Adobe Premiere Pro For Beginners: Editing Efficiency + Getting Started

1. Class Introduction!: Editing is where the magic happens in videos, but if your workspace isn't set up for success, then it can be a tiresome process. If you wish, you could shave hours of time of you're editing process, then you are in the right place. Hi, I'm Charles. I run Creative Agency, WCM and I've been editing and working in Premiere Pro and the Adobe Creative Suite for almost nine years now. I've worked in studios in London, Auckland, Toronto and Australia during my career and picked up some some of the best, manage and streamline their workflows and editing process. Now I want to take the techniques that have helped me to edit and produce hundreds of videos in an efficient and stress-reducing manner for clients like Chanel, Adobe, and San Miguel just to name a few and share them with you over the duration of this class. Let's take your editing from time-consuming and costly to fast and furious 9. In the world of freelance and production, time is money, and if you're spending more time than you should be editing a project for a client, it means you have less time to take on other projects and that's costing you money. So let's fix that. This class is useful for people who are fairly new to Adobe Premiere Pro, or even those who may have been using it for a while, but are looking to up their game and push their knowledge. We're going to cover some of the basics like setting up your workspace and getting your keyboard shortcuts in order, and then we're going to move on to some more advanced techniques like color grading in reading your graphs, where to store caches, and how to use proxies. I love to help people make their lives easier and streamline the work that they do day in, day out. Now let's get into Premiere Pro and it make our new best friend. [NOISE] 2. Class Orientation!: Your class project is going to let you share all of your progress and your own personal take on this class with all of your peers. Basically, you get to show off and who doesn't like that? All we need to do is share a screenshot of your brand new workspace layout and a keyboard setup that you found most efficient after watching all of the lessons, super easy and bonus points, if you give them funky names, you could even do before and after comparison to see what changed. Not only is it super easy to do, but you can also take inspiration from other people's set ups and maybe we'll learn something along the way. Maybe we'll form some ultimate workspace, keyboard setup layout and it will be used for generations to come, we'll only know if we try. All you need to participate in this class is a laptop or a computer and to have Adobe Premiere Pro and Adobe Media Encoder installed on one of those devices, have an external HDD or SSD is also going to be great, but not 100 percent necessary. Don't worry about that too much if you don't. Make sure you use the most up-to-date versions of each of those programs. I'm currently using Adobe Premiere Pro 2022 and that you've got enough space or storage on your devices to make a new project. Now let's get into it and open up Adobe Premiere Pro. 3. Intro to Premiere Pro: [MUSIC] Before we jump into the source, I want to give you a basic orientation of Adobe Premiere Pro. If you're completely new to video editing and you're thinking, "I've never opened a Premiere Pro before please help me," then don't worry I got you. If you've been in video editing game for a while though, you may want to skip onto one of the next lessons. I don't know, man the buttons probability along here or something, don't leave me please. [LAUGHTER] If you've never opened up Premiere Pro before, then prepare to have your mind blown in a good way obviously. Let's double click the icon and get it blew it up. This is Premiere Pro, and if you followed the last step correctly, we've opened it up and we're being greeted by the project loaded screen. Now, this is where all of your recent projects live. Surprisingly, it's also the place you come to begin a new one. Let's do that. The first thing you're going to see when you click the "New Project" button is a new project window that pops up. Here, you can do things like name a new project. So let's call as this. Seems appropriate. Next, we need to choose where we'd like to save this new project file. Let's click "Browse" here, and find a nice little place for this project to live. I've already created a folder Skillshare test project, and save it inside of my edit folder, which is something we'll talk about later. We will click "Choose", and now we get back to the new project window. I'm also going to talk about a great way to streamline this process later on if you hang around. You can also adjust your general settings, such as video and audio playback and display formats. Your color management, which we'll talk about in one of our later lessons. You're going to love it. Your Scratch Disks and your Ingest Settings. Only one you need to worry about for now is your Scratch Disks so let's click over to that tab. These are files that may be created on the spot by Premiere, such as previews when rendering, recorded video or audio, and one of the most important files your auto save. We want all of them to live in the same folder as your project. Let's make sure that's the case. We can do that by clicking "Browse", go into our Project Folder here, which again, we're going to discuss later. I like to save them in my Premiere folders here. We'll click "Choose", and then for each separate line we do exactly same thing. Once that's done, we can click, "Okay". Now we're here in a brand new, fresh project and this is our everything should look if you've kept your program on its default settings. But we're going to work on that. Don't worry. First though let's import some footage and you have two options when it comes to doing this. First, you can go to File, click "Import", and then select the footage you'd like to import. Or you can move your mouse here to the Program panel and simply double click on an empty space. They both do the same thing, but it's just way cooler if you double click, I'm just saying. Now, let's go for the workspace we can see right now. This is your program when it's a panel. This is where any footage you're working on in a sequence will be shown, and it's decided by the position of the playhead this is your Project's panel. It is about all of your files and anything else that's a part of your project is going to live. Is similar to the folder system use on Mac or Windows. We can create a new bin by clicking on this button here. We can drag and drop items into it, but more on that later. This is your timeline. This is where you're going to work on all the clips you're going to import, and space them up and make them look good for your clients. We'll talk about timelines and sequences in one of the later lessons. Most importantly this is the Help button. You can click this and type anything you're looking for. If it exists in Premiere it will show you exactly how to find it. It's a bit like Google Search, but for Premiere Pro and it probably also it doesn't steal all of your data. Well, let's have a look at some of your key settings to get us started. Let's go to Premiere Pro here, and click "Preferences". First we're going to change the appearance of your workspace. Let's scroll down to Appearance, click and you open up this panel. I like to have mine darker, it's a place less strain to my eyes. I also feel like it helps me to work for longer, but this is entirely up to you. Next, let's go to Audio Hardware. Here's where you can select the input and output for your audio. If you have an external speaker, you can choose it here or select your headphones, for example. Finally, auto save. If you do anything today, let it be this. This feature has saved my life many a time and it will continues to do so until I finally become a perfect human and no longer make mistakes. But until then, I'd like to have my preferences set to auto save at least once every 10-15 minutes. Your maximum project versions is how many auto saves. A Creative Cloud will create before overwriting the old one and 20 is a good number for this. I also recommend to can save a project copy to the Cloud and save or other projects when auto saving. I feel like we've done enough here for now. We're going to be coming back some of these preferences in later classes. Just relax, it's fine we'll go back to this. This is the default Premiere Pro home screen. After this lesson, you'll have a basic understanding of how to start a new project, what settings to apply, some of the different panels available in your workspace, and adjust to some of your vital preferences within Premiere Pro. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to talk about timelines and sequences. [MUSIC] 4. The Timeline and Sequences: The timeline, not just for Sci-Fi movies, it's also the place where you were doing all the heavy lifting in your editing workspace. If you remember back to about two minutes ago, I gave you a brief rundown of the default premier pro workspace and you may have heard me mention something about the timeline. In this lesson, we're going to delve into what can be done in the timeline, explain what sequences are, and explain how you can use them. Let's get started. A sequence is simply a visual assembly of your video and audio clips within the timeline panel. It can be customized in numerous ways to match your needs, and it can also be used in a variety of ways once you've done this. Now to create a new sequence, we can go here and select "File", and then go down to New Sequence, or we can hit the keyboard shortcut on a Mac, which is Command and N, or Control and N on Windows. Now once a new sequence window pops up, you want to name a sequence like this, and then we want to adjust our settings. We can either choose from some of the pre-sets available here in which case I would recommend DSLR,1080p, and then IV at 24 frames per second or 25 frames per second, depending on which frame rate you shot in. Or we can go into the Settings tab and choose our own custom settings. In this case, I'm using DSLR footage shot at 25 frames per seconds with dimensions of 1920 by 1080. Let's go over to the Settings tab and select the DSLR and change our time-based to 25 frames per second. Now if we look here, we can see the dimensions of the sequence we're about to create. Let's select 1920 on the left, this would be the width and 1080 on a right, and this will be the height of the sequence. We want to display format to match the time base so we're going to select 25 frames per second, and unless you know otherwise, you most likely want to use Rec 709, which is a color space your footage is being compressed into. We can leave the audio settings alone and our previous don't need to be touched for now either. We can also save these sends as a custom presser, which is useful if we're going to be using them a lot by clicking the Save pre-set button below and it will be added to the list on the previous tab. Let's press "Okay" and create our sequence. The sequence should now appear in a project panel and we can differentiate it from our footage using the icons here to the left. This is your sequence, and this is your footage, and we can double-click our sequence here to open it in the timeline below. What we have now is a completely empty sequence waiting to be filled up with some lovely footage and audio. But first, let's get to know the anatomy of a sequence. Now your sequence is comprised of multiple tracks; video tracks and audio tracks. They're separated by this lovely line here in the middle, and by default, a new sequence will have free video tracks and free audio tracks. Anything you add to your sequence is going to need to live on one of these tracks. We can zoom in or out of our sequence by using this bar here or resize individual tracks like this. Along the top here we have time markings and increments, and this will either be displayed in seconds or frames depending on your settings. Personally, I prefer timecode because I'm not a robot. The left of the tracks, we have a few buttons that you might want to try pressing. We can hide everything when we video track using this button here. Be sure to keep an eye on this when exporting though, because if the track is hidden, it's not going to show up in your program monitor or your final export. Pressing this Lock button will lock your track and prevent any changes being made to it until it's unlocked. This can be useful when you want to cut down or trim tracks above or below without affecting the lot track. You can rename a track by right-clicking here and setting it to rename. This can be used for organizing large projects with multiple tracks. When you take a look here, we have V1 highlighted in blue. This tells us that this track is selected for track targeting and source patching. Now, these are a little too in-depth to cover here, but it's useful to know that any copy and paste or navigation commands are dictated by the track selection here. You can customize this section by clicking here and selecting Customize option. That was a lot, I know. But again, to know your timeline and sequences will save you lots of time and energy down the line and make you a better editor overall. After this lesson, you should have a much better grasp of what can be done in the timeline, how to create new sequences, and how to customize them. Now let's move on to the next lesson. 