Pro Video Editing Workflow

1. Edit Like a PRO: What is going on, everyone? Welcome to my latest Skillshare course. My name is PJ May. I am a video editor and creator, used to be a production assistant for the Draw with Jazza YouTube channel, and today I'm going to be running you through my video editing workflow. Now I know that might not sound like the most interesting thing you could be dedicating your time to, but it's probably the most important aspect of video creating just in general. This course is all about making you as efficient and as effective and as productive as possible when it comes to creating videos. Whether you're a freelancer looking to get more clients, maybe you create videos for fun, maybe you have a YouTube channel, whatever it is, the whole point of this course is helping you streamline the creative process of making videos and help you pump out content faster. This course is going to be about everything in the post-production stage of creating, so everything after filming. But if you are interested in getting some of my personal tips on filming cinematic videos and filming a little bit more professional standard, then go check out my other course here on Skillshare, where I give you a bit of an introduction into the basics of filming cinematic video. In this series, we're going to cover everything. We're going to cover file management, which I know might not sound that interesting, but it's important. Just shut up and watch it, please. I'm also going to give you a brief introduction to Premiere Pro and show you how you can tailor the program to work for you and make things as comfortable as possible. I'm also going to run you through my different stages of editing, so we're going to cover everything from rough cuts to refinement. We're even going to cover export setting. By the end of this, you'll have everything you need to know to get your videos Internet-ready. This course is going to benefit you regardless of your skill level, whether you're a professional or an amateur or completely new to this; whatever it is, this course is going to benefit you because this workflow is very similar to what I was using when I was working for a big professional YouTube channel where we needed to be pumping out multiple high-quality videos every week without fail. This workflow, it's tested. It works. If you follow along with this, it will help you out. If this sounds like something that can benefit you, I look forward to seeing you in the first video. If not, well then, go watch it anyway, you got nothing better to do. Plus, if you use the link in the description or in my bio or wherever it is you're watching this video, you'll also get a free unlimited all access trial of Skillshare where you can watch literally any course they have on there. You'll be able to educate yourself on painting or cocktail mixing or other stuff. There's a lot on there. They have a lot on their and if you decide that it's not for you, you don't like it, you don't want to pay for it, you can cancel at anytime without paying a cent. So it's a win-win situation. If you use that link, I also get a little bit of a kickback. It gives me a bit of a commission, so I'd appreciate it if you want to use that. But if not, it's cool. With all that being said, I'll see you in the first video. Yes, I will. First, go on. Go. 2. Get Organised: The whole point of this Skillshare course is to teach you how to be more effective with your time. Teaching you how to save time because if you want to become a more professional video editor and how I define professional is someone who makes money from whatever they're doing. If you want to become a professional you need to understand that time is money. Put it this way, if you arrange a specific timeframe, like a deadline for a project to be finished, you can't go over that timeframe because if it's your fault, if you went over it, if you were just lazy, you didn't manage time well, you can't charge them more for that that was on you. So the more time you spend working on it past that deadline, that's time you are not getting paid for, so you're losing money on that job now. You'll notice if you really start to get into this and if you start to work more consistently, you'll get a lot of jobs that are very time sensitive. They have to be done before a certain deadline. Sometimes you don't get very much time to work on a project at all. You really need to be effective with your time and hopefully through this course you're going to figure out how to do that. I believe the most important place to start is here on your desktop and getting everything nice and organized. So that's where going to focus on this video. Something you're going to realize very quickly when you start video editing more and more, whether you're doing it for your own YouTube channel or you're doing it for clients, whatever it is, you're going to notice you're going to build up a lot of footage very quickly. There's nothing worse than being in the middle of a project then realizing you need a specific image or a specific song then digging through a messy hard drive trying to find this one particular thing. I was talking to a friend about this and he was like, just remember the name of the file and type it into the search