Book Image

Mastering Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 HOTSHOT

Book Image

Mastering Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 HOTSHOT

Overview of this book

Adobe Premiere Pro has become synonymous with video editing, in the same way Photoshop has become a byword for image manipulation. To unlock the true potential of this powerful software you don't need you to take expensive training courses or spend hours trying to get your footage “just right”. Work through this practical guide and truly master Premiere Pro CS6 using real footage with engaging examples.Using the included source material (available via digital download), this book will help you discover a plethora of features and functionality hidden within Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 that can truly augment your skills and take your footage to the next level. By covering a diverse array of topics in a practical manner, you will gain a full understanding of how to approach pretty much any video editing project you want to tackle with Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.Starting off with an entry-level project to get both new and existing users up to speed, "Mastering Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 Hotshot" dives right into a series of engaging real-world projects that help you understand how you can harness Premiere Pro's full potential. With an explicit focus on practical real-world projects from concept to publication, this is the definitive guide for people who want to make the most out of this powerful software.As you progress through the book you'll encounter problems of poorly shot footage; news reporters who stumble over their dialog and camera crews who fail to deliver key scenes, leaving you to scavenge and then hide your trail. Not only will you develop a full understanding of how core features work, you'll also have a clear grasp on how to make your footage stand out from the crowd.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Mastering Adobe Premier Pro CS6 HOTSHOt
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Streamlining Premiere Pro


In this section, you will customize Premiere Pro CS6 to streamline the editing workflow for the project used in this chapter, and many of the others in this book. Specifically, you will customize the general layout of Premiere Pro CS6 to encourage you to use keyboard shortcuts, create new Bins (folders) in the Project panel, and finally save this all as a template for use in the future. This task is designed as an Easy in feature for you to get used to the style of the book and to double-check whether you have Premiere Pro CS6 set up correctly.

Prepare for Lift Off

Once you are sure all the assets you need are gathered together in three separate folders on your designated video drive, launch Premiere Pro CS6 in the normal way.

Engage Thrusters

You will now set up your interface for easier editing, and save these settings as a reusable template. To do so, follow these steps:

  1. Once Premiere Pro CS6 has finished launching, the Recent Projects splash screen appears. Then, select the New Project icon.

  2. Before naming your project, select the Scratch Disks tab at the top of the New Project window, and confirm whether all scratch disks are set up for optimal performance as stipulated in the following screenshot. In this example the drive letter "V" represents the computers dedicated video drive. More information on using a dedicated video drive can be found in the Preface.

    Tip

    While you have the previous window open, you should also click the General tab, and check if the Mercury Playback settings are correct for your computer. Generally speaking, you will get better performance if Mercury Playback is set to take advantage of your graphics card.

  3. Once you are satisfied with the project settings, name this project Hotshots Template - Montage, and select a location to save that file. The default Adobe folder in My Documents should be fine for this purpose and is recommended for the rest of this book.

  4. The New Sequence window will now appear. Select the video standard that matches the majority of your video assets (see also Classified Intel at the end of this section).

  5. The main Premiere Pro CS6 interface will now open, displaying the default editing workspace, as shown in the next screenshot. Here, you can see the Project panel and Timeline panel sharing a one third/two third portion of the lower interface, while Source Monitor and Program Monitor equally share the upper part of the interface. If your interface is showing something else, use the keyboard shortcut Alt + Shift +3 (Windows), or option + Shift + 3 (Mac) to display the editing workspace.

  6. Select the Project panel by using the keyboard shortcut Shift + 1. Selection will be confirmed by displaying a gold border around the Project panel.

  7. Use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + / or command + / to create a new Bin folder in the Project panel, and name this Bin folder as Video. Press Enter and then Esc on the keyboard to exit the renaming function.

  8. Repeat step 7 twice to create two more Bins folders called Audio and Images. Your Project panel should look like the following screenshot when you have finished:

  9. From the menu, select Workspace | New Workspace and in the New Workspace window enter Editing Optimized.

    Note

    When you created your own custom workspace, it will have been assigned a keyboard shortcut. Go to Windows | Workspace to see which shortcut combination your workspace has been given.

  10. Right-click on the header of the toolbar panel that sits (and takes up valuable real estate) between the Timeline and the Project panels, and select Close Panel. If you prefer to use the mouse for tool selection, ignore this step.

  11. Place the cursor between the Timeline and the Project panels, so that a double-headed arrow appears, then drag to the left-hand side to make the Timeline panel larger. Stop before the Effects tab disappears.

  12. Take a moment now to make any other customizations to the general layout of the interface. Once you have finished, press Ctrl + S or command + S on the keyboard to save this layout.

    Note

    By saving this layout as separate Premiere Pro CS6 projects file, it will be available to you whenever you want to create a new montage.

Objective Complete - Mini Debriefing

In this task, you have confirmed that the scratch disks are set for optimal video editing and customized as the workspace towards an optimal editing workflow. You have also created three new bins into which you will later import your assets. More importantly, however, you have begun using keyboard shortcuts to control Premiere Pro CS6. It is important that you at least try to break the habit of using the mouse all the time. Sometimes, it is of course unavoidable or simply easier to use the mouse instead of the keyboard, but overall, keyboard shortcuts can often prove to be more accurate in use than the mouse.

New keyboard shortcuts covered in this task are as follows:

  • Shift + Alt +3 (Windows) or Shift + option + 3 (Mac): This shortcut selects the default CS6 editing workspace

  • Shift + 1: This shortcut selects the Project panel as the active panel

  • Ctrl + / (Windows), or command + / (Mac): This shortcut creates a new Bin folder in the active Project panel

  • Ctrl + S (Windows) or command + S (Mac): This is the universal shortcut for saving a project

Classified Intel

Although item 4 of this section asked you to select a video standard that matched the majority of your video assets, it's not going to be a problem if you get this wrong. A new feature of Premiere Pro CS6 is that it will offer to change the Timeline settings of any empty sequence to match the settings it detects in the first clip added to that sequence. However, you need to make sure the first clip on the Timeline represents the majority of clips used in the rest of the sequence; otherwise, you will have to endure unnecessarily long render times.