5. Create Your Custom Workspace: Welcome back. I'm Charles and you may recognize me from the previous lesson. Thanks for joining me again. Just now we ran through sequences and timelines, and before that we had a quick chat about the default workspace in Premiere Pro. But this is not the only workspace available. There are others and they all have their own specific uses. Let's have a look at some of them. First though, let's quickly clean up your workspace settings. Now personally, I don't want all the visual random workspaces here. This class is about streamlining and efficiency. Let's click this button here and then Edit Workspaces. You can reorder your workspaces like this by clicking, dragging and dropping them. You can drop them into the Overflow bar, which means that they won't show up along the main panel here. Or you can remove them entirely by dropping them here into the Do Not Show panel. Now they still exist, it just means they won't show up when you click the Overflow bar here. I like my workspaces to be in the same order as my workflow from left to right, so let's do that. But before we do, it's important to remember that your workflow can differ from project to project and person to person so you may have an entirely different process or more use for different panels so set this up the best way to suit yourself. We begin with assembly here. This is usually your first stop when creating a new project. You can view and organize all of your imported media here quite easily and organize your sequences and make selects. Let's keep that right at the top. Next up we have the editing panel. Once you've imported all of your footage you usually want to move on to this panel to begin cutting down and doing the main bulk of your editing. Later on we're going to customize this boundary to suit your needs as having it set up incorrectly and goes through hours and hours on a project. Next we have effects and graphics. After we feel like our cut has come together nicely, we can move into this panel to add things like transitions, titles, motion graphics and other effects. We can also use this workspace to edit any previous effects we may have already added to our clips. Next up we have audio. Let's drag and drop color and place it down here. This panel is set up to streamline any audio work you may need to do. You can adjust your levels, mix your audio, add any sound effects or any other audio work can happen here. Next up, we have the color workspace, also known as the Lumetri panel. But what I do know is that its one of my favorite workspaces. All of your color work is going to happen here and we're going to have a nice little chat about this one in a later lesson. Finally, we have libraries. This is about all of the assets in your creative cloud library can be accessed. Again, this is something we're going to discuss in a later lesson. You may have noticed a few other panels, but these are some of the main panel you'll be working in. Now that you have a good idea of what they do, let's talk about how we can customize them to suit our needs. Let's just drag and drop captions, metalogging and production into the overflow menu because most likely we won't be using them. In fact, we can even put them here into the Do Not Show. Perfect. Let's press Okay. You can see along the top here now all of those panels are in the correct order and only the ones we need are left displayed. If you're an observant person, much like myself, you may have noticed that your workspace is made up of many smaller, customizable segments. If you click one of these segments it will become highlighted like this. You can see the blue line around it. Then you can resize this segment by clicking and dragging from the edge or the bottom. Or you can move it to completely new space by clicking and holding here, and then dragging and dropping it and letting go on one of these highlighted segments, decide where it's going to be. Like that. Using this, we can change the order of our panels, stack them on top of one another, or have them in entirely stand alone window by losing this and undocking the panel. Wherever makes you happy really. On top of this, we can also access all of the available windows by going to Windows here, and selecting the window we'd like to add or remove from our workspace. Anything have a tick next to it, like this, is currently present in a workspace that you're in. If we combine all of this knowledge, we're able to create a workspace that looks exactly how we'd like it to look and has all of the uses that we need from here. I have my own custom workspace that I spend 90 percent of my time editing in and it's up to suit my own needs perfectly. Some of the adjustments I made came to me over time. Some are just simple common sense, but let's take a look it now. To do that, we're going go to Window, then Workspaces, and then we're going to go down to Chuck. Now that we're in this workspace, the first thing we're going to want to do is add it to our panel at the top. It's Edit Workspaces, find Chuck here and drag and drop it here between assembly and editing, because this is probably my main editing workspace. Press Okay. Now you can see it's here and we can just switch between what we already have. Let's take a look at this workspace and see what I've changed. I've moved my source monitor here next to my program monitor. Usually, I want you to view both of these at the same time. If you look at the Editing Workspace here, you can see source monitor is on its own on the left. I removed the Metadata Window entirely. I won't be adding any metadata at this point in my workflow. We'll have it there. We also removed a whole bunch of other unnecessary panels from the bottom left of my workspace. If you remember, we're aiming for efficiency and streamline. You can see here we have a whole bunch of panels that I've decided I don't need. You see, I've only got three here in this box. You may also notice I've relocated all of my panels to the top left of my workspace here. As before, it was down here on the bottom left. I dedicated all of this space that I created by doing that to my timeline here and my viewing monitors up here. You may also see I've resized my timeline to take up the entire bottom half of the workspace. This means I can see all of my clips and edits in much more detail and have a lot more space to play with when rearranging clips. You may also notice my viewing area has more space in the top half now. Again, we can compare the two. Most across most of my buttons, which we may have already covered in the sequences lesson. I've also ordered my panels on the top-left and in particular way to reflect those which I need it the most and order they tend to be used in. Adding in audio channels here, also lets me make quick audio channel adjustments if needed. Now if you go to my Effects panel, you can see here I've created a custom bin called Faves. This is where I've added all of my most use effects and it saves me time have to search and look for them every time I need them. You can do this yourself by clicking here to create a new custom bin name in it. [NOISE] Literally select whichever effect you'd like, drag and drop it into the bin. You can reorganize your bins in exactly the same way. Its a very handy tool just to have them all in one place. You have a play around with your workspaces and think about what you might need the most during an edit. Resize things to suit your needs in the space you have. Windows can also be dragged onto second or third monitors if you have them. Once you're happy with how things look, you can save the layout by clicking Window here, go into Workspaces, and then Save as New Workspace. Just name it 2.0. Press Okay and it will be added to the top here and also available in the Edit Workspaces panel. You can do this as many times as you'd like and create as many custom workspaces you need for the different workflows that you have. Before you make any changes to your workspace though, don't forget to take a screenshot of how it looks before this lesson so that we can use it for the before and after reference in your class project. Have fun customizing and I'll see you in the next class. We're going to talk about setting up your own custom keyboard shortcuts. See you there. 6. Setting up your Keys!: Sorry, I didn't see you there, I was too busy using of my extremely efficient keyboard shortcuts in editing my projects in record time. Want to know how I do it? Well, let's talk about custom keyboard shortcuts. One of my favorite aspects of this class, every single key is customizable to set as a shortcut for Adobe Premier Pro and you need to utilize this factor to advantage, we're in the 21st century, come on. Let's head back into Premier Pro and see exactly how you can do this, with your project open we can go to the Premier Pro tab and then click ''Keyboard shortcuts'' here, and this lovely keyboard window should pop up. Here you can see the current layer of your keyboard and any shortcuts as they're assigned at this moment in time, and if you've never seen this before, you probably have the Premier Pro default settings, which I'm going to reset to just now. They're okay, but let's be honest, we're not here for okay, are we? I'm going to share some of the keyboard binds I use for my personal workflow and learning this process has shaped hours over my editing and prepping time, so hopefully you're going to find them useful to. But remember at end of the day it all comes down to personal preference. We can search for specific shortcuts by typing into this box here and typing in whatever we're looking for and then we'll bring up all of those commands that are available down here, or we can also manually search for them by just scrolling and going through all the different options. Once we've found the command that we're looking for, we can assign it to a key by selecting it right here, click in, and then press in the key that we would like to assign it to. I've just reassign, select camera 4 to keep 4 on my keyboard. You can also do it like this, we're going to remove that shortcut by pressing the ''X'' and then we're going to drag and drop that command onto this key, very easy to do. But we can also apply modifier keys which allow us to add even more shortcuts like this, so we can use the modifier command, which brings up a brand new keyboard layout. We can also use option, again, which adds a whole new keyboard, or we can press "Control." Again, we have another keyboard. I'm going to add commands to these modifiers, we hold that button down and again, pretty much exactly the same way we can drag and drop, or we can just select here, and again type the key that we want to add that command to. Let's go through some key binds that I use super often and share them with you. Now that we've got a good starting point, let's save on in keyboard setup and name it something very cool and press "Okay", so save as funky keyboard bindings and press "Okay", and that should be accessible in your keyboard layout presets whenever you need it. Press "Okay", and our new keyboard should be set up. Why have we just done all of this and how does it help us? Well, let me show you. Let's get some footage into the test sequence by selecting this clip here and dragging and dropping it here into the sequence, and you can see we have our video here and our audio here and we can extend that down by dragging and dropping and seeing our audio wave forms a little bit better. Ripple trim in more Ripple trim from the endpoint of any clip the play-head is situated over or selected up to wherever the play-head is situated in your sequence. Ripple trim out does