thing and you'd be able to find it. You try to remember the name of every single Blackmagic RAW file you get or Canon video file. You can't remember them all, so you need to have them stored automatically in a place that's just easy to get to. Let's take a look at my desktop here and you can see that ain't much really going on. I don't keep much out here. I know some people like to save all their projects all over the screen and I can't do it, man. That's just not my style. I like to keep everything sorted into folders and you can see that. These are my main folders here. These are the things that everything's going to be stored on, these are the things I'm going to be looking at in this video. Before we do that though, let's just head over here. I want to talk about my two different storage locations. I have two different storage locations in my PC. The first one we'll talk about is this hard drive here. This is just a standard regular two terabyte hard drive. This is just used for storage. This is where I just store most of the projects that I've finished or that I'm passively working on, we'll get more into that in a little bit. Then my other drive here is a 500 gig SSD. Basically what I keep on here is just the bare essentials. I keep my editing programs. There's a couple of games as well. I only keep the project that I'm currently working on in this folder. Again, we'll go into more detail on this later. I have an SSD, which I do my editing off because SSDs are faster than regular hard drives. We'll come back to all of this in a second for now though, let's check out this archive folder here. Basically this archive folder, this is stored on the two terabyte hard drive, and this is where I keep all of my completed projects. Once I finish the edit and I've done all the rendering and I've uploaded the video and released it and done all of that, when I'm completely done with it, I take it off the SSD and chuck it here into this folder. You can see there's not really much here at the moment that's because recently I had filled this hard drive completely up and I have to move everything off onto an external drive. That's my process every few months or however long it takes to completely fill this hard drive, I'll take everything off it and chuck it on an external drive. I like to have all of my more recent videos stored on the computer where they're easy to get to if I need to call back to an old video or get a piece of specific B-roll that I shot recently that would work good for the next video that I'm working on, like whatever it is, it's always really handy to have these older or more recent projects easily accessible. Let's move on to this folder here. This is my assets folder. We're going to be spending quite a bit of time in this folder over the next couple of videos because this is really important and this is going to save you a whole heap of time. One way that I like to save time on my videos is to have all of my most frequently used files or assets stored in a really easy to find place, so I can constantly go back to. I have things like background music and sound effects and lots for color grading and my end cards for the videos. I have all of that stored in this assets folder and that gets stored in a Premiere Pro Template Project, which I'm going to show you how to create later on. But that's all there so that I can just constantly pull from them whenever I need to use them. So pretty much in every single video that I make without fail, I'm using LUTs, I'm using background music, and I'm using sound effects. The other great thing about this, and one reason I don't store it on a Cloud or whatever is because I can copy this entire video assets folder, chuck it on an external hard drive. If I ever need to go somewhere and edit on my laptop, I have instant access to all of my assets right away. I don't have to redownload anything. I don't have to worry about having Internet, because they're not stored on a Cloud service or whatever, I can just get them instantly off that drive and it's all there. That's it for how I organize all my files and how I keep everything nice and organized. Now we're going to move on to creating a Template Premiere Pro project. 3. Pr Template: One little trick that I'm going to show you guys that I got from when I was working at Draw With Jazza is creating a Premiere Pro template that we can use every time we start a new project. Now the reason I like doing this so much is because it just saves a whole heap of time. Basically this template that we're going to create is going to have in it already all of our assets that we commonly use so all of our background music, all of our sound effects, overlays, things that we would use pretty much every single video that's going to be all included in this template so that we don't have to go through and such for it every single time we want to use it. It's going to be already in there. I don't know what I just said but you know what I mean. If you're not using Premiere, if you're using something like DaVinci Resolve, or Final Cut, or whatever the other programs are that are out there, you can still do the same thing. You can just create a template project but I use Premiere, so I'm going to show you how to do that inside Premiere. When