Getting started with Premiere Pro advanced training

All right, so let's get started. First things first, download the exercise files, they're pretty big, so be careful where you download them, they're about a Gigabyte. There'll be a link on this page here for them, so download those before we get started. 

Next question to answer, Mac or PC? I'm going to use Mac through this course, because that's what I use, but you can use Mac or PC throughout this course, the shortcuts are a little different, but I'll mention them as I go through, and some of the codecs are slightly different, Mac versus PC, but I'll mention those throughout, so either is fine. I talk really fast, you know that already, but you can slow me down on all the videos, you'll see in this big player here, down here, I think down, down over, yeah, down over here, there will be like a cog or some sort of, like 1x, 2x, and you can slow me down to 0.75, I sound a smidgey bit drunk, but if you, maybe English is not your first language, or I just, I talk with a funny accent, so you can slow me down, I do try and slow myself down, I will try, but sometimes that's a complaint from people. So yeah, slow me down to inebriated Dan, and you do get used to me speaking a bit slowly. 

All right, let's talk HD versus 4K, or Full HD versus UHD. A lot of the exercise files in this course are just the smaller ratio, that kind of Full HD, not because I like working that way, I'm mainly working in 4K now. I'm kind of transitioning across, but it's to keep the file sizes not ginormous. They really balloon if they all, like amazing resolution 4K, and not everybody that is doing this course has got an amazing laptop, mine's pretty good so it runs it, but a lot of people are using older crappier laptops. So yeah, note that some of the exercise that we do, and we're going to do color correction and stuff, we're working on footage that might not be the best, you're going to get better results, is kind of what I'm saying, from your own raw footage, where my stuff had to be, shrink down a little bit, to make it work for everybody, so that the exercise files aren't huge. 

There are a couple of little topics that I cover again here in the advanced course, that was from the Premiere Pro Essentials course, so if you have done that course, think of it as like a recapping, and becoming better, because you get to repeat it. Now I've made sure that they're only a couple little topics, and whenever I do talk about them, I make sure that I build on that knowledge, so there's extra bits to make you more awesome, but there are a couple of little teeny tiny repeats. 

This next bit is optional, when we're opening up Premiere Pro, if you want yours to look like mine, or you're having some issues with it, we're going to reset all our preferences when we open it up, so you don't have to do this. I like to do it beginning of a course so that we all match. So before opening up the program, hold down the 'Option' key on a Mac, or the 'Alt' key on a PC. On a PC, often you can find it in the kind of, like Start menu down here, and just hold that down before you start. On a Mac, mine is in the dock, it doesn't matter, where you find it, in the Applications folder, hold that key down, 'Alt' on a PC, 'Option' on a Mac, and click that, and it will reset your preferences while you're doing it. You can let go when this appears. I kind of hate doing it because I get my preferences perfect, but I got to make a course, and I got to show you how to get them perfect as well, well, the way you like them, click 'OK'. 

One little extra bit is that if you hold down the, that first key that I said, so 'Option' on a Mac, 'Alt' on a PC, and 'Shift', that'll do, like even a bigger refresh, it'll get rid of things like cache from your plugins, and if you only do that, if you're having issues of, you're like, "Man, Premiere Pro doesn't work very well anymore," try doing that, it's kind of a fresh restart, but know that all your preferences that you change, workspaces, all that sort of good stuff, shortcut keys have all been reset and come back to normal, so be careful, but yeah, don't be afraid, let's do it. 

One last thing before we get started, is that you'll find some footage that I'm using in this course, won't have a watermark, and you'll open up your version, you'll be like, "Hey, mine's got a watermark?," that's because EditStock has graciously let us use some of their footage for this course. You can totally use it in your portfolio and things, as long as you leave the watermark there, but if you do want to, let's see, do put some effort into one of these projects, and you want to remove the watermark, you can go and purchase the footage from editstock.com, and you'll find it in here. They are about 50 or 60 dollars, so really reasonable.

This place here is a really great place to find footage, so that you can build portfolio pieces from raw footage, that you didn't have to shoot yourself, and there's a really amazing selection here, so documentaries, commercials, music, videos, sports, I'm reading out the list there. I've used it all the time to really help kind of find different stuff you like. If you don't have multi-cam, and you really want to practice with it, there's a lot of stuff in here, there's just all sorts of other types of footage, that you can use to practice, craft portfolio pieces, yeah, check out EditStock. 

All right, that is it, let's go into some actual courses, let's learn something.