the exact same from the outpoint and if you don't know what a ripple trim is, is another great shortcut that will delete your footage and automatically remove the gap left in a sequence created by it. Pretty handy, thanks Adobe. How does using the Add Edit come into this? How is it different from the [inaudible] ? Well, Add Edit will literally split any clip with just a touch of its shortcut wherever the play-head is situated like this. The [inaudible] need to manual select and click wherever you'd like to [inaudible] to be like this, that doesn't seem very efficient now, does it? Now using this, we can create new in and outpoint in your footage and then ripple trim up to the play-head to cut our eclipse down super fast and fly for our editing and selects. Let's reset this footage. Say we're playing through and we want to keep this segment here, but we decided we don't want this segment here. We just press ''X'' to add an edit here and then we can press ''Q'', and it deletes that whole segment up to the play-head, and then deletes the gap that was left behind or ripple trim it, given us a very clean cut and a super fast rate to edit out segments we don't want, so again, one more time. We don't want this segment here, we press ''Q.'' Let's do again here, say we don't want anything from here to here. Let's create, press ''X'' to create a cut and we press ''W'' here and again, it just cuts the whole segment out, deletes it and ripple trims. Perfect. Now what does the Slip Tool do? Remember we set our Slip Tool to the E-Key. Let's press ''E'', and this is a super useful tool for adjusting the in and out points of a clip without actually adjusting it within a sequence. For me, I had to finger the clips in a timeline as little boxes or viewing windows in the timeline. Each box takes up is given space on the timeline, and we can show whatever part of footage as inside that box we'd like for the viewing window. All slip tool is going to do is change the part of the footage we can see for our viewing window. Does that make sense? Let me show you. We've got our clip here. We have the in point and our point here and instead of manually adjusted it like this, to say, move our clip along a bit and change the part of the clip we'd like to view, we can actually just hold E, click, and then drag to the left or the right, and you can see here the times in the left is the in-point time and the time in the right is the outpoint time and we're just pushing that level forwards or backwards slightly depending on how far we drag without having to adjust the in or out points here. Let's talk about the Rolling Edit tool. Using this tool, which is set to R, we can grab the in and out point of two clips that are next to each other in a timeline and then move them in sync. This is super useful if you don't want to have to drag each in and out manually and mess up the rest of the time and so you can see here we selected that cup and we're dragging it to left and it's increased the length of this clip and decrease the length of this clip without us having to say do this, so maybe we want to increase the length of this one, we'd have to do that and then we'd have to drag this one to the left and then fill in the gap ourselves. Again, it's just a majorly good time-saving tool. What about the Rate Stretch tool? Well, don't worry, I haven't forgotten about it. This is one of my favorite tools and this allows me to drag an in or out point of the clip and fill up a space, but automatically adjusting the speed of the clip that selected. This is great if you already know what segment of the clip you want to use, you don't want to change it, but you need to fill a gap in your sequence by changing its speed. It takes away all the guesswork for you, so say we have this gap here, I mean no, I don't want use this segment of the clip, we select T, we select the clip like that, then we drag from the in-point or the outpoint and fill. Now you can see the clip hasn't actually changed where it begins or starts, but the speed, which can be seen here actually has gone from 100 percent to 76.64, so it's just been slowed down slightly to increase its length. Now if you go with my instructions, you should have a render entire work area set to your return key. Now make sure it's render entire work area and not render effect inside work area, two different things, I made that mistake once, not cool. This allows you to set your in and out points using the I and O shortcuts on your keyboard and then render any clip and effects that are inside that space, which is your in and out point now, here your workspace, which is shown by this blue line here, which is the in-point and this blue line here, which is the outpoint, by pressing the return key like this. This is great if you wanted to preview just a small segment of your timeline and don't to wait ages for the entire sequence to render along with all of its effects and audio, just select the part you need, I, O like that and render it. You can also see once we've hit that return key to render, that the line along here goes from yellow to green, now yellow means it's partially rendered. You have some partial previews cached already. Now this is usually fine if you have a good enough computer or processor, but sometimes you might have lots of effects color grading, audio clip etc. They're going to slow that down and make it much slower to load and maybe a little bit jumpy, so you might want to pre-render it by using those shortcuts and then you'll get a nice green bar here, which shows that you have all of it cached. Finally, we have the color labels we assigned to the number keys. Using this, we can sign a number of colors to any of the clips in the sequence, and this is helpful when organizing lots of clips. You can assign colors to separate scenes or locations or just for making your project looks super cute, so let's select a clip here, press ''One'' you can see we changed the color to purple. Let's select this clip here, press ''Four'' goes to pink, we press ''Eight,'' this is orange and for me personally I might say, this is all of my A roll, this is my B roll, and this here could just be, I don't know, maybe drawn clips, but it lets me have a visual way to see what having my sequence and what I have to play with. Those are some of my favorite custom keyboard settings and I highly recommend them to use. Here are some other basic shortcuts you might also find handy. Have a play around and think about which of these tools suit you best and add them to your repertoire. After watching this lesson, you should now have a good idea of some of the more useful shortcuts available to you in Premier Pro and begun to customize your own keyboard set up to suit your own projects and workflow best. Don't forget to take a screenshot of your keyboards up before you start to customize it and then once again, once you've finished customizing it to share with us all in the class project. See you in the next lesson. Don't forget to brush your teeth. 7. Project settings, caches + more!: One of our earlier lessons, we talked about preferences and settings that you might want to tweak and said that we will come back to them at a later time. Oh, guess what? Now is that time. Let's get into it. First, we're going to talk about your Media Cache and how you can speed up your project and potentially free up a whole ton of space on your storage. Then we're going to talk about memory and allocating RAM. Finally, we're going to have a very quick look at some of your audio settings. Let's open up the project, get into preferences, and have a look. What's a Media Cache and why should I care? Good question. Well, bad news first, it's nothing to do with money. Now when importing media into Premiere Pro, it processes versions of these files that you can readily access for fast performance, and these are referred to as Media Cache files and they're stored in the Media Cache files folder. Now you can access your Media Cache preferences by going into Premiere Pro up here, then Preferences, and then go all the way down to Media Cache. It should open up the Preferences window on the Media Cache tab. On an ideal world you want in these files we locate on a separate disk to your operating system and applications. For that disk to be as fast as possible, I've set mine to be in a 500 gigabyte external SSD with superfast transfer speeds. If you don't have one of these, a dedicated hard disk drive or external drive is better than nothing. You can set the location of your Media Cache files and database by clicking the Browse button here and then going down and selecting where you'd like it to be. As I said before, mine is located here and you can do the same for your Media Cache database. Once again, I've set mine to the external drive. We also have the option to automatically delete cache files when they exceed a certain size or over x days old. It's useful to clear your cache periodically as it can build up very quickly and take up important space that they really doesn't need. You remember, these are only temporary files that are built on a per-project basis. To change this, we can go to the Media Cache management settings here, and we can say, Do not delete cache files automatically. You can have it set to Automatically delete cache files older than 45 days, and we can also have Automatically delete oldest cache file when a cache exceeds certain amount of space, and mine is going to be set to 200 gigabytes. Now if you've never looked at these settings okay to cache files, it may be worth clicking this button here, Delete, and getting rid of older gigabytes and gigabytes of cache files that you've not used for years, gone. Feels good, give it a go. Now let's take a look down at the memory sense. Let's click over to the Memory tab. This is where you can allocate how much RAM, Premiere Pro, and other Creative Cloud applications are allowed to use, and then how much you reserve for other programs. RAM is your computer's short-term storage and it's where it keeps files it's actively using. Ideally, you want to allocate as much RAM as possible for Premiere Pro, well as even enough for other programs are run. Now RAM can vary from machine to machine, but for video editing, a healthy amount of around 16 gigabyte is a good place to start. Allocating something around three-quarters of a RAM is a good amount to give to Premiere Pro and Creative Cloud. As you can see here, I've got 16 gigabytes of RAM installed, I've reserved four gigabytes of RAM of applications, and I've left 12 gigabytes for Premiere Pro and other Creative Cloud programs. You can also change down here, maybe you want to optimize your rendering from performance or memory and obviously select performance because I want Premiere Pro to run as smoothly as possible. Now that we've cleansed the hard drives and we can feel pure again. Let's have a little look at the Audio tab just over here. There are a couple of settings that you may want to tweak. I recommend on ticking this box here as it isn't really that useful and it can be more of a nuisance in anything. What this button does is it turns off play audio while scrubbing. What that means is when you are scrubbing through the timeline with the play head like this, the audio will not be played. After adjusting all of these settings, you may notice your Premiere Pro and computer running a lot more smoothly and operating at a much faster speed. I don't know about you, but that makes me very happy. After watching this lesson, you should now have an understanding of how your Media Cache works, what your RAM does, and how you can allocate it, and also tweak some of your audio settings. [MUSIC] Make sure you run through the settings we've just discussed and change them to your liking before we start the next one, and I'll see you there. 