you've opened it up, hit "New Project". We're going to name it something. This might seem a little bit complicated, but I'll explain why in a little bit. We're going to go 00-00-00_Title. I'll explain why in a little bit. Then Location, we're going to hit "Browse", we're going to go over to our Asset folder and we're going to select that and keep that in there. When you load up Premiere, it's going to open up a workspace. This I think is the default one, I never use this. Something that's really cool about Premiere is the fact that you can create custom workspaces. I highly recommend doing this because this is just going to keep things nice and organized, nice and neat. You don't need to have every single Premiere window open like I just the bare minimum out here, so I'll show you how I set things up. This is my default Premiere template workspace thing that I'm always using. I add it with two monitors so you can see that's why it's extra big, but I'll explain what all of this does. This window here is my program monitor, this is where you see the edited version of the video. This is my audio meter here. This is my timeline but I like to have my workspace setup, so the timeline takes up as much real estate as possible, so I like to have it as long as possible. Usually will like to have it as big as possible to like this tall so that I can see as much of the timeline as possible. I think that really helps me in my personal workflow. Up here, I've got my Effects panel here which I also am going to go into detail in this course. But I recommend setting up a favorites folder in here that has all of your frequently used video effects and transitions and stuff. Then the effect controls panel, pretty self-explanatory. Over this side, I have my Project panel here. This is where all of the footage and everything gets stored and my Lumetri Color and essential graphics as well. Then over here, this is the source monitor. This isn't something that everyone uses, but I like to use it. If you have a really long video clip but you know that you only need a tiny little bit out of it, instead of putting the whole thing over here on your timeline and cutting through it and trying to find that one little bit, you can put it in the source monitor and find that little bit to set an in and out point and just take that little tiny piece that you need and put that straight on the timeline. Then down here, this is my Lumetri Scopes. Again, that's good for color grading. Now I understand that not everyone is going to have a dual monitor display, some of you might just have a single monitor, or some of you might have an ultra-wide, or some of you might just be working from a laptop, so I'm going to show you this display here which is the workspace I have setup when I'm using my laptop to edit. We can say I have basically all the same windows and stuff, it's just they're all crammed into a small space. But what you will notice is the timeline here, this whole thing here, this takes up as much space as possible because I like to have a really big timeline. Once you have a workspace and a setup that suits you best, now we're going to move on to adding assets. We're going to create a new thing. We're going to call this one VIDEO. Let's call this one Music and then the last one for sound effects. Then let's create another one and call that Misc. Those catch up random stuff in there. I wonder how many people hate me now for making this one all capitals and then the rest. I wonder if that's going to annoy people. I'm not going to change it though, because I am that guy. I'm not going to. No, let's move on. In the video folder here, I'm not going to really add much. One thing we will do in here though is create a sequence. This is important. There's a bunch of sequence presets you can choose from but we're just going to go over here to Settings and we're going to create our own custom one. Our frame, you can set to whatever you want. I like to set it to 23.976 or just 24 frames a second, that's the cinematic standard. That's just what I do because this is what I'm used to, but you can have it set to whatever you want and then the resolution. I have this one here set to 1080, so it's 1920 by 1080 full HD. That's what I primarily uploading, however, I do have two versions of my Premiere template set up. I have a 1080 version, but I also have a 4K version. You can always go back and change this later, but I just think it's easier just to have it all done right from the beginning. The name here though, I do call this Main and then I just hit "Okay". Then there you go. Now I have that automatically in there. There's a timeline already created every time I want to start a new video, I can just instantly start dragging things onto this timeline. That's all that I keep in the Video folders. Now let's move on to the Music folder. What I like to put in here is all my background music. In the Assets folder you can see I have a folder called Music Library, and then in here I have subdivided different genres and stuff. You can see there's quite a few songs in each thing like this, there is a fair bit of stuff. Instead of trying to get through browsing through these folders every single time, dragging it in, and then finding out I don't like that particular