Edit Engaging Short-Form Video: Premiere Pro for Complete Beginners

1. Introduction: Hello, I'm Kamal Kondia Makaya and welcome to my short series of courses on my favorite features on Premiere Pro. I use these features and tools during my daily work as a video creator, and I don't know what I would do without them. Each course will be less than 10 minutes long and won't require any previous knowledge. However, I do encourage you to take this time to practice alongside of me, and I look forward to seeing your videos in the project's tab. Let's get into. 2. Syncing Audio From an External Source: Synchronizing audio in Adobe Premiere Pro is actually quite simple. What we're going to do is highlight our two audio clips. In my case, that is the camera audio and the Zoom audio. I'm going to highlight these both, and then I'm going to right click and click synchronize. Then I'm going to hit Okay, and there we go. Already, the audio is synchronized. Now I can decide whether I want to have both audio playing. Hello, this is the test video or if I want just the Zoom audio, which is this audio two, Hello, so this is the test video. Or if I want to hear the camera audio. Hello, so this is test video. What you want to keep in mind is if you have an audio track muted in your timeline, then when you go to Export, this audio is also going to be muted. My preference is to mute the camera audio and keep the Zoom audio. There we go. We have our synchronized audio from an external source. 3. Creating and Customising AI Captions: Alright, so I already have my clip and audio imported and from here, I'm going to go to the text Window. For me, this is located right here on the left side of my screen. If you don't see the text window, then you're going to go to the Window tab at the top of your screen. You're going to click text down here. The next step is to transcribe my audio. I do this simply by clicking the word transcribe. In just a few minutes, you're going to see a paragraph version of my video captions generated. Here is my transcript. Now I want to go in and make sure that there aren't any grammatical or spelling errors throughout this transcript. There will be an opportunity to fix any mistakes later, but it is much easier to do so in the transcript panel that will be down the line in the graphics or captions panels. Once you're satisfied with your transcript, then you're going to click the Create captions button. It is located right here. You'll see a bunch of settings that you can play with. For today, we're going to focus on the maximum length in characters and the duration as well as the lines. If we already had a caption textile saved, then we could select it here under style. For this project, we do not have a style set yet, so we're going to customize our text in a later step. For the maximum length in characters, I like to start at around 19. For the maximum duration, I drop that all the way down to one and for lines, I'm going to click single and then I click Create captions. You'll see your captions here on the left side of your screen. You'll also see them up here in your timeline in orange and you will also see them on your preview pane. At the bottom. Already, I know that I want to make customizations to this text to make it more visible and so we're going to go into the properties panel. Here I'm going to change the font to my custom font. I'm going to increase the font size. I'm also going to change the zone to the center. To make this even more visible, I'm going to add in a background. I'm going to make the background more opaque. I'm going to make it bigger, get a bit more rounded. I'm going to remove the sotto. I'm also going to change the background color. Feel free to customize your text, however you'd like. Once you're happy with your customization, I recommend saving this style as a textf. We do this by scrolling to the top of our properties panel and clicking plus icon, then we're going to say create style. You can choose to either save this textile only to your project or to save it to your local styles to be used across projects. I'm going to save it to both and hit Okay, now you can see that the track style is saved to skillsha test. That means that all of my captions are now set to that textile. The next thing we're going to do is scrub through all of our captions to make sure they're exactly how we want them. For example, once we get to this caption, I would prefer to have Adobe in its own line. What I'm going to do is listen through the Adobe and find where the word Adobe starts, it starts right here. Then I'm going to make a cut. I used Control K, and I'm going to double click on these captions. Now we can see them appearing in the text panel. I'm going to go ahead and delete Adobe from this first one and delete for the from the second one. Now you can see that we have four the Adobe Premiere Pro. Just like that, you have pretty quick and easy AI generated captions that you can customize to your needs and liking. 4. Cutting Footage (5 Ways): When you're in premier pro and you need to cut footage, you have a couple of different options for shortcuts and tools that you can use to get this job done. Looking at our timeline here, I know I want to make a cut right here. I can use the razor tool, which is up here. I can also access it using the C key. And this tool will allow me to make a cut wherever I click. The next option you have for making cuts to your footage is by using Control K. This will allow you to make cuts wherever your playhead is. For example, the playhead is right here, if I do Control K, that is where the cut happens. Next, if you want to cut everything to the left of your playhead, you can use the Q key. Just like that. If you want to make cuts to everything to the right of your playhead, you can use the W key. If your footage is a compilation of multiple distinct scenes, then you can use the scene detection tool. You do this by right clicking your footage, going here to scene Edit detection, and then you can choose whether you want to apply a cut, create a bin, or create markers. In this case, you want to apply a cut and you click Analyze. Just like that, your scenes will be split into multiple clips. 5. Adjusting Position and Scale (Zoom Effect): To create more engaging short form video, we're going to play with the scale and position of our subjects. Before even getting started, I've set a guide on my preview pane. You can choose to follow this step or skip this step depending on your preferences. This guide helps me make sure that the subject is centered at all times. If you'd like to create your own guide, you can do this by first clicking on your preview pane, then going to view Show Guides. If you don't have a guide setup, then you click Add Guide first and then Show Guides. The real first step though, is to go to your Effects panel. You can do this by clicking the FX in the top right corner of your clip or by navigating manually to the Effect Controls panel. If you don't see the Effect Controls panel on your setup, then you want to go to Window. And then scroll down to Effect Controls and click it there and then it will appear. Once you're in effect controls, we want to set a number of keyframes. We're going to set two keyframes at the beginning of the video and two at the end. We do this by clicking the timer icon. We're going to click on position to set the first keyframe and we're going to set a corresponding keyframe for scale as well in the exact same position. Then you're going to navigate your playhead to the end of your clip. And you're going to click these diamond icons on position and scale. Now we have our keyframe set, but they're not doing anything at the moment. Navigate to the beginning of the clip, we're going to click this left arrow. We can navigate back to the end of the clip or to the next keyframe by clicking the right arrow. When we go to our first keyframe, we can see where our clip is starting in position and scale. I'm going to leave mine there because I am happy with the position and scale of my clip at this time. But when I navigate to the end, I want this clip to be slightly bigger. However, I want to still have my subject being the center. I'm going to change the position of the clip to recenter the subject. I'm also going to move the subject down a little bit so that there is more of a gap between the top of my head and the top of the clip. We can scrub through that is how the clip looks. Now I want to apply the same Zoom effect to every other click in the video. I do this by copying this clip. You can also use Control C and highlighting the rest of my clips. Now I can right click and paste attributes, or I can do Control V to do the same thing. What I'm copying over is the motion, and I'm going to hit Okay. Now the same keyframes have been added to every other clip in the timeline. Just like that, you've made your short form videos more engaging by changing the position and scale of your clip over time. I look forward to seeing your edited videos in the project tab. 6. The Final Video (Project Example): Hello, so this is the test video for the Adobe Premiere Pro for complete beginners short courses. Throughout these short courses, we're going to be editing this clip and making it more engaging. I look forward to seeing your projects. 7. Class Project & Conclusion: Now it's up to you. Now is your chance to practice the skills and tools that we discussed in this class. And when you're done, feel free to share a screenshot of your timeline or even your edited video in the projects tab. I would love to see what you've been working on and to interact with you more. And if you're interested in learning other beginner skills and tools for Adobe Premiere Pro, feel free to check out my teacher profile. I'll see you in the next course.