premiere, we can choose the rolling edit tool, then move to the edit point, and the arrow points at both clips because both clips will be trimmed. One will be trimmed to be longer, while the other is trimmed to be shorter. If we hit the maximum length from the source clip, where there are no more handles that were trimmed away, that's as far as we can go. And it also helps to look at the playback monitor. As we make changes, we can see both the ending of clip 1 and the beginning of clip 2 changing as we go. Okay, let's see one last pair of tools, the slip and slide edits. A slide edit lets you grab a clip anywhere in a sequence and simply move it left or right. The clip you're moving does not change length. Its start and end doesn't change. It just moves left or right, while the clips around it do rolling edits to fill the gaps. In Premiere, we can choose the slide tool from the tools panel, then simply drag a clip left or right. As that clip moves, the clips before it and after it get longer or shorter to adjust. And finally, the slip edit is one of my favorites. To visualize a slip edit, I've cut a hole in a piece of paper, and I'm going to thread this clip through that hole. So we still have an in point and an out point where the clip starts and ends. Underneath the paper, I can move the source clip left and right. And if this clip is in a sequence surrounded by other clips, we can do the slip edit without disturbing the other clips. The slip edit changes which portion of the source clip we see without moving the other clips. The length of the clip that we're using stays exactly the same. If we were using 7 seconds of this clip, we're still using 7 seconds, but a different 7 seconds. So how do we do that in Premiere? Well, we just select the slip tool from the tools panel, then drag the clip left or right. In the program monitor, you see a representation of the clips before and after. And we can see the beginning and ending of our trimmed clip as we drag. the clip left and right until you have exactly the section of the clip you want. So using slip and slide, we're able to place exactly the clip we want, exactly where we want in the sequence. Have we covered every way to edit clips in a sequence in Premiere? Well, certainly not. But this is a solid foundation. Most people start with the blade and the trim edits because they're easy to understand. And if you're just starting with Premiere, those should probably be your first editing tools. If you want to edit fast, I do encourage you to learn the other techniques we've seen and combine techniques. Some of these take some practice to master, but once you understand them, they can help you become a much faster, more efficient editor. I encourage you to use this video as a reference. Try to put each of these techniques into practice and come back here if you need to remind yourself of how each of them work. To keep learning and for more videos like this, be sure to subscribe to this channel.