one and then get rid of it, this is much simpler, I'll show you what you can do. You put your Music folder in here, and then what you can do is open up all of the files here. Double-click on it, it's going to open them up in your source monitor here. You can listen to them and find the one you want really quickly because you just double-click and each different song will play, it doesn't matter where it is. You can listen to it and then when you like it, you can just drag it straight down onto the timeline and then it's ready to go, you can edit straight away. Then something else you can do, say I only want a certain part of the song straight away and I already know is just this bit I can hit "I" and set my in point and then over here I can set O and that will set my output. Then I can drag that on and now it's just drag that specific section of the song onto the timeline without dragging the whole thing. Then you can see I'll add all of my sound effects into my sound effects folder and all of those are there. Again, same thing I can just bring them up in the source monitor and it's all there ready to go. The miscellaneous folder is more for just random assets. I put my end cards in there for example, or I might put random images that I sometimes will use or whatever it is, it's just certain things that don't really fit as music or sound effects and I can just chuck them in there, so it's just random stuff. But random things that I use frequently enough if that makes sense. That's really it for that so then I'll close it off and then I'll head over to my assets page. You can see this is the one we just created. I'll make a copy of this and I'll also put it in my Current Project folder here. I like to chuck it in there as well, because it just again saves time. So I can instantly open this up, create a new project folder, which we're going to do in the next video, and then that template is already here for us to use. That's how you create a template project, it's a really simple thing you can do. It might take you a little bit of time to set up at the beginning, especially building out an assets library and doing all that stuff. But I'm telling you the amount of time it will save you in the long run and over time, it's so worth it. I can't recommend doing that enough. That's it for this video now let's move on to setting up a project folder. 4. Starting the Project: This video is going to be a pretty quick one, but this is another one of the simple little things you can do. This is going to save you a bit of time, and that's what we're all about in this course. I'm going to head over to the current project folder here and open it up, and we're going to create a new folder. There's a very specific naming convention that I like to use. It might be little bit of overkill, but I think this is just another way to keep things organized easily, so I'll show you what we do. We're going to start off with the year, then we're going to go the month, and then we're going to go with the day, today is the 25th. I'm going to go underscore and we're going to just title it whatever we want to title it. Now, the reason I do this is because when I eventually archive this video when it's finished, it'll automatically have everything sorted in chronological order. Now, I know the easier way to do this would just be to just sort it by date in the actual file explorer thing. But this way it's already done, and I think this is just a very simple way to do it, and I can just look at the titles of the video, see what the title is and the date that it was worked on, is just simple. You don't have to do it this way, this is just the way I like to do things. Now I'm going to go inside this and I'm going to create a new folder, and I'm going to call this folder bin. Now, something you're going to notice in this video is there's going to be a few folders within folders. It might seem a little bit convoluted, but I'll explain why I do it like this in a bit. Let's go inside this bin folder, and here is where we're going to separate all of our footage into different categories based on what camera it was shot with. Often times in my videos, I'm shooting with multiple cameras, I might be doing screen recordings like I'm doing for this Skillshare course. I might have time lapses and I might have beta. All of those different things, it ends up piling up to be a lot of footage. Now, you could always just chuck all of it into this bin folder and have everything here and do it that way. I don't like doing it that way personally. I'll break things down in a couple of ways. I'll sort it out by camera, what camera it was shot on, whether it was my Blackmagic camera, Canon camera or a GoPro. I'll also break it down into whether it was talk to camera footage or if it was B-roll footage. Let's set up a couple of photos in here. Let's go. The first primary camera is going to be my Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Camera. Why did they name it such a big stupid name? Then we'll say we have a GoPro. Then let's also say we have screen recording, and then let's say we also have a B-roll folder, and I didn't label that number 4, that's going to trigger people. Then what I'll do is I'll take all of the footage from the Blackmagic camera and copy