8. Create Your Template: Media Hierarchy + Project Management: For me, when it comes to any project, organization is a key part of the process. An automating as much of this process as possible is also something that can be a great time-saver. As projects grow without diligence, things can get out of control and you begin to lose valuable time looking for things like files, tracking down the old save, or trying to remember where you saved the new asset. Don't ask me, I wasn't even there. This is especially important when you begin to work with other creatives or as part of a team or if you have to come back to old projects and make changes months or even years down the line respect your future self and count on top of this stuff now. In this lesson, we're going to discuss two major ways that you can collect your projects and save some major time. The first of those is going to be organizing your project folders and creating a template for yourself to use. This also includes how to name and organize them. The second is how to use a project consolidation tool inside of Premiere. Let's talk about folders and names. Now, as you begin to work on more and more projects, you start to notice that you're creating the same folders over and over again to store various file related to Set Project in. Now for me, this collection of folders looks something like this. It gives me a place to keep all of the footage related to the project in one place. Somewhere for all of my saves, the Edit folder, the sum up for all of my exports, the exports folder, somewhere for all of my audio, the audio folder, and also any assets used in the project, the assets folder. It would make sense to create an entity copy of this folder and use as a template. Of course, it would. That's why I do. For every project I begin, I copy this folder, I rename it, and I'll begin to fill up all of the files related to my project. Now, it's important to make sure you keep doing this for the duration of the project. Any download, new asset, additional footage, anything that arise during or after the project that's related to it needs to be saved in or moved to its corresponding place within your project folder. Not only does this keep things in order and make them easy to find, it also means that you can very easily backup or copy the entire project and having to deal with it and know that everything you need to come back to this project at any point will still be there. Something that you're going to realize is supremely useful the more that you work within editing. Now, the folder system that I use was taught to me by the head of post-production at a studio in New Zealand, someone who'd been in the industry for way longer than me, and honestly made my whole editing process so much more efficient. But the folders and files you use can different to what I use or need. Feel free to adjust this as you see fit. Another thing that's really useful is to have a consistent and easy-to-use naming system for your projects. For me, it looks a little bit like this. Let's go have a quick look inside my projects folder. You can see here, all of my projects are named in a very similar way. We have the project number here, we have the client name here, and then we have the name of the project here. If we take a look at our test project, you can see also done it here. But let's rename it quickly just for the sake of doing it. We're going to press Command Shift S to save as, I'm going to go to our edit folder open our project folder. Let's rename the project according to this template. We put the project number 0001_, then you put the client name, Skillshare_, then we put the project name, which is obviously. Then because this is a Premiere project, we're going to add this in the end, Version 1. Then if I ever need to version up or make a copy of this project for some revisions or any major changes, I'll just change that to Version 2, Version 3, etc. This allows you to keep track of the order of my projects and which is the most recent. It also doesn't add confusing names or like final version or Version 1 into the mix and that just makes it so much easier to know where you're at with a project. But not just this, I would then take the project number which is 0001, and I would assign it to any other project saves or exports associated to this project and is a full name for project Save 2. My Premiere save would look just like this. This means that if at any point I need to find an export or save file related to this project, I can just search for 0001 in my folder and everything related to this project and client should appear. Start doing this now and I promise you're going to thank me down the line. Now, you may have your own way of doing this already or an even better way, and that's fine. But important thing is that you need to be consistent with it. I'd love to hear your way of doing this. If you've got one, please feel free to share. Finally, when you finish a project, you might want to declutter all of the files used in it and only keep what you need. Now, Premiere have been really kind and given us a tool that does just that. Let's head back into our project and see how it works. You want to click file up here and then had all the way to the bottom to your project manager and open up the project management window. You can then select your main sequence, which is test sequence here. Also make sure to exclude unused clip, which means a one bring any unused files from a predict window or your bins into the new project. You can also do select this box here because I personally feel like it makes life hard. Like you don't want to change the names of your files. That down the line, everything's still lines up in his reference easily. You don't want to choose a destination path for your new project. I'm going to put this into, let's just put it, say here in my exports for now. Then once you press Okay, probably I will create a new project folder, copy an under the policy of use, and put them all in one handy place. You can then use this to back your project up and move it to the Cloud or send it to another editor to continue working on. We have a look here. We've got the copy of the project which we can see. We have all the footage that we've used, the audio previews, the video previews, and a copy of the immediate cache along with the project save. Pretty cool. After watching this lesson, you should now have a brand new project folder template and also learn how to consolidate your projects within Premiere Pro itself. That's pretty dope If you asked me. Before their next lesson begins, have a think about how you want to set up your project template folders and create a test copy to play around with. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to be talking about bins. 9. Getting the most out of Bins!: Keeping your projects organized under control within Premiere Pro is an extremely important aspect of project management. Failing to do so can have you wasting minutes at a time trying to find clips or even working on the wrong segment of a project without even realizing it. Having a set structure in place across all of your projects allows you to keep them easily organized to come back to them weeks, months, or even years down the line and pick right back up where you left off. In the last lesson, we created a project folders template with a specific set of folders inside for the assets that you may use during your project. Now, what we're going to do is we create those folders as bins inside of our Premiere project. This allows us to keep consistency across all of our projects and keep our file management under control and also allows us to import assets into Premiere in the correct place on the fly very easily. Let's start by heading into Premiere Pro and creating the bins we are going to be using inside the project. Let's begin by opening up our project panel here. We can just drag this over slightly it gives you a better view of what we're doing and now we're going to use this button here to create a new bin or we can right click and select new bin. We click here to rename the bin, and then move on to the next one. Let's create those bins, we're going to start by creating a footage bin. Obviously this is where we're going to place all the footage that we import. Next, we want an audio bin. This is where we're going to place all the audio, music, sound effects, voiceovers that we import. We also want a motion graphics bin for me to as well import any motion graphics or assets that I bring it in from After Effects. We'll create another bin and we're going to call that one masters. This is where we're going to place all of our master sequences, which is something that I'll discuss in a moment. We've also added assets and Nests and assets is where I like to place anything like adjustment layers, time codes, any assets generated by Premiere that don't have another place to live and nests, of course is where I'll place any random nests that I create during my editing. Now that we have a bin for our footage, our audio, our motion graphics, our assets and a few extras that you might not have seen before. Master is about all of the master sequences live. Archive is for any backup sequences and if we no longer need in a project or anything we want to declutter. I find it's best to always use this as a bin as opposed to delete and things because this can seriously backlash, if you need to go back, which is an asset down a line and you're also able to add colors to bins, to code them in whichever way you like. You can do that using the shortcut keys that we saw up in one of the previous lessons. I can press 2, 3, 4, 5 and it just would change, and it will just change that folder to the color assigned to that keyboard shortcut. Super useful. We can also set up smart search bins that display any project files that match the preset criteria and to do that, we have the main search bar here, and then we have the smart search bin here and we can check what we'd like to look for. We can say the name and the frame rate and you can say 25 frames per second and then the name is A-Cam and that will display in this bin any footage with A-Cam and 25 frames per second and it automatically updates as a project continues. You can see how useful that might be but for now lets leave our project [inaudible] get rid of that. Now again, this is just a generic template for bins I, myself use regularly and find useful and it can change as projects in these evolve and I might add or delete more bins as needed. Figure out what works best for you and let that be your own guide. Before we carry on, let me just quickly clean up my project panel. Let's put my footage into the footage bin and I'm going to create an archive bin and put this sequence here into it because we don't need it anymore then we are going to the test sequence into the masters bin and I'm also going to rename it as test sequence-master and this is another really good habit to get yourself into. Whenever you have a main sequence that you're working on, make sure to add master to the end of its name and then whenever you need to make revisions or any major changes you're unsure of you can simply duplicate the master sequence and rename it to backup 1, 2, 3, 4, etc and place that backup into the archive bin now. Why you'd want to do this is because if you're going to make any serious changes to a sequence or perhaps a new round of revisions you want a backup of that sequence to go back to in case the client says, hey, actually, I'm not so sure about this change we have so can we go back to the old one? Now instead of having to redo all the work that you've already done, you can simply go into your archive bin open up this test sequence, and that is all the work as it was before you made the changes and believe me, I have not done this and had to spend so much time going back and redoing work I had already done, so don't make the same mistakes as me. Now we've done that, I also find it useful to number these bins so that they're in an order that I'd like them to be. One at the top and then I want archive to be zero. I want my masters to be number two and for the rest of these bins, I'm not really too fast. Now that we've done all of that at this point, we can also create sequence templates. For example, with varying aspect ratios. We can load in assets like logos or sound effects that you might regularly use or any other file it has repeat use and you find yourself importing fresh for each project you start. We can then save this project as a template and open it to begin each new project. Saves ourselves, tons of time down the line. Now, when using it, make sure you remember to save as and rename the project before doing anything else. Let's quickly open up my template project and have a look at what I've got inside of it. We're going to go to projects. I'm going to go into my template folder here. We can go into my Edit folder. Now you can see in here I've already got my Premiere template, which is my 2021 version. Let's open that up and we have a look. You can see here we've got my bins preloaded, we've got my archive, my assets and inside of that, I have some sizings for various Instagram posts. I have a sequence that fits feed post dimensions, sequence that fits that story post dimensions. and for me, that's useful because I do a lot of Instagram content and we have my audio and I've separated them into music and sound effects. I did have a bunch of sound effects loaded in, but I removed them, just to save space and I wasn't using them too often. I have a footage bin, my masters obviously, and inside there, I already have made up a master sequence and a select sequence, which is why I usually like to make my selects before bringing them into the master. I have motion graphics, the effects, and have a bunch of visual effects that I regularly use, some grain transitions and light leaks and I also have a bin for my nests. Now, that's just how I like to work and again, for yourself, it can be anything you need or whatever is useful for your workflow. If we want to create a project from this I'll literally go Command, Shift S or Save As, then I'll go to my project folder into the edit bin, and then I will rename it according to my name in templates. We'll say 0001 Skillshare template Version 1 and then we have a brand new project created from this template. Play around on that guys and see how you get on. After watching this lesson, you should now have a standardized set of bins across all of your projects or project template that comes preloaded of all of those bins and any other assets that you may be using regularly and there's probably a high chance that you never [MUSIC] want to hear me say the word bin ever again. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to be discussing proxies. 10. Proxies!: You've just been grocery shopping and all of your bags are filled with the heaviest stuff imaginable. The gallons of water, bags of flour, several kilos of potatoes. [inaudible] nice enough to sneak in several crates of canned soup for good measure. Also, I forgot to mention, your car is broken down and you've got to walk five miles homes to get it all back. It doesn't sound like fun, does it? It's probably going to take forever. Now imagine if someone came along and waved a magic wand and made all of those groceries weigh a fraction of the weight that they did before. Suddenly, that journey just got a whole lot easier, didn't it? And you get to keep all those lovely cans soup as well. Once you've gotten through the front door and you've packed them all away where they belong, the magic returns them back to their original weight. Pretty cool. Where was this person last week when I needed him? Regardless, this is a pretty good analogy of how proxies work. You could say that they're a type of magic. They let you take your high-quality and RAM-intensive or probably 4K footage and sort it out for a much lower quality, less RAM-intensive and probably easier to carry home version was working on your project. Then once you're ready to explore, Premiere swaps it all right back in it for you without even having to ask. How to use them? Let me show you. First of all, it's important to note that you might not always need to create proxies. Usually if you're using footage of a high resolution or have a project that a lot of assets and just want things to run more smoothly, then it's a good idea to create some. However, if you do, you're going to need to set some time aside at the start of your project to create them all. It may take a little longer, but we'll more than make up for that time down the line. Let's get into it. Let's open up on Premiere project and go to our footage bin right here. Now, usually you want to do this right at the start of your project before you do anything else. If you've got lots of footage, you may want to do something like this overnight and let it run, also, proxies are created, or at very least go make a cup of tea and take a very long time drinking it. What we're going to do is select all of our footage like this. We're going to right-click it and we're going to scroll down to proxy. Then we're going to select "Create proxies". Then it's going to bring up the create proxies window. Now before we carry on, I just want to say it's also possible to do this for an entire folder of footage or bin. Doesn't need to be done one by one. You can also right-click the footage folder, like this, go down to proxy and create proxies. Once again, we've got the create proxies window open and we need to decide what resolution we'd like to proxies to be. Remember, the goal here is it temporarily scale down your footage to reduce the load on your RAM and processor. If you shot in for 4K or HD, because it is scaling down to 720p at a minimum. That's what we're going to do. Select your format, which is most likely h.624, this is an efficient and standardly used codec across most video production. We're going to select that. Then we're going to select the preset low, medium or high quality we're going to go with low, which is around 720 P. Then we're going to choose our destination. Remember that proxy folder we made earlier, it is looking pretty useful right about now, isn't it? Let's do that. We're going to go to our project folder, Skillshare test, open the proxy folder, and then select this folder. Once you've done that, going to press "OK". That's going to take a few seconds just to put these proxy jobs together. Premiere will now open up Adobe Media Encoder, which are going to cover in a later lesson and send all of this information across and begin the rendering process. Now the proxy jobs will be automatically created and rendered behind the scenes. It's important to know if you're creating a lots of proxies or you're creating a proxy for a large amount of footage, it may take a while to process initial command and open up Adobe Media Encoder, so just be patient. Now you can see here each job is going along and creating a proxy, we've got the progress bar here. As each job finishes, Premiere is going to automatically attach that new proxy that is rendered to its parent file and use that proxy in place of the original high-res clip. You should now be able to preview and play through your footage without any pre-rendering and work in in your project a lot faster. Let's head back into Premiere. Now we can also check to see which footage does have a proxy attached and which doesn't by going up to the project panel over here. This is our metadata. We want to right-click select "Metadata Display", go into Premier Pro project metadata and scroll down until we find proxy, which is here. Or we could just type proxy and then click this box here to make sure it's selected. Then we press, "Okay". What that should do is add the proxy status column along the metadata display. We've got it right here on the enemy can see each one of these clips has a proxy attached because we've just created them. We can also drag this all the way along to here if you want it to be at the start and be easier to view. Now you can see we've got our proxies attached to our footage. They should also be inside of our project folder, inside the proxies bin, which they are. After watching this lesson, you should have a pretty solid understanding of how proxies work, how you can create them in your projects, and also how to get your groceries home. Walla, you are now a proxy pro. I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Save time with CC library!: Libraries. Not the most exciting place in the world, but what if I told you there was a library that could streamline your creative process and save you hours of editing in your projects? You probably want to go there. right. Sadly, that place doesn't exist. But it is a feature not just in Adobe Premiere Pro, but entirety of Creative Cloud, and as you probably guessed, is called library. You may have seen the library workspace earlier in the class when we were editing, and workspace helps. But primarily, library is used as a panel within any given workspace. What library does is let you share assets across multiple creative club programs, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop. That's just to name a few. I could go on forever. I won't. But the question is, how can you use it? So let's take a look. Let's head into Premier, and add the library panel to our workspace. To do that, we can select "Window", here at the top, and click on the "Library" panel, which is right here. We can add this panel here like this, or we can head over to the libraries workspace where it's already set up. This is my library panel. As you can see, it's filled with color palettes, pre-made titles, graphics, logos, and all sorts of other assets that are used or may have used on a regular basis in the past. To use them, all I need to do is drag and drop them into my timeline like this. As you can see, that pre-made title has now been added into my project. Super easy. Right-clicking on an asset here like this also gives you several options to edit it, copy it, or add or remove it from a group. As you can see here, we've got these groups that I've created in the past that just keeps things easily together and nice and organized. But how can you create a library, and more importantly, how do you add assets to it? For that, we need to head over to Adobe Creative Cloud, which you should already have installed as part of your Creative Suite. Let's open up Creative Cloud, I'm going do it from my toolbar up here, and head to the files panel, which is right here. Next, we need to click down onto our "Libraries", which is here. Now, you can see here I've already got several libraries that I've created, but we're going to make a new one. To do that, we click this button here. We name it Skillshare Test Library, and then we select "Create." From here, we can select "Upload File" to add files for our library, like this, and we can select any random asset we like. Or we can create a group which allows us to organize and categorize our assets in a library, which if you've been paying attention at all, is something that I highly recommend doing. So let's create a group quickly. Let's call this one, Interior Images, and then we're going to drag and drop that asset into that group. Now we can add another group within that group, and we can add say, 31 Rue Chambon, which is name of this address. Then make sure that that is added into that. In this way, we can add a whole series of groups and categorize all of our assets. You also have the option to add assets from within other Creative Cloud programs like Photoshop or Illustrator by simply dragging and dropping them into the library window, which is useful if you've created a new asset that you'd like to bring over to your Premiere project without having to import it. I'll give you a quick demonstration of that now by opening up Photoshop. Let's open up this lovely elf here, that's a cover for our previous project. We want to add it to our library, so we go to the libraries panel here. We should be able to find the library that we just created by going out of this one and then finding Skillshare Test Library, which is here. I'm then going to select this layer, click the plus button down here, and select "Graphic." As you can see, that graphic has been added to my library. Now we go back into Premier Pro. We go back out of this library into the Skillshare Test Library. As you can see, it's lovely elf who's chilling there. It can be added to my project. It looks like an elf is great, but let's hide that little dude for now using the eye icon here on the left and hide and everything on that track. You may have also noticed that I had various colors in my library. Let's go back to the library now. You can see here, I've got an entire group called colors, and you can add color palettes, dark digital library from the Adobe Color web tool, which is a super useful tool, and I highly recommend familiarizing yourself with it. Like a quick look, now, I've got it open here. All it is, is you build your palette here, you have various options, and once you've got your palette ready, you can select the library you want to save it to, name it, "Save," go back to your project, and that color should be added to your library right here. You can now use the hex codes and the color codes from this palette, super-useful and it goes across all of your projects. Any assets you add to your Creative Cloud Library will be stored in the Cloud, using the 100 gigabytes of storage Adobe gives you with your subscription. If you need more space, however you're able to upgrade for a small fee. Now we've built a library. Any project we store using our Creative Cloud account will allow us to access any of the assets still divinity across all of our projects. Efficiency is the name of the game, so make sure to fill it up with any assets that you use on a regular basis. To recap, in this