Video editing can be one of the most time-consuming tasks in all content creation. This can scare a lot of people from committing to video content but with a few simple tricks, you can make it a lot easier, quicker and cheaper.
- Using Premiere Pro Presets
- Greenscreen any footage with Machine Learning
- Automatically remove silence in clips
- Find customisable templates
Using Premiere Pro Presets
If you find yourself adding the same effects to footage over and over again, setting up presets can save you a lot of time. They allow you to combine multiple effects into one simple drag and drop allowing you to immediately as many effects as you want in a single click.
To begin find a piece of footage that has all your desired effects and ctrl+click all the effects in the effects controls panel.
Right-click and select save preset. Give it a name and hit ok.
Next time you want to use the same effects, go to the Effects panel, find your preset and drag it onto your footage. You can still tweak the individual effects and their settings once you’re dragged onto a piece of footage but those initial settings will save you a bunch of time.
This one is ridiculously simple and can save you minutes every time you want to use those effects which can quickly add up to hours throughout your career. Just be sure to give your presets useful names otherwise it can get a little confusing once you have a few.
Greenscreen any footage with Machine Learning
This sounds complicated but I promise you it’s actually straightforward!
First, you need a piece of footage. For the sake of this tutorial, I’m going to use this footage of Sam our MD dancing on a company night out.
Next, you need to open a browser and head to runwayml.com.
You will need to sign up to an account to use but it’s free to export to 720p and they hardly ever send emails.
Now you simply upload your footage and drag it onto the timeline. You can do any trimming to get the exact clip you want to cut out.
Then under the magic tools, select greenscreen.
Now you simply click on the subject you want to cut out, in this case, that’s Sam. You keep adding points to include and exclude until it’s a perfect mask. Then play the clip and any find any points where the mask goes wrong, simply pause it and add more points.
Do this until the end of your clip and when you’re happy click go-to project.
Now he’s cut out you can put whatever you want behind him right in the web editor.
If you want to download the clip to use in your editing program or are happy with your creation, then click export, give it a name and select the quality you want. It’ll take a little time depending on the size of the sequence but once it’s done you can download it and edit it like any other piece of footage.
Automatically remove silence in clips
When recording anything you’re going to stumble every now and then, especially when you’re just getting started. Removing all those stumbles and gaps of awkward silence is the first task you have to do when editing and its time consuming (as well as a bit demoralising sometimes).
You can speed this up by automatically removing silences using Adobe Audition.
You want to start by dragging your clip into premiere. Look at all those gaps of silence. Manually removing all that would take a lot of time just to get to the actual edit.
Drag your clip into the timeline and select edit in Adobe Audition. This sometimes fails so if it does create a new sequence from the clip and then go to edit sequence in Audition.
Now we’re in you want to double click on your audio channel and find the diagnostic tab. If you don’t have I already go to window and add it to your workspace.
Select Mark Audio from the drop-down menu, then click Find Levels then Scan once it’s done.
Below you should now see a list of markers and you can scroll through these to check they have successfully removed the silence. If it hasn’t then tweak the silence and audio settings.
Once you’re happy you want to Mark all markers and head to the markers tab.
Select all markers using CTRL + A and right-click and select change marker types to Sub clip.
File and save as an audio file. Sadly you can directly save as a video file.
Now to get this to work as a video we need to add an empty video track to this so we’re going to open up media encoder and drag in the audio file we just saved.
We’re going to render it out as a QuickTime since they are fast to render but it doesn’t matter.
Now you need to match the resolution and frame rate to your source clip and render it out.
Drag this new file into premiere. It’s going to appear as a bunch of clips but don’t worry and right click and make offline
Then you want to link media to all these now offline clips and select your original clip.
Once this is done you simply drag into the sub-clips and add them to your sequence and all the silence should be removed. You’ll still need to remove your stumbles but it’ll be a lot faster than scrubbing through all the silence
You can also easily extend any clips where audio has been cut off to get the timing just right.
Use customisable Templates
Creating complex graphics in premiere can be a challenge especially if you don’t have a lot of experience. Even once you do it also ends up being a very time-consuming task so if you’re on a deadline it’s just not possible…that is unless you use templates.
Using sites like Envato Elements you can find many templates for everything from titles to transitions to fully animated intro sequences. Now Envato Elements does require a £14.50 subscription to use but they do have a free 7-day trial so you can give it a try before you buy and maybe just download as many as possible since once you’ve downloaded them you’re free to use them at your leisure but you didn’t hear that from us 😉
Now, these templates can come in one of 2 forms:
- MOGRTs
- Full Projects
Each has its advantages and disadvantages but to keep it simple we’ll explain it like this.
MOGRTs are templates that can be found in the essential graphics panel and customised from within Premiere Pro. They are essentially linked After Effects compositions so will run extremely slowly unless you render and replace them once you are happy with the settings.
The Full Projects are normally much more customizable as you can tweak every single aspect and element. This means you can get exactly what you are looking for but you’ll need to do a bit more of the heavy lifting yourself. If you’re going this route, you should probably look into the After Effects template as they can be found for the same effects, but After Effects is more built for that kind of work.
Whichever you pick, once you’re happy with whatever you’ve created, I recommend rendering them out into a format you can easily reuse should you need to. For example, make that title sequence into an MP4 so you can drag it into any video you need.