that all straight into this folder, and I'll do the same for the GoPro, and the screen recording, and then B-roll footage. Now, sometimes with B-roll, I'll have again, multiple cameras. There's a couple of ways you can do it. You could go in here and then again subdivide all the B-roll footage into what camera it was shot on, or you could go in here and in the Blackmagic one have talk to camera and B-roll. You could do it any number of ways. This is just the basic way to show you that separating things in terms of what camera it was shot on is going to make things so much simpler for you. Here's an example of my bin folder that I used for a recent project that I just did, and you can say I have it split into different cameras. I have my 80D and then like Blackmagic camera, and then I also have two different folders for B-roll. That was just because I'd shot this B-roll on one day, and then I shot B-roll again on another day, so I just had to split. When I imported it into Premiere, I didn't have to sort through the old stuff to try and find the new stuff. You can see when I go inside these, there's a fair bit of footage, and it would be a pain to, for example, like these Blackmagic files here. If I had all of these in one folder, that would be a lot of stuff to just manually sort through and that just wouldn't be fun. I keep everything subdivided just to keep things simple. Once all of the footage has been imported and sorted into the folders, now we're ready to start the edit. What we're going to do is go back to the current project thing here, we're going to take a copy of the Premiere folder template thing that we made before. We're going to paste that inside the project folder, and we're going to rename it to be the same as the project folder itself. We'll just rename that like that and now we're ready to start the edit. In the next video, that's what we're going to do. 5. Rough Cut: Now we're finally going to actually get into doing some editing. The first part of this is going to be pretty straightforward. This is going to be the rough cut stage of the edit. I'm not going to go into full detail on my editing process. I'm probably going to do that in a future Skillshare course. But basically you can break it down into three basic stages. So first off, you have your rough cut, then you have the refinement stage, and then we have like the exporting, and the rendering and all of that. This first video here, we're going to work on the rough cut stage. The video I'm going to be editing in this video now is one of the videos you've already watched in this course. This is going to be the organizational section of this course. So that's what we're going to add Es, so the naming convention is a little bit different, but that's just because of the way I've structured this whole Skillshare thing. Anyway, we're going to jump into Premiere, so we'll just open up this folder here, and start setting it up. You can see here already installed on this template folder here is all of the background music and sound effects, and that's already in here. Remember we set all that up before when we created this Premiere template to work from. So now what we're going to do is go back to our browser here, and we're going to grab this bin folder. Now inside here, we have two different things. We've got our Blackmagic camera files and then we have the OBS screen recording. We're going to take this whole bin folder here and drag that into the video section. It's going to import it and now we're ready to go. So it's all in here. See? We have all of our footage ready to go. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to take our OBS recordings here and drag them onto the timeline. You can see we get this warning coming up here. So basically what this is saying is the settings of the clip we just dragged on don't match the settings of the timeline that we set up. Okay, so it's not the resolution. I recorded this at full HD. It's the frame rate. The frame rate is different. So if you remember, when we were setting up this Premiere template, we set the frame rate to be 24 frames a second. You can see here, our OBS recordings were recorded at 60 frames a second. Now this doesn't really make much of a difference. I'm just going to click cape existing settings and that's going to just change that. But if you get that warning, that's usually what it is, it's either the frame rate or the size of the image. Now we're going to drag our Blackmagic footage onto here so that one will go with that one. Then this will go with this one. What a perfect freeze-frame that is. The reason this looks so zoomed in here is because I shot this in 4K on this camera that you're watching right now. This timeline is set to be full HD, so it's 1920 by 1080. So what we're going to do is we're going to highlight both of these and we're going to right-click on them and we're going to go set to frame size. You can see here, didn't do a perfect job. We can see there's like little gaps. We're going to go to effect controls here. We're going to just select one of these and we'll just change the scale a bit, so it fits. Then I'll copy that, then go over here and paste it. Now they fit. It's all nice and good looking. We have two different things going on here. We've