Premiere Pro Tutorial for Beginners | FULL COURSE

Summary

Gavin Herman presents a practical beginner’s course in Adobe Premiere Pro. The course focuses on common editing tasks and hands-on examples rather than covering every feature. It moves from project setup and basic editing through color, audio, captions, and animation.

1. Set Up a Project and Understand the Interface

• Organize files before editing: Create a project folder on an SSD if possible, with separate folders for media and Premiere project files. SSDs generally offer faster read/write speeds than hard drives.
• Adjust useful preferences: The instructor recommends enabling automatic saves every five minutes, keeping multiple project versions, using hardware-accelerated decoding, and enabling automatic clip transcription. He also demonstrates setting media scaling to “Frame Size,” managing cache files, and allocating sufficient memory to Premiere.
• Create a project and choose a workspace: The main panels include:
  • Project: Imported media and project assets.
  • Timeline: Where clips are assembled and edited.
  • Program Monitor: Playback of the edited sequence.
  • Source Monitor and Effect Controls: Previewing source footage and adjusting effects.
  • Tools and Essential Graphics: Editing clips and creating or modifying graphics.
• Set up a sequence: Dragging a clip to the timeline can create a sequence. Sequence settings include frame rate, frame size, color space, audio, and video previews. The instructor recommends keeping footage at a consistent frame rate when practical.

2. Assemble and Edit a Basic Video

• Import footage and audio into the Project panel, then drag clips onto the timeline.
• Enable timeline snapping to make clips meet cleanly. Separate video from unwanted audio with Unlink, then delete the empty audio tracks.
• Trim clips by dragging their edges or using the playhead and keyboard shortcuts:
  • Q: Remove material before the playhead.
  • W: Remove material after the playhead.
  • Ripple Delete: Close a gap while removing it.
  • A: Select clips forward from a point on the timeline.
  • C: Use the Razor tool to make a cut.
• Add Cross Dissolve transitions from the Effects panel. Shift+D applies the selected default transition to selected clips. Transitions can be lengthened or shortened by dragging their edges; the instructor suggests using shorter transitions when appropriate.
• Create titles with the Type tool, then adjust font, size, and alignment in Essential Graphics. Duplicate text layers for separate clips and change their wording as needed.
• Add shapes with the shape tools and adjust their position and appearance. Use Nest to combine related layers so they behave as a single clip—for example, to help multiple graphics fade together cleanly.
• Add sound effects and adjust levels with Audio Gain. Use keyframe handles to fade audio in or out rather than letting it stop abruptly.

3. Use Green Screen, Keyframes, Stabilization, and Export

• Green-screen keying: Apply the Ultra Key effect, sample the green with the eyedropper, and refine the result with matte cleanup. Place the replacement footage on a lower video track.
• Animate a reveal: Nest the background footage, then set scale keyframes so it grows into view in sync with the opening of a foreground door. Keyframes record values at different points in time, allowing Premiere to animate between them.
• Stabilize shaky footage: Apply Warp Stabilizer and let Premiere analyze the clip. Stabilization may crop the edges, so check that important content remains visible.
• Export: Set in and out points to define the portion to export, then choose the relevant range in Export. The example uses high-quality 1080p H.264 with both video and audio enabled.

4. Correct and Grade Color

• For footage shot in a flat C-Log 3 profile, apply a Canon C-Log-to-Rec.709 conversion LUT as an input LUT. Footage already in Rec.709 does not need this conversion.
• Use Lumetri Color controls to adjust exposure, temperature, highlights, shadows, whites, blacks, and saturation. The instructor emphasizes making changes carefully rather than pushing levels until image detail clips.
• Consult Lumetri Scopes, especially the waveform, to assess image brightness. Values near the top or bottom of the scale may indicate a loss of image detail.
• Use HSL Secondary to isolate and adjust a particular color. Selections may be imperfect, especially if similar colors appear elsewhere in the frame, so refine the selection and keep changes subtle.
• Additional tools include sharpness, vibrance, curves, and color wheels. The comparison-view color-match feature can suggest a starting point for matching shots, though it is not guaranteed to produce a perfect match.

5. Mix Voiceover, Music, and Sound Effects

• Arrange dialogue, music, and sound effects in relation to the video. The example combines a voiceover, city music and effects, then beach music and wave sounds.
• Use the Audio workspace, Essential Sound panel, and Audio Track Mixer. Track-mixer effects apply to an entire track, while a mix-track effect can affect all audio tracks.
• The instructor demonstrates:
  • Parametric Equalizer with a vocal-enhancer preset to shape speech.
  • Denoise for modest background-noise reduction.
  • Dynamics Processing to make quieter speech more consistent.
  • Audio Gain to lower levels when the meters show clipping.
  • Pitch Shifter for a lower-pitched voice.
  • Essential Sound tools for speech enhancement, loudness matching, noise and rumble reduction, and other cleanup.
  • Ducking to lower music under speech and generate keyframes automatically.
• Use fade handles to soften the starts and endings of music and effects. The goal is to balance dialogue, music, and ambience without clipping or abrupt transitions.

6. Generate and Animate Subtitles

• Use Premiere’s speech-to-text transcription to create a transcript. Transcription can be run manually or enabled for future clips in settings.
• Remove pauses using the Text panel’s pause filter and Delete All for a quicker rough cut.
• Create captions from the transcript and set preferences such as maximum characters, minimum duration, and single-line captions.
• Style captions in Essential Graphics and save the formatting as a track style to apply it consistently.
• To animate captions, convert them to graphics, apply the Transform effect, and adjust the anchor point so scaling happens around the text rather than an unintended location.
• Add and ease keyframes for a brief scale-in effect, then copy the effect to other caption graphics. Fonts and colors can also be customized.

7. Animate with Keyframes

• Apply the Transform effect and set keyframes for properties such as scale, position, rotation, and opacity.
• Use Ease In/Ease Out to make motion less abrupt. Adjusting the keyframe handles can further shape the animation’s speed.
• Create a smooth talking-head zoom by keyframing scale, then reversing the change later in the clip.
• For a moving graphic, keyframe its position and rotation so it enters, pauses, and exits. The tutorial describes nesting a graphic before applying Transform as a workaround for a motion-blur issue.
• Animate text with position and opacity keyframes. Custom keyboard shortcuts can speed up repeated easing operations.

Overall Takeaway

The course encourages learners to build confidence by practicing with real projects and combining editing, visuals, color, and sound. Premiere Pro is presented primarily as a nonlinear editing tool; for more advanced motion graphics, the instructor recommends learning After Effects and incorporating its compositions into Premiere projects.

Speakers and Sources Featured

• Gavin Herman: Instructor and narrator; the only speaker heard in the subtitles.
• Adobe Premiere Pro: The software demonstrated throughout the course.
• Canon’s C-Log-to-Rec.709 conversion LUT: Cited as the example conversion LUT for log footage.
• Course-provided sample media: Footage, audio, and graphic assets used in the demonstrations.