lesson, we've done the following. We went through the process of how to create a custom library within Creative Cloud, we've learned how to add unorganized assets to that library, and finally, we learned how to implement those assets within our Premiere Pro projects. It's not too shabby, if you ask me. I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Mastering Audio Levels + Sound Mix: Every time on the TV, did I have to watch in a movie with some friends, and the volume set about 110. You jump six feet into the air and scare one of the nine lives of your cat. This has absolutely nothing to do with mastering your audio levels. I just wanted to put that image in your head. In this lesson, we're briefly going to explain audio levels. We're going to explore the Essential Sound panel, and we're going to cover freeways I can help you to quickly master your audio. Audio levels are an extremely important part of completing any project within Premiere Pro, especially if you're going to be shipping it out to a client. What are they and why do you need to fix them? Now your audio levels are measured in decibels. We have zero decibels being the loudest, and anything below that, being measured in negative numbers. I know that doesn't make any sense to me either so don't worry. Each audio track in your sequence has its own audio level that can be adjusted as does your project as a whole, and this is known as the master level. In general, you want your master audio to be picking at around minus 12 decibels. This is a general area accepted and it works for most platforms. However, we need to delve a little bit deeper because this master audio can be made up of many, many separate audio levels that also need to be whipped into shape. [NOISE] Music, sound effects, voiceovers, ambiance, and any other number of weird sounds that you want to inject into your project, I'm here to judge, all need to be kept in check and balanced accordingly. This is something that's also known as sound mixing. Here are some general decibel levels accepted for each of the previous sound types mentioned. For your overall mix level wants to be around 12 decibels, give or take. Any dialogue in your project you want to be between minus 12 and minus 15 decibels. Your music wants to be around minus 18 to minus 22 decibels. For sound effects, they can be anywhere between minus 10 to minus 20 decibels. These are not hard and fast rules but are a good guide to base your audio levels off when mixing a project. Now if any of your audio levels reach near the maximum limit, which is zero decibels begin to start to distort and lose their quality. This is obviously not what you want. A good way to check if this is happening is to keep an eye on audiometer whilst editing your projects and playing through. Audiometer, which is located here, gives a visual representation of your audio levels in decibels. If at any point during playback we see red, it means that the audio is clipped. It also means there's a good chance you probably don't care about people's hearing and that makes you a bad person. If your audio is clipping, what can you do? First of all, let's set our levels. Select all of the audio in a vocal track and then click here, "Loudness", and then here, ''Auto-Match'' and burn. All of our vocal clips and are now sitting around the correct decibel levels. Now let's do that for the rest of our clips too. We just select Music, Loudness, and Auto-match. That will set it to the right levels against the dialogue to make sure that everything can be heard. Now, let's remix on music different lengths of our sequence. To do that one, you need to make sure you're using Premiere Pro Beta, which you can access from Creative Cloud, and then down to the Beta apps tab here, and making sure that you have Premiere Pro Beta installed. If you do, you can start the music track here. Take this duration box here, and then set the desired time you want to try to be, and you can do that, we have 11, 21, which is the length of our sequence. Press "Enter", making sure it's remixed, box is ticked. As you can see, just like that, your audio track will then be cut and mixed and stretched out to fit the length of your sequence. Finally, let's select a music track once again and automatically duck it against our vocals. This has nothing to do with white on inverts it enjoy bread. Ducking refers to reducing the volume of an audio track in specific segments to allow another audio segment to be heard better. Let's close the Duration tab, select the Ducking, tick box, and here we can choose what we want to duck the track. Again, we've got dialogue, music, sound effects, ambiance, or without an assigned audio type. We went to duck our music against our dialogue up here. So we select this ducking, make sure this box is ticked, click "Dialogue", and then click this, Generate key-frames, and voila, give it a few seconds Generate key-frames. We can see that anywhere there's dialogue to music is automatically key-frame to reduce in volume so the duller can be heard. This happens all the way throughout wherever there's dialogue, you know the changes some of the settings here like sensitivity, the amount that's reduced, and how long the phase take. Pretty good. To recap, you should now have a basic understanding of how to balance audio your levels within your project, why they need to be balanced, and how you can achieve that very quickly using the essential sounds panel. Now we going to have to save time and perfect our audio in our project. Let's move on to color grading. I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Colour Grading - Learn the Lumetri Panel!: Ever wondered why your footage doesn't look anything like the stuff you see in the movies? Me too, to be honest. But that's besides the point. If you don't know how to color-correct and stylize your footage, then you're missing out on a huge chunk of the post-production process. In this lesson, we're going to be covering a brief introduction to the color grading process, have a look at what's going on over in the color workspace, and check out some of the tools that are available within the Lumetri panel. Color grading your footage is like editing a photo, except the photo is moving and isn't actually a photo, it's a video clip. This being said, you still need to adjust your white balance, contrast levels, and saturation before your footage is ready to export. It gives a much more polished look to a final product and gives your work its own unique look. But why should you use it? Maybe you want to correct the exposure of your shots, change the warmth, or add some stylistic colors. Either way, it's a skill well worth learning. What's the process? Generally, once you've finished editing your footage and building out the timeline, one of the last steps would be to grade your footage. There are several ways to do this, but generally, things should run like this. First, there's color correction. This is where we adjust the white balance and exposure of our image. We do this first before making any other adjustments to make sure all of our shots are correctly exposed, and the correct or as close as we can get, white balance. Think of it as applying a primer to your skin before applying a full face of makeup. The steps should be as follows. First, you want to correct your tone and exposure levels and apply contrast if needed. Then you want to adjust the saturation of your image to natural levels. Finally, you want to adjust the white balance of your shot. The main goal here is not to make any artistic or stylistic changes but to get your image look as natural and close to its original look as you can. Then once you've done that, you're going to move on to the color grade in stylistic changes. Once your footage is color corrected, you can then go ahead and add your color grade or any stylistic changes. There's a reason for this exact order and we'll go into it in more detail later when discussing graphs. Here though, we might want to change the hue, saturation, or luminance of individual colors. You might want to adjust our tone curves or use the color wheels, and we may also add creative LUTs to give an overall or feel to our footage. But before we do any of that, let's go for a quick rundown of the tools we have in Lumetri panel, which is broken down into several segments. If you squint slightly, you may even think you're using Lightroom. Let's head over into the color workspace and have a look at the Lumetri color panel and see what we've got. Let's open up the basic correction segment. In here, we can set our color balance like this. We can change our exposure levels and tone like this. Using the white and the selector, this tool here, and clicking on a neutral gray area in that image, we can automatically set our white balance like this, or at least as close as automatically it can get you. This might not be 100 and accurate though, and it's far better to learn to do it properly. The same applies for the automatic tone button, which works like this. We can turn those adjustments on and off using this button here to see a before and after of my color grade. Now let's move into the creative panel here. We can add stylistic adjustments such as color tints, additional saturation, creative LUTs here, and fade here. These are our tints. Looks great. So let's switch those off, close that panel, and we can move into the curve segment. Here, much like in Photoshop or Lightroom, we can adjust our tone curves. Now, you might only want to use these very subtly. This is just for your RGB. We can go through, obviously, red, green, and blue. We can also use hue and saturation curves, which allow us to change certain colors in different ways. We can use the pen tool here to select a color and apply it to the graph, or we can choose the color here and change it manually like this. You can see there the hue of that specific color has been adjusted in the image. We also have options for luma, saturation, and hue. If we go into the color wheels and match segment, we can see we have a useful tool here called color match. Now to do that, we need to select comparison view and select the first clip, this is a reference clip, and a second clip, which is what we want to match it to. We're going to match this shot here to the reference clip. We do that, we have them both selected and we press apply match. It's going to analyze the clip and you can see there it's adjusted the mid-tones and shadows and highlights automatically to try and match the look between the two shots. I think it's done a pretty good job, to be honest. It doesn't always get it right, but if you're looking for a quick fix or a good place to start from, that's a great tool to use. We also have the color wheels, which allow us to adjust our mid-tones, shadows, and highlights individually by either dragging them up or down to change their levels. We can also change the tint of those individual shadows, mid-tones, or highlights like this. This can be really useful for adding very stylistic looks to images. But it's also a very broad way to apply a change. So be careful with that. We also have this tool here which allows you to select a color and apply changes just to that color. You can see here I selected just this color here. We can broaden it by increasing the saturation. This is changing the range of the hue and this is changing the lightness levels. You can see here I've just increased the mask that's being applied. I can denoise it with this tool here, add some blur to the mask, and then also apply my corrections to it. I can decrease there, I can add 10, and I can change the temperature of just that color, and the tint. Add contrast, sharpen it, and saturation. Now, if we remove that, this is not, obviously, how you want it to look, but it's just an example of how you can edit those individual colors with a secondary mask. In just at the bottom here, we have vignette, which is obviously how you want to add a vignette if that's something you'd like to do. Anyway, we can switch all of those off. Now, during that explanation, you may have also noticed I mentioned the word LUT several times as if it was a thing that everyone should know about. This may not be the case, so let me explain. LUT stands for look-up table. This refers to the fact that it consists of a set of predetermined values used to determine the look and color of your image. Think of it as a color preset, but for video. You can create your own LUTs or download other peoples' from the web or your local LUT dealer and exist as small files stored on your hard drive. We have your input LUTs here, and your creative looks here. They can be very easily applied by scrolling through, select the look you'd like, and then you can adjust the intensity here. I don't recommend leaving them at 100 because that's a bit too much, and we can go between before and after by selecting here. It's a super-easy way to just add a creative stylistic look to your footage. To recap, in this lesson, we covered a basic understanding of color grading and the process behind it, we had a look at some of the tools available in the Lumetri panel, and we did a quick explanation of every travel influencer's best friend, the LUT. In the next lesson, we're going to learn about a very important aspect of color grading, which is the Lumetri scopes. We're going to do that by running through a color grading process together. See you there. 