got a talk to camera like face version and then we have the screen recordings. Now, I need to do a couple of things here, but the primary thing I need to do when I'm shooting with multiple audio sources and multiple camera angles is sync up that audio. So we're going to highlight both of these clips and right-click. We're going to go to synchronize, make sure audio's selected and then just hit "Okay". This is going to basically just sync up the audio for you. Now it's not always perfect, especially if the frame rates are different, sometimes you might have to go in and manually tweak it. Just make sure you check. So the way we check it is we look up here where I've done my clap syncs and we just listen so we shouldn't hear any echos. We've done that. Now I'm going to just highlight my OBS recordings, right-click, and then click on "Link." Delete that audio because I don't need it. Something I like to do as well is just change the color of the different cameras that I use, just makes it a little bit easier to tell things apart. Once my audio is at a good level, now we're going to move on to the actual rough cut of the edit. Basically what I'm going to do here is just cut down everything that doesn't need to be in there. All the mistakes, all of the mess ups, all of the random bits of like rambling that I tend to do, and I cut all of that down and hopefully get this to be just a rough version of what the finished video will be. In this stage, I'm not doing anything like color grading. I'm not adding background music. I'm not doing any fancy cuts or transitions, I'm not adding any zooms. I'm just cutting it down to size. This is going to help me get an idea of the flow of the video. This is a really important stage. I'm going to go through now, I'm going to cut this all down and then see what we end up with. Currently we have just over 13 minutes of footage. When I cut through all of this, it should end up being quite a bit shorter. I'm going to go through it and do that now. That was the rough cut. So that didn't really take too long. We were at like 13 minutes, 25 seconds, something like that. You can see now we're at like six and half minutes, which is pretty good. A lot of that was just mistakes and there was some stuff that I thought didn't really need to be in there, so I cut that out too. This isn't perfect. Like there are still some little tweaks and little things that I think could still be cut out and I can tighten things up a little bit. But generally in this refinement stage, it's just about keeping the important things in and then I can tidy it up in the next stage, which we're going to cover in the next video, which is the refinement stage. 6. Refining the Edit: The next stage of my editing process is the refinement stage. Now, this is the time-consuming part. This is going to take the longest, and this is where things really start to come together. This is where we're going to come up with our finished product. Now look, we could break this down even more into more little steps and I could really run through my editing process, but that's not what this is about. I'm showing you my entire workflow as a whole and then in the future I might bring you guys along for a more detailed look at actually how I edit these videos and some of the techniques I use. But for now I'm just going to go through and do all of the more fiddly things, add in the background music and transitions if they're needed, and screen overlays and stuff that. That should turn this into a finished product. First thing I'm going to do, I'm going to go through, do a quick pass on this, do some more refining, tighten things up a little bit, cut out anything else that needs to be cut. I'm also going to be adding in l and j cuts if you don't know what they are, they're just a really useful way to help with pacing of a video. They keep things moving nice and quickly. Mostly going to add in some zooms and some punch ins and stuff that. Then also whatever like screen overlays I need to add in and color grading as well. That'll be probably the last thing we do. I'm going to get stuck into it. That's basically it. When this is done, we'll have a finished video and then we can get on to doing some of the other stuff like exporting and all of that. Okay, so I finished my refinement stage of this edit. Let me run through a few of the things that I did to sort of tweak this out. Now something you're going to notice is the final length of this is now just under six minutes. I trimmed off about 30 seconds, which is what I sort of estimated I'd be able to trim off. That was through a combination of two things. Firstly, I just cut out a bunch of stuff that I don't think needed to be there. It was still unnecessary. Then the next thing I did was I added some l and j cuts. So this here is an example of a j cut. You can see here the audio layer of this clip is starting while this clip is still playing. So that's a j cut. You can see here if I sort of move my mouse here, you can see this little intersection line here. It looks a J. That's what's called a j cut. If it goes the other way, it's an L. It's a very subtle thing. You're not going to notice it if I didn't bring it up. But now as you're watching this, you're going to notice every single time