Blog Post 53 - Stage 3 - Adobe Premiere - Getting Started

Clip imported and being viewed

As mentioned in the previous Blog Post in regards to setting up a new project, once you have selected all of the necessary settings for your project you can begin to edit your video clips. However, before you can do this you need to import some video clips. To do this, navigating to File -> Import... will allow you to find video clips on your computer and then import them into Premiere. Too keep everything in a logical order is best to make use of the Project Bins in the bottom left hand area where your clips are stored for ease of access. Clicking on the New Bin button allows the swift creation of the bins which will once clips have been imported they can be dragged to the bin to be stored in there. Now that you have imported a clip from your computer to that of Premiere the next stage is in regards to begin editing these clips... You may wish to include the entire clip that you have imported into Premiere and if that is the case then you can simply click and drag the clip from the bin or the viewfinder in the top left onto the timeline. 

Clip Trimmed and Added

However, you may wish to make use of a particularly useful tool in Premiere which is that of the Mark In and Mark Out buttons which are situated just below the video preview panel. When viewing the clip by using these Mark In and Mark Out buttons this means that you can effectively trim down the clips to the selection that you want. For this example, I decided that from this clip of 58 seconds long, I did not want the entire selection however the selection that was of chasing the criminal after jumping out of the car. Personally, the use of the Step Backwards and Step Forwards buttons were also very useful indeed as these allowed me to precisely go frame by frame through the clip to get exactly to the very start and end of the scenes that I was looking for. With the selection of the clip now selected (visible by the blue/green highlighting) I was then able to drag the selection down to the Project Bin. Once here, I could then double click on the name and rename to a sensible new name - I chose ChasingSuspect as then in the future if I needed to come back to this I would know what the clip contained. Once this was safely in the Project Bin, I could simply drag this clip onto the timeline which then populated the Audio and Video Timelines due to their being both. With this in place, the video preview area at the top right updated to the first frame that the slider was on which slows the trimming and editing was a success.

Having now got the basics in place of importing, trimming and adding a clip to the timeline, the next blog post will be in regards to how to manipulate these clips and edit them using some tools that are present in Premiere.