User Guide – Adobe Premier

Adobe Premier is a piece of software that allows you to import and edit various pieces of video footage to create a professional final product. It includes many features that allow you to accurately cut and crop to achieve a precise music video.

This is the main page of the edit. This is called the timeline and everything that you create and edit appears on this timeline. However as you can see if you were to import a very small piece of video footage it may be difficult to cut it down. However below you can see that you are able to stretch the timeline to make it more accurate down to the nearest 100th of a second. (This allows you to be more accurate, making the transition between the different clips unnoticeable).

The first thing that you must do is open up a blank page within the software, click on file then import. Once you have done this a prompt screen will appear, this is where you must go into the designated folders to find the video clip that you wish to import. (If you need to import any other video clips then just follow the same process).

Here, in the project box, shows everything you have imported so if you make a mistake you can drag a new copy onto the timeline and re-edit. This is very helpful as otherwise you have to keep going through the import process which would be very time consuming and you will end up spending more time on importing and less on tweaking the video to get a more professional final product.

One of the main tools that you will come across is the razor tool. To use this you simply mark and cut up various segments of a video clip to narrow it down to the footage that you require. (This is very helpful if the footage is very long as you can cut that particular piece into many segments saving time from importing each individual clip).

After the cutting has been done, you simply just have to drag it onto the timeline into its desired place. This will form the basis of the creation of the music video.

Once the various segments have been cut up they all appear on the timeline and you can see that it shows the clips individually so if you did not like the affects or the speed of the one segment then you can easily remove them individually instead of the whole timeline.

As I was creating a music video to go along with the video I needed to add the soundtrack in as well. This was done by using the same process as importing the video clips; however, instead of dragging it into the video section of the timeline you drag it into the audio section so that they play simultaneously. You can also edit the sound in more depth, especially the sound

of the video clips as they must be muted so that it does not interfere with music in the background.

To make the final product more visually exciting and interesting for the viewer various effects can be inputted by clicking on the project screen and then video transitions. (This means the way in which the video transfers from one clip to another). For the music video we decided to use the dissolve transition as this gave off smooth transition between clips.

Once you have chosen and edited to desired effect you can then drag it to wherever you want. As this is a transition effect you must place it directly between the two of the individual clips. In more depth you can then edit the amount of time the effect has over the two clips so for example you can have it 2 seconds before and 2 seconds after the clips to show a smooth transition.

A simple but very affective feature of the software is that it allows you to preview the work that you have done as you go along, so that any mistakes or changes you wish to make can be indentified immediately after some editing has been taken place. It also gives you an idea of what the final product is going to look like.