it happens, you'll pick up on it. But it's a really, really useful sort of tool to use to help keep the pacing nice and snappy. Also added in just some graphic things. I'll probably end up adding a little bit more through this as I tend to refine it a little bit more. But just for an example, I'm just going to save this as done. Also added in my background music. Now I just kept this very simple. Because this is a Skillshare course and it's meant to be just more instructional and all of that, I don't want the background music to be too distracting. I kept the volume quite low on it, and I just used the same song and just looped it. That's how I do it with this. I've picked a song that I like. It has the nicest chill beat to it and it's not too distracting, like I said. Then the final stage of the edit was going through and adding the color grade. So you can see here if I click on this Blackmagic clip here and then head over to master, if I turn this off, you can see this is what the image looked like before I did any work to the colors and you can see it's a bit flat, it's a bit boring. If when I turn that back on, you can see there's a lot more almost saturation, just it looks a lot better. That's what I'm trying to say. Now you'll notice up here in the effects control panel, there are two different sort of sub-menus. See? So you've got main here, which is where you can control the scale and the positioning and all of that. Then you have master. Now I make sure that I do all my color grading inside this master menu, so I'll show you what I mean. If I go over here to Lumetri Color, and if I click on main, okay, and I do my tweaks here, you can see I can adjust this clip here, but then if I move over to the cut that's gone, it only affected this one clip. But now you can see if I go over here to master and I do the same thing. So let's just make this super yellow. You can see now that's affected everything all the way through the video. That's what happens when you do that to the master clip. So that's just something I do to help speed up the process a little bit. I don't do my color grade at the beginning of the edit because then that's just more information that the computer has to process and play through all the time. So now that we've gone through and done a rough cut and our refinement phases of the edit, now we're ready to move on to the final stage, which is the rendering and the exporting of our project. 7. Exporting: Here we are, final step. We're going to be exporting and rendering our finished video. Let me show you how I do this. Rendering and exporting can get a little bit confusing because there's just so many different settings and things you can do that's going to impact the quality of the final video. Honestly, that can change even from when you've shot the video in the first place. There's a lot of things to cover. I'm not going to go into too great detail here, we're just going to go with a very simple use case. We're going to assume in this video that you're uploading your video to YouTube at a resolution of 1920 by 1080 because that's the standard. We're going to just assume that's what you'd be doing, but I highly recommend checking out this video from D4Darious on YouTube. He has a really good way of explaining all the encoding settings and all of that to make sure that you're getting the best quality or getting the quality that you're looking for out of your video. I'm just going to cover some of the basic settings, we're not going to cover everything in [inaudible] , I'm just going to tell you the things that you need to know to get the good-quality. The first way of doing this is through Premiere. Once we've finished our thing, we go up here to File and we're going to find Export. I'm going to click "Media". That's going to bring up this menu here. Now, here is where all of our export settings are. Like I said, there's a lot of stuff here. Again, check out that video from D4Darious, he will explain all of this in really good detail, we're just going to cover some of the basic thing. Starting up here, Format, we want to have that set to H.264, and then we're going to just have this preset here. We are going to leave it at Match Source and a High bitrate, but there's a bunch of options here. You could just click this "YouTube 1080" preset down here, and that's going to work fine. I used to do that, but now I'm a little bit more focused on getting the best quality I can. I'm just going to leave it like that. Here we're going to go to output name and we're going to choose what we want to call the final thing. I usually will just call it the same as the project file. Let's just call it Final. Now, down here in the video section here, we're going to change a few things. The resolution, we're just going to have it set to Match Source, so it's going to just stay the resolution that we've edited at, which is 1920 by 1080, same with our frame rate, all of that. Then we'll check render maximum bit depth and scroll down here to encoding settings. We're going to uncheck this and we're going to set this to High, and we'll set the level here to 4.2. Then we'll scroll down until we get to our bitrate settings. Now, this is an important one, and this is something that I only learned recently. We're