14. Colour Grading - Using your Scopes!: In the last lesson, we left off by giving you a little teaser of the lumetri scopes. I know you're all super keen to find out just what they do. So lets get into it. Lumetri panel has a number of waveforms and vector scopes available that allow us to accurately evaluate the brightness and color within our video. But three of them are going to be a whole lot more useful than all of the others; the luma waveform, the RGB parade, and the YUV vector scope. We use these to match the color values of our footage in a visual way and each one has its own use at a different step of the color grading process. The luma waveform will be used to set exposure and tone of our clips and works by displaying signal intensity in the video clip. The horizontal axis of the graph represents a video from left to right and the vertical axis of the graph measures intensity units called IRE. The range starts at zero, which is black, and ends at 100, which is white. The waveform displays the levels of each pixel X location within the video and using this knowledge we can assess if certain areas of the shot are blown out to black or clip into blacks to dark. Now let's move on to the RGB parade. The RGB parade is going to be used to measure the temperature and tint of your footage. It works in a similar way to the luma waveform that we just talked about. It displays the intensity levels of each color but in three separate channels; red, green, and blue. Why did I have to look at the script to know what RGB stood for? What's wrong with me? We can assess the balance of our shot by looking at location of each channel's pixels in relation to one another. Finally, the YUV vector scope which is going to be used to check the saturation and overall balance of our clip. This scope displays the hue and amount of color in an image. Is very similar to a color wheel. Based on location the pixels within this scope, we can assess the saturation of a certain hue within the image being previewed. Now let's run through this process using a clip right now using the graphs to guide us along the way. Let's open up our premier project if you haven't already. Head over to the color workspace along the top here and open up lumetri scopes panel. If it isn't there already we can add it now by going to Window at the top and heading down to lumetri scopes and making sure that it's selected. This is your lumetri scopes panel here. Now before we start grading, I'm going to remove the edits I did to the clips in the previous lesson by selecting them all. Right-clicking and then selecting remove attributes. Now we only want to remove the lumetri color grades that we've added. Let's untick motion, capacity, time remapping, and also the channel volume and panel, and then press "OK". Now you can see it should reset the color grade of our clips back to their original settings. Let's select the clip that we want to edit, which is going to be this one here for now. Remember the steps with the color creation process. So first, we're going to do exposure and contrast. Then we're going to add our tone. Then we're going to add or remove saturation and finally we're going to work on our white balance. We'll begin by setting our exposure and tone. We're going to make sure the luma waveform is being displayed. To do that, we can right-click here and then make sure that we have waveform luma selected here. Now from looking at this waveform, we can tell a few things. If you watch as I adjust the exposure, pictures within the waveform move closer to the top end of the graph, 100 or white and as we decrease it, they move down and closer to zero or true black. Let's adjust this to bring the exposure up slightly because I feel it's slightly underexposed. You can see here these are around the mid-tones of the image and without these adjustments they're slightly under 50. As for me I like to have them brought up just a touch to sit between 40 and 60 mark naturally. Now that I've added one step of exposure here, let's adjust the tone just to bring a bit more dynamic range into the image. We're going to push the whites up here and you can see that those whites are moving up towards 90 or 100. We don't have any real highlights here, for now, so I'm going to let them sit just under 90 which is the maximum range here. I don't want them to clip so I'm keeping off of a 100. I'm also going to bring the blacks down slightly. You can see here they're sit in just off of zero and we don't want them to clip. We can also just click here and move to the left to just make slightly less, we can type in manually the amount we want. I'm going to minus 0.8 and for that would be just maybe minus 7.5. There you go. To just off of clipping this line here which is what we don't want to happen. I also want to add a little touch of contrast in this image and maybe we'll again just bring these blacks up slightly and they're fine there. I'm also going to adjust my highlights here, just to bring them down slightly and with the shadows, I think actually we're going to push the shadows down a bit here. You generally want to go from exposure and a little bit of contrast, adjust your whites and blacks and then adjust your highlights and shadows just for your own preferences. As long as there's nothing clipping here or here, you should be good. Let's just have a look at it before and after. You can see that it's a much more visually pleasing image already. Now we've currently set the exposure and contrast of our image. We want to start work on the white balance. To do that, we're going to change a vector scope from the luma waveform to the RGB parade. To do that, we're going to right-click, select parade RGB here and we're going to hide the luma waveform by selecting again right-click and then de-selecting that. Now, we have just the RGB parade. If we have a look at this on the full screen here, we can tell a few things. First of all, I can tell that the image is slightly colder than it should be. The warmth is a little too far on the blue side and also that the tint is slightly a bit too green because the red here is a lot lower than the blue, which is obviously thrown off balance and the green tint is slightly higher. To fix that, we're going to adjust our temperature here. If you keep an eye on the graph you can see as I bring it into the warm side, the blue starts to decrease and the red starts to increase closer towards 100. Now, we can also look at the image to get a bit of a visual reference too. But what I'm going to do here is just that. After we've done that you can also see that the green channel here has now gone higher than the blue and the red. That also means that we need to put a little bit more magenta into this. As I bring the tint over towards the magenta, so you can see the green comes down then blue go up. It also all balanced out that all in the same region here that all leveled out. That is what you're trying to get with this RGB, a very balanced image with the free parades lining up perfectly. Again, you can't always get it 100 percent perfect but it's a good way to get it into the right ballpark with your warmth. Let's again have a little look at before and after. We can see now it's looking a lot more neutral and balanced in image. Now that we've set the white balance with image, let's get an overview of the general grade and check the saturation it was by taking a look at the YUV vector scope. To do that again, we're going to right-click here, go to Vectorscope YUV, bring it up and then we're going to hide the RGB Parade. Now, let's take a look at this and you can see here we have a few things on this vector scope. We have this line here which is actually the skin tone line If you're working with people or faces in your imagery, this is generally where you want the skin tone of that person to be aligned. You're not always going to get these things perfect so don't focus too much on trying to perfectly balance everything because you'll just waste hours and hours and you'll never get anywhere. We also have this circle, this hexagon here which is actually showing the safety levels for broadcast saturation as recommended and essentially you don't want your saturation levels to exceed this ring. Also obviously you have red, magenta, blue, cyan, green, and yellow represented on the color wheel which we'll see in a bit more detail once we begin to put some saturation into the image. From this image obviously I can tell it's not super saturated because the further out that these pixels extend is the higher the amount of saturation. You can also tell that a lot of the pixels here align towards the side side of the color wheel. We also have a tiny bit of red which I'm guessing is coming from the rocks along the bottom of the image here. When we adjust it we see how those fluctuate and change. What I want to do now is add some saturation into this image and as I do that, you can see how the pixels move further out towards the edge of the vector scope. Now, I don't want to oversaturate the image too much so I'm going put a little bit in, keeping an eye on this image here as well and I think that's a good amount there. I can also show you quickly how the vector scope changes as I adjust temperature intense so I push it to the cold side. You can see that all the pixels move towards the blue and cyan area of the vector scope. As I push it to the warmer side, you can see all the pixels move towards the red and yellow area of the vector scope and the same goes for tin. As I push it towards magenta it moves towards the magenta side and as I push it towards the green side it moves towards the green side on the vector scope. Your exposure, contrast and tone also will affect the pixels on the scope accordingly. For me, I'm pretty happy with how the general look of this image is and I think for now I'm going to leave it there. Now, if you have multiple clips in your sequence that are shot in a similar location where maybe similar exposure and white balance also possible to copy and paste the adjustments over to other clips in the timeline. You can do this by selecting the clip that we've adjustments on it. You can right-click, copy and then select the clip you want to paste the adjustments to, right-click and then choose "Paste Attributes". It'll bring up this window here and you can select the attributes you'd like to paste. Obviously we only want to add the lumetri color so unselect volume, channel, and panner, press "Okay". You can see here it's added those adjustments to this clip now but obviously we don't want that kit to look like that so we're going to remove those for now. Another option when it comes to adding color grades you have this two create and adjustment layer and what that does is it creates a invisible layer that you can apply effects and sides to and then overlay above your footage. Let's create one now by heading to the program panel and selecting this button here and creating a new adjustment layer. Let's name it and make sure that is the correct width and height, say 1920 by 1080, the correct time-base, 25 frames per second and press "Okay". Then we'll name it color correction and then we'll put that into our assets folder and then drag and drop that into the timeline like this. Now, this is essentially a blank piece of footage that I can drag and extend over all of my other footage and we can take the grade from here, this clip we just created and paste it onto here the same way as we did before and then because we have now added this grade to here we can go to the effects panel. Let's look at the effects of this adjustment layer and see what we have. You can see here in the effect controls lumetri color effect has been added and you can see all the changes are there. Now, because