Adobe Premiere Pro is all grown up. Over the last several years Adobe has been working hard to remove what has been a perception in the industry that Adobe Premiere Pro isn't a serious nonlinear editing tool. While that perception might have been a reality for many years Premiere Pro has now come into its own as a very powerful and very capable tool for all facets of post-production.
In this course we’ll dig our way through the entire program and touch on all parts of a post-production project from ingest to edit to audio, color and finishing. Most everyone knows the basics of editorial in this day and age we we’ll jump beyond a lot of the simplest of techniques and dig deep into Premiere Pro’s interface and functions. Each phase of post-production will get its own dedicated class as all parts are of equal importance. We’ll be using the very recently released 2014 update to Premiere Pro and we’ll look at what’s new in this update as well as what has changed beyond CS6.
Scott Simmons was born in rural West Tennessee and didn't really realize that movies and television had to be made by actual people until he went to college. After getting degrees in both Television Production and Graphic Design he was in one of the early graduating classes at the Watkins Film School in Nashville, Tennessee. During that time at Watkins he discovered editing. While most of his classmates in film school wanted to be directors, Scott saw real career opportunities in post production. With nearly 15 years of experience in all areas of post-production Scott has worked both as a freelancer and on staff at a post-house. In 2005 Scott created The Editblog a website dedicated to all things editing and post-production which is now a part of
where he is the managing editor. He has also written articles and product reviews for Studio Daily and HDVideoPro. Working in a market like Nashville has allowed Scott the opportunity to work on a wide range of projects with many different kinds of post-production technology. Someday he hopes to edit on a beach with a touch screen device, a wireless hard drive and a Red Stripe.
Class Listing
Class 1
Why Adobe Premiere Pro? - With all the other editorial tools out in the market why would an editor choose Adobe Premiere Pro CC over any of the others? What are its strengths and what are its weaknesses? What advancements has Adobe made since moving from CS6 to CC? What areas of the NLE still need attention? No holds barred as we prepare for the entire semester.
Class 2
Before editing can begin media must be ingested into Adobe Premiere Pro CC and footage must be organized and logged. There are many different types of footage in our world of file based cameras (and Adobe Premiere Pro CC supports most all of them) and several ways to get them into the NLE. Once media is in we'll look at how to sort footage into bins and how to use subclips or markers for logging. We'll also take a look at Selects Sequences and how they can help organize footage as well.
Class 3
We begin doing some actual editing but not before taking some time to go through more of the numerous settings and preferences that Premiere Pro has to offer. While we won't begin doing a lot of creative editing at this point we will look at various features within Premiere Pro that makes creating sequences and selects reels easier. These are all important things to learn that can be applied throughout editorial in Adobe Premiere.
Class 4
We continue to look at basic editing in Adobe Premiere Pro CC. While we'll still look at number of preferences, menus and keyboard shortcuts we'll also dig deeper into the timeline and different ways to get media from selects sequences into an edit. Other editing techniques like ripple trims / rolling trims as well as slip / slide edits will be discussed. We'll also take a look at setting up a multi-camera edit and using multicam tools for music video editing.
Class 5
In the audio lesson we are going to go through many different aspects of audio in an Adobe Premiere Pro CC project. One important overall concept we'll discuss is track-based audio mixing vs. clip-based audio mixing and Premiere Pro supports them both. Topics covered include: keyframing audio levels with "rubber bands" as well as recording keyframes with automation, setting up and recording voice over right to the timeline, working with audio at a subframe level and keyboard shortcuts for adjusting audio levels and volumes. We'll also work on changing some incorrectly imported audio clips that we've already edited in the timeline.
Class 6
We are talking about effects. This is a long lesson as there is a lot of material to cover as effects work can go quite deep in Premiere Pro. We'll spend a few minutes looking at basic keyframing before digging into more depth with both keyframe-based time remapping and using PPro's built-in masking and tracking to remove some unwanted text from a frame. We'll wrap up this class looking at After Effects integration with text templates and Dynamic Linking.
Class 7
Color - Post-production wouldn't be complete without color correction and color grading. Like all good NLEs Adobe Premiere Pro CC has its own share of color correction tools including a 3-way color corrector and a full complement of video scopes. While PPro's built-in tools are entirely capable this week's session will venture beyond Adobe a bit to explore other color grading options.
Class 8
We are going to look at finishing within Premiere Pro. When we say finishing we're not talking entirely about finishing an edit within Premiere Pro but also prepping offline edits for moving into color correction and final finishing. We'll look at preparing a music video for color correction by collapsing our edit, flattening multi camera edit and exporting reference copies and conforming lists. We will also export a multichannel Quicktime file and upload automatically via FTP.
Class 9
We're going to look at Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2014 integration with a number of other products. Of course we'll briefly look at some video effect and transition plug-ins (FxFactory, Red Giant, HitFilm) but we'll focus more on workflow integration tools. Those third party tools include external from Premiere Pro video scopes with ScopeBox, extensions including Pond5 and PluralEyes, and integration with Imagineer Systems mocha Pro. We'll also take a brief look at Adobe Audition integration and using Adobe Bridge to browse content like a stock footage and music library. Beyond browsing through Bridge we'll look at using Final Cut Pro X as a media browsing tool.
Class 10
Potpourri - No lesson can cover an application as deep as Adobe Premiere Pro CC in its entirety, digging into every nook, cranny and feature so in this final lesson we'll look at some things we've overlooked and follow up on any lingering questions from the forums.