Setting up your video background & basic editing in Premiere Pro

All right. Hi everyone, in this video what we're going to do, is do some basic editing in Premiere Pro, so we're going to make this-- so at the beginning of my timeline, hit 'space bar', it's going to fade in, I've flipped it upside down, this thing plays, it goes for about 15 seconds, plays it... Plays it... And, it dips to black. So let's go and do that.

So now it's time to make our video, so what we've done is, we've opened up Premiere Pro, now you can do your video editing in anything you like, especially for video backgrounds. We're not doing a whole lot of things, in our case we're just going to get something that loops so we're going to use Premiere Pro. If you're more at home with After Effects, it will do the exact same job for what we need it for now. 

So what we're going to do is we're going to create a 'New Project', all right, this wonder bar opens. We're going to give it a name, so at the top here, let me call mine 'Designers Background', and location, let's give it a place to live. I'll put mine on my desktop; I'm going to put it in a new folder. And I'll call mine, 'Premiere Pro - Designer Background'. Great! Hit 'Choose', and don't worry about any of this other stuff. Let's just click 'OK'. So great, we're in Premiere Pro. Now, few to follow along, just make sure you're under 'Window', 'Workspaces', you're in 'Editing', and if yours still looks different from mine, go down to one that says 'Reset saved works', and it's going to rejig and look like my one. 

Now, Premiere looks-- it looks daunting. And when you open it up, people get scared of it, it's not actually that hard, it just looks like it should be, but it's not. So we're going to input our video. Let's go to 'File', 'Import', now this is not going to be a full tutorial on how to do everything in Premiere Pro, I've got another course for that. It's like a corporate video editing thing, so go and watch that one if you want do a full set of it, this is just going to be the quick version to make our videos, get them nice and small, and get them up on to our site.

So, 'File', 'Import', and check out the exercise files, if you haven't downloaded them yet, I’ve  downloaded them. Here's the exercise files. And then here, what I'm looking for is 'Video', and we're going to use this one here. I'm going to import it in, so this one we got from Adobe Stock, so click 'Import'. 

Great! So we've imported our video, the first thing we need to do is create something called a sequence, and the sequence is just like the-- it's the page in the document, you can't just have a video sitting around, it needs to go on something, or in something, that container, and that's called a 'Sequence', like a page in a document, we need that page to stick our words on.

You - my video are the words, kind of. So, to do a sequence, 'File', 'New', and you could go to 'Sequence', but it's a lot easy, because then you got to try and guess what the sequence should be, you got a sequence, and you're like, "Holy Moly." Which of these settings should I use for my sequence? It gets a little bit confusing. The easy way is to 'right click' it, and say-- can you see here? It says 'New Sequence From Clip', and the cool thing about that is, it will use all the settings that have come from that video and create the sequence, and dump it on to my timeline, so this little icon here, see this one here, that is my sequence, this is the video that I imported, so what's happening is, they got the same name which can be a little bit confusing when you're starting off. 

That is the holder, and that's the video that is stuck on the timeline, so there is my sequence, and that's the video that's on there, and I can now have one sequence, and I can keep importing lots of videos, and keep adding them to this timeline, so I might have 10 videos, and 1 sequence, so remember, this is the basics, hit 'space bar', it will start playing it, and you can see my little guy there. And also, mine has the Adobe Stock through the middle here, that's because I haven't paid for this yet, mainly because if I buy it, and send that out with these class files, I'm pretty sure I'm breaking loads of laws, and I'll get in trouble, so I'm just going to use the place holder one. It's easier to go off and obviously pay for it. And you might be working the same sort of way, you might be working with a client, you can go through and mock up, maybe three different backgrounds using this mocked up version, with Adobe Stock. I'm going to try and fix one that you can go off to and pay for it. It's really easy to update here in Premiere  afterwards.

So, there's my video, it lasts about how long? It lasts about 15 seconds. Now let's say I want to trim it up. It's quite easy, either beginning or the end, all you do is hover above your mouse, and you can see I can drag this in, and it trims it up. It hasn't deleted it, it’s just kind of trimmed it. It's still there, look. But I can just kind of trim up the ends here, and I might trim out the beginning, and move this along to the beginning, and what I've done is I've cut it down by a few seconds. It's up to you and your clip, now, how long it should be? It's totally up to you, but the longer it is the file size gets bigger, and maybe you might do a quick run through and just see how bigger the file sizes are. Just so you know, file sizes are getting big when they’re getting closer to 10MB, those smaller ones are around 1MB, so if you've got something that's 30 seconds long, it's going to get up there in terms of the file size. 

So I'm going to use this nice little short one, and the cool thing about this one is , I've hit undo a few times-- is that-- I'll do it a bit more. Okay, not too many. --is that-- yes, it's got that nice kind of loop, this may be-- I don't need all that last seconds, can you see it hangers off, so this bit here, I might trim off, just because I can't see the hand any more, so it also doesn't really matter. That goes around loops. Great. Say you want to get rid of the bit where he started writing, you just want to get to the bit where he starts moving it. So I'm going to slice that bit out. What I can do, is you're going to use this tool here. Your toolbar is in this middle chunk here, and the one you're going to use is this thing called the 'Razor tool'. 

His job is, watch this, my play head there, I just click 'em, and I've kind of sliced it into two pieces. I'm going to go back to my selection tool, and you can see it's two chunks. I haven't really sliced up the video, it's all still in there, watch. Kind of just made a little edit, so I'm going to go back to my razor tool here, and I'm going to slide along until he finishes writing. And right there, I'm going to slice that bit out, and I'll grab my selection tool, I can click on this, hit 'delete'. I can either drag it across, one nice trick in Premiere is, I can click on this, you see, it goes white, and I just hit delete on my keyboard, and it trims it up.