we have the grade on here, it means we don't need it here. We can switch it off here by again going to effect controls and turning it off, you scroll over to our other clips we can see that that grade has been added to all of the other clips. Now, this is in the situation where you do something like this because all of these clips are very different and require their own corrections but let's copy and paste this adjustment layer, head to sequences, masters and go to our test sequence where all of the clips are pretty much the same. Paste the adjustment layer in, drag it over the top and you can see here even though this isn't the correct look for these clips, the look has been applied across all of the clips. If we say cut this here and move it away this clip doesn't have the changes and this does. That is how adjustment layers work when it comes to color grading you might want to stack multiple adjustment layers in your sequence with different grades or looks on them, you can just keep doing this and keep adding them in and having different looks and each one is good for testing out different looks. You can hide one and look at another, have a play around there's really a lot of ways to use those super-useful tools. Now, there are several ways to apply stylistic changes. Lots are the easiest and you can download or create these yourself. They tend to change color values and specific saturation levels along with tone intent to create a different feel for your footage after color correction. You can add those to your clips by selecting them, heading to the creative panel, opening the look drop-down bar, choosing your like, I've actually got quite a large selection that I have installed previously, you can scroll through different previews here and select from this preview window by just clicking here and you can change the intensity of the light by dragging this bar to the left or the right. I recommend having it not a 100 percent because it really is a bit too much for most cases. To recap, in this lesson we covered a basic understanding of the three graphs that we're going to be using to color grade our footage and then we've ran through the process showing how each graph works along the way. That's it for color gradient and I'll see you in the next lesson. We're going to be talking about super exciting program called Adobe Media Encoder. See you there. 15. AME + Exporting Like a Pro!: In this lesson, I'm going to introduce you to your new best friend when it comes to exporting in Adobe Premiere Pro or any other Adobe product for that matter, Media Encoder. It does exactly what it says on the team. Media Encoder is your one-stop shop to encode, render, and export any and all footage from any program within the Adobe Suite. Why would you want to use it? Premiere Pro exports stuff just fine. We're sure, but don't you want to do it in a faster and more efficient way? Probably, so keep listening. Media encoder allows you to queue up and prep multiple exports at the same time. Even better, once you finish cleaning every up you can even close Premiere Pro or After Effects or wherever other program is that you have been using freeing up vital memory space on your computer to render these exports even faster. You know what else is cool, Media Encoder makes a cute little beeping sound when it's done rendering your projects. Why wouldn't you want to use it? Essentially, you want to be using Media Encoder if your export is going to be taking up a considerable amount of time or RAM. You have multiple smaller segments that you want to explore or you just want to be cool like me. You can also set up export templates and presets, and book a plan to any export sitting in the render queue, saving you even more time. Let's take a quick look at how to do that, and use some of the other features within Adobe Media Encoder right now. Let's head over to Adobe Media Encoder. We can open up here, and we still have our proxies queued up from earlier in one of our other lessons. What we're going to do is actually remove those by selecting them, and then we can remove. Yes. Now the first thing we want to do is show you how to set up your export templates. We're going to go into Premiere. We're going to select our Test Sequence. We can right click, and Export Media down here at the bottom. We can select the sequence again in our program panel, go to File, and scroll down to Export, Media, and it opens up in the same window. Once we do this, we have a few options. We have here format, which in most cases is going to be H264. Obviously we have various other options, but when it comes to video exports this is generally the codec that you're going to want to use. We have our presets here, a whole bunch of them in fact. We're going to ignore those for now because we're going to create our own custom preset. We have the output name, which is where you name your file as it's exported. To change it, you click. It also lets you select where you'd like to save. We're going to go to Skillshare, our test project folder. We're going to go to Exports, and we're going to name our sequence 0001, which is our project number. We're going to add our client name, Skillshare, and then we're going to add the project name, and that is Test Sequence. It's going to be version 1. It can either be the project name or the name of whatever the asset you're exporting is. Either way, it still links back to the main project, and let's you know which version it is. Then you press Save. You can see that it's changed the output name. We're going to make sure we're exporting video and audio, and we're going to go down here to see our settings. We're going to click across to the Video tab, and you can see here we can change our width and height by de-selecting this box, and changing it here. That de-links those two so they don't stay in ratio, which we don't really want to do. We want to keep them here together so that if we change the width, the height also changes and they stay in the right perspective. But we'll put that back to now. It's 1920, and I keep it at 1080. We can also adjust our frame rate, which we want to keep to match 25 frames per second. Here is where we change the quality of the video. One pass is what you might want to use for a low quality export. Two passes slightly more intensive, and we also can put the bit rate up. For a high-quality export, I might want to change it to VBR 2 pass with a maximum bitrate of 20, and a target bitrate of around 18. We can also change, Use Maximum Render Quality, and then the rest of these things we won't go into now. You're also able to adjust your audio settings, and a variety of other settings such as add in the Lumetri Look or LUT to the export. You can add an Overlay, you add a Timecode, and you can also limit the video. But for now we're just going to stick to the video. Now that I've changed all of my settings to what I'd like them to be. I'm going to save this export by clicking this button here, and then changing it to High Quality Export , 1920 by 1080. Then I can choose to save the effects settings, and the publish settings two, if I like to. That just means that any changes you've made here will be saved, and also any change you've made here will be saved if you tick those boxes. But for now, we just want our export settings to be like that. Once we've done that, if you want to reuse that preset we can click this tab here. You can see along the top, all of our custom presets are saved. Instead of pressing Export as you normally would, what we want to do is add this to the Adobe Media Encoder Queue, we press Queue instead. What that does instead of exploring it from Premiere, it adds it to the queue here, and it's now ready to be exported when you want it to. That's one way of exporting your footage to Media Encoder. Once you're here, you can also adjust the settings of your exports from these tabs here again, and change the preset. We can change the output location, and the name, and we can also change the codec or format. Now, let's try and queue up multiple sequences at once. In a situation where you want to export all of these, instead of going for that process four times, you can simply select all the sequences, right-click, and then Export Media, select your preset here, and then Queue, and it should all be sent to the Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Something else you can do from here, is change the settings of all of them at once by selecting them, and then changing the settings here. Super easy, super useful, and saves you a ton of time. Now we've covered setting up your export templates, and how to bulk edit exports. One last thing we can do is you can also add and in by pressing I, and out, and then using command M or the export shortcut. We can export that small segment there, and also add that to the Queue. Again, if you just really want to export lots of many clips or a whole bunch of sequences at once, Adobe Media Encoder is really good to use. Now, one other thing I want to do, is I want to stop this export by pressing Start Queue. You can see now it's going to run through all of these, one after the other, and render them. Whereas if we did it through Premiere Pro, we'd have to render each sequence one at a time, wait for it to finish before we could begin the next one, and send that to the Queue. Really, I can set all of these renders up, go out and do something else, come back and they should all be finished. I can also close Premiere Pro down like this, and the renders still continues. That saves up RAM, and memory of my computer, and allows the renders to happen a lot faster. Now hopefully, you've all got a pretty good idea of how you can use Media Encoder to your advantage, and you're probably quite excited to get into it. To recap this lesson, we've gone over a brief explanation of what Adobe Media Encoder is, and how you can use it. I've shown you how to create your own Export presets, and use them for bulk exports within Adobe Media Encoder. I've also gone over some of the other basic features of the program. Unfortunately, we're now coming towards the end of this amazing class. I know you've all enjoyed. I'll be seeing you in the next video where we're going to wrap up this class. Peace folks. 16. Fin.: [MUSIC] Well, we've made it to the end of the class. How very efficient of you. Congratulations. Very luck by now, you'll be blazing for your video and animation projects faster than you say yes to a client with too much budget. Do those even exist? But before we wrap up, let's quickly go over some key points for some of the previous lessons. Number 1, set up and customize your workspace. Make sure to do this to streamline your editing process and have all the tools that you need on a regular basis available as you need them. Number 2, customize your keyboard settings. Make sure to customize your keyboards settings and shortcuts to streamline your editing process, and save time on tools you're regularly using once again. Number 3, don't forget to build a project template. Create yourself a project template within Premiere Pro, that contains all the bins and any assets you're going to be reusing on a regular basis. You can then use this to start any new project and save as new. [NOISE] Number 4, make sure to set up some export presets. Again, you can use a Media Encoder for this or have them set up in Premiere Pro. But when it comes to exploring, if you're going to be doing it the same way or you're going over, having a preset means you don't have to re-enter those same settings over and over again. But the most important thing to remember is that there is no one set way to do anything. Your needs and expectations will change from project to project and from person to person. Remember this and adjust your settings accordingly. Now that I've emptied my brain on all of the knowledge on Premiere Pro that I have for you, don't forget to share your before and after screenshots of your workspace and keyboard setups. Let's see what everyone's come up with, and let's compare some notes. I want to steal some ideas from you guys. Hopefully, after watching this class, enough that I have to make Premiere Pro at the back of your hand, and you're running through edits with your eyes closed. That's usually how I do most of my work, and if anyone wants to know where you learn all these mad skills from Lincoln now, you just send in the referral link to this box, cheers. Anyway, it's been an absolute pleasure sharing this time with you. Thank you so much for taking the time to watch my class, and I'll see you in the next one.