Efficient Footage Sifting and Selection Process for Video Editing (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: Hey, how's it going? Parker Wohlbeck here with fulltimefilmmaker.com and in this video, I'm gonna be showing you my process for sifting through footage and selecting what clips I wanna keep and what clips I want to throw out. Let's dive in. Now this process will vary depending on what type of video you're shooting and editing. If it's a wedding video, it's gonna be a different culling process or sifting process. When it's a commercial, hopefully you've pre-planned this a little and I have, I had a shot list. So I had specific shots and kind of a story built out beforehand. So the sifting process should go by quicker compared to capturing an event. You just have a bunch of random clips and then you have to kind of sort through all of them in post. So we have an hour of footage and we need to whittle it down to a two minute ad and a one minute ad. We'll make two versions of this. And there's a couple of ways you can do this sifting process. A lot of people like to work from the project bin over here, select one clip at a time, scroll through that individual clip, find your in and out points, hit I for in, O for out and then bring in one clip at a time into the timeline. I personally like to see it all laid out in the timeline and then just cut through each one as I go down the timeline. So my process would go like this. I'd zoom in nice and tight on this one clip. I'd hold down my mouse, grabbing my cursor to find my in points, which is gonna be about right there as the in points. Then I'd hit B for blade and then I'd push F as what I have set to ripple delete, which then deletes whatever was before that. Then I come to my out points, B for blade again, A for select tool, select the rest of that clip and hit F. And now I have only what I want left, which are the in and out points and everything else has been deleted. A slightly faster way to do that, find your in points and hit E for add edits and then F to delete, then scroll to your out points and then E again to add edits, click on the rest and F to delete. And one tip to note at this point, our playback is a little bit choppy and that's because we are using a 4K 10 bit log file from our Canon 1D X Mark III. It's got a super tough codec for Premiere to read. And so to improve playback, you can either create proxies, which I rarely do, but that's what a lot of people opt to do, or I come up here and toggle my resolution down. We're currently at half. If we go to fourth, that's going to improve it. So based on your computer speed and the codec you're using, you can always adjust your resolution playback. I usually edit in a half resolution. So we continue this process for the rest of our clips. Now I know from the footage I shot that I did four or five takes of this and my last take was probably my favorite. So we're going to go to the very last take, which is this guy. Get our in and out points. And I would delete the rest before that, assuming I like that as my best take. Moving down the line to our next shots. These were some pickup shots that I thought I might want, but I probably will end up using these. So we'll go ahead and delete this scene for now. We have it shot in case we want it. I'm going to hit delete. Don't think I will. Now we have our next scene that I shot several times as well, several takes. So we're going to go to what I thought was the best take, probably the last take. Get our end points. Delete everything before that. Go to our out points and delete the rest. Next shot, once again, we did several takes. So we'll go to our last take again. Find our in and out points. About right there before he comes into the frame. Just going to raise that up temporarily so I know where that's at. I want her to use the beginning of that clip and the end of it here when he finishes up. So we'll cut out the middle there. And then I'm going to fill it with a tighter shot that was shot before that. Have a few options here. So I'm just picking my favorite spots in some of these clips and deleting everything else. So this process is basically just throwing out footage that I know I'm not going to use, keeping the potential footage that I might use and the footage I'll definitely use. And basically just trying to whittle away at the unusable stuff. So we're only keeping all the usable footage on the timeline. So I'll just continue that process until I've cut through all of the clips. So there you have my sifting and selecting process for efficiently going through all of your footage. Hopefully that was helpful. Thanks for watching. Make sure to check out other Premiere Pro tutorials in this playlist. Link is in the description below.