So now I've got this thing, it plays through, starts writing, but actually just jumps to the bit where he's finished writing. It's kind of a bit weird actually, so I'm going to undo that, it's more of an example, so I'm going to undo until I got this nice long bit here. So remember, trimming it, just pull these ends, and the Razor Tool to cut bits out. If you've got a second video, watch this, I'm going to go to 'File', 'Import'. This video I'm going to import. You can see down here, I've got another video. You can see the difference between these two icons, this one here has both-- we'll zoom a little bit here. This one here is video, but no audio, this one has video and audio, and you can see the two little icons there. So, it doesn't really matter, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this one over, and now I've got this one, and it's going to kind of blend into this one.

 

So if you've got more than one video, and you want to kind of string them together because you got lots of different cuts, you just keep importing them, and keep dragging them along in this timeline. I can't see the end of it here, so I'm going to zoom out a little bit, just hit minus ' - ' on your keyboard. Now you can see this blue line around the outside here, this just means that this is the bit that's active, and if I hit minus, you can see it zooms out. If I click up here, can you see the blue line is around this, it's called your program window. This is just what's going to export, and if I had minus ' - ' here, I can kind of zoom along on the timeline on this one. So it's going to make sure when you're down here, plus ' +' and minus ' - ' works, and when you're up here, plus ‘ + ’ and minus ‘ – ‘ zooms in and out of this one.  

So now that I can see more, I can keep adding videos. Now in terms of the editing, we're just going to kind of cover one or two more things. The next one is transitions. At the moment, this is just a jump cut, it just goes 'zzzzz', and then jumps into the other one. That's fine, just a plain old cut. What we want to do is look at maybe doing a 'Cross Dissolve', or 'Blend Across'. And what you're going to do is, you're going to find your effects window. You go to 'Window', you go to 'Effects', that opens down the bottom here, and you're looking for video transitions, jump it down, and these are few of them. 

And to be honest, if you use 'Page Peel', I'll find you, hunt you down, and take your Premiere away from you. Wow! It's a bit harsh. Wow! So you can see here, there's a bunch of different transitions. To be honest, they’re all a bit naff. 'Cross Dissolve' was a good one, 'Dip to Black' is a good one. In terms of 'Dissolves', this one here, 'Cross Dissolve' is going to work nicely. I'm going to click, hold and drag it, and watch this. Can you see between these two lines here, this little gap up appears. And I'm going to zoom a little bit, remember plus ' +', and there's this 'Cross Dissolve'. It's a slight little tiny baby thing in between. Don't worry if yours ends up on one side, or the other, or in the middle, it doesn't matter, the effect in the end ends up the same. So I'm going to hit space bar here, you can see lovely 'Cross Dissolve'. 

Say you want it to be a little more adrenaline, you can extend all these transitions, any of them, if you can see, if I hold my icon across this, and I drag it out, that's going to be twice as long, so it's going to be a bit more-- Days of our lives. And there's a bunch of other ones in here, 'Page Peel', I said I would never do it, but here we go. Ready 'Page Peel'? Okay, terrible 'Page Peel'.

So, other transitions, you can go through them all. What I'm going to do is, I'm actually going to-- let's zoom out a little bit. I'm going to delete this one, because, actually my little loop is just going to be this chunk here, and I'm going to get this loop forever, but now instead of it jumping, can you see, the beginning starts with this note pad over here, I wish this hand was off, because then what would happen is, if we'd go to the end, and it would also be off, no it wouldn't be, but any way, what I want to do is I want to get it to loop a little nicer, rather than just getting in to the end, and jumping back, I want to add a bit of a fade in the beginning and at the end, and that will mask the transition a bit.

So, to do it, it's under 'Dissolve', and there's one here that says 'Dip to Black', just means fade to black. And if I hover about that end, grab that at that end as well, you can see, just kind of locks on the end here, and watch this now, 'space bar', starts black, fades in, and it's going to go through it all, I'll skip along, 'space bar', and it's going to fade along again. And because I'm going to force this to loop in my website, it's kind of-- I don't know, maybe a little less obvious, you might prefer the 'Jump cut'. It’s fine. Just like the other transitions, by zooming, I can extend these dips to black, just to make them a little longer. You'll find them really hard to work with, unless you zoom in, okay, a little bit longer.

So the last bit of editing that we're going to do for this particular one before we go off and start doing more of the style points for Premiere Pro is, I want to flip mine upside down. Why? Because, this up the top here is kind of interacting with my menu, so I want that to kind of be at the bottom, so I'm going to flip this upside down. So what you do is you click on it, so we got to select it on my timeline, and along here is something called the effects control, so if you can't find them--  these little tabs are really hard to use. You can't find it, you lose it, it's gone forever, you go to 'Window', go up here, go to 'Effects Controls', and it will kind of jump it out again. You'll see, if I twirl these a little up, I have 'Motion', 'Opacity', some stuff in here that can be really useful for you. So what we're going to do is, under 'Motion', we're going to twirl it down, there's one in here called 'Rotation', and I'm going to flip mine 180. Just means it's going to be running at the bottom of my thing, and it's going to look a little cooler, at least, I think.   

You can see some other basics in there, like scaling, say you want to clip off bits, I could scale this up by clicking, holding, and dragging to the right. I find it's easier to use these then it is actually on the program window, grabbing the edges, don't know why, just the program works a bit clumsily that way, and try and work on the video. It's easier to do it over here with the numbers.

All right, let's close that down. Let's have another backup, and let's put the scale back to 100, hit 'Save', and now let's get on to adding some cool textures, and background colors, and things.