going to change this to VBR-2 pass. Basically, what this is going to do is it's going to analyze the video on the first pass and then on the second pass it's actually going to start rendering things. Then here we're going to change our target bitrate to 30 and our maximum to 50. Basically what we're doing here is controlling how much compression there is. When we render a video, when we export it, what we're doing is we're compressing everything down. Then when we upload it to YouTube again, YouTube really compresses the video down. This is why sometimes you'll notice when you uploaded something to YouTube, the quality looks like nothing like what you shot or what you edited because YouTube really compresses video files down. We want to make sure that we render this with as much information as we can, and then when it gets compressed to YouTube, it's not losing too much quality. Again, watch that video from D4Darious. He explains it really well, so definitely go check that out. But this is basically what we're going to be sticking to here. Then we just hit "Use Maximum Render Quality", and then when we're ready to go, we just hit "Export". Once this is done, then Premiere will render out the project and it's ready to go. Now, the thing is doing it in Premiere means you're not going to be able to use Premiere while it's rendering something. Once you hit "Export", you can't use Premiere anymore. You have to wait until the video is done and then you can get back to editing another project or whatever it is. Say we're working on a multiple video project like the Skillshare Course, for example. What I'd want to do then is hit "Q". Now, when I hit "Q", it's going to open up Adobe Media Encoder. Basically, what this is is it's a program designed to render out your projects while you're working on something else. Now, obviously this is going to depend on what your computer is like, and if you can handle working on a project while you're rendering out something else, but this is a way you can do it. This is going to carry over all of those settings that we just changed in Premiere and it's going to save it up here in the Custom. If we click on this and then move over to here and click on this, we can save this as a preset, call it whatever we want, and then next time when we want to render a project, we can use these exact same settings just by clicking on that preset, and that'll apply all of those settings and it's automatically done. You can queue up as many projects as you want, and it may even encode it. It'll go through and render those in the background while you're working on something else. That's always a nice thing to be able to do. Again, it depends on what your computer can handle, but for the most part, it's a really good feature to have, something that I personally use a lot. That's it for this course, this is a little informational stuff. In the next video, we're going to cover your project. But I hope this was helpful. I hope you got something out of this. I hope you learned a little bit from my workflow. I know this wasn't like a technical skill, course, but I think this is just important. Developing a really solid workflow, I think is more important than becoming the best editor in the world right away. If you can really nail a good efficient workflow, that's going to really help you stand out, and meet deadlines, and just be a more appealing person to hire. I hope this offered you something, let me know what you thought down below. Make sure you head over to my YouTube channel and check that out on youtube.com/ pjmay. Let me know as well what other things you'd like to see from me. I do want to do a really detailed editing course here on Skillshare. Let me know if you'd be interested in seeing that. Yeah, that's pretty much it. Thank you for watching. I'll see you over in the next video where we're going to run through your project for this course. 8. Project: So there it is. That is my entire video editing workflow. This is something, for me, that personally changes a lot and it's been evolving over time. But this is generally the process I always follow. I kind of adapted this from when I was working at Draw with Jazza. This is basically workflow that we followed. As for your project, it's pretty simple. I want you to create a short two to three minute video detailing your current workflow and some of the things that you think this course could help you improve on, and maybe some little tricks and stuff that you use yourself. It would be cool to share them with everyone else. I'm really curious to see what you do and what you thought of this course, but that's it for this course. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you got something from it. If you want to see more of me and what I do, make sure you head over to my YouTube channel, youtube.com/PjMay. I make content all about self-development and just figuring stuff out. Also follow me on Twitter and Instagram, and make sure you share this course with someone who you think can benefit from it. We all know someone who's just completely unorganized, and this might help them out. Make sure you share that with them, all right. Thank you all for watching. Hope you enjoyed it and, yes, I'll see you in the next one. All right, later. [MUSIC]