Digital Home Thoughts: From Home Movies to Hollywood Blockbusters with Adobe Premiere Pro

Putting The Clips Together
Having captured the clips, the next step is to start putting your project together. Although the project window, which lists the resources that are available to you in this project, hasn’t changed significantly, there are some improvements that could alter your workflow processes.

For a start, Premiere 6’s storyboard feature is no more, although there is a different way of achieving the same result. As with batch captures, storyboards entailed building a sequence of clips into an order and storing that order as a separate file. With Premiere Pro, if you change the project window’s view to Icon View (as shown in Figure 7), you can then drag the clips into the order that you want them to appear in the timeline (as shown in Figure 8) and then simply select all of the clips, drag them down to the timeline and, hey presto!, the clips are there in the right order. Simpler to achieve, within the same user interface and no additional files used.


Figure 7: Project window in icon view mode. Click on the image for the full size image. (104KB)


Figure 8: As above, after changing the clip order. Click on the image for the full size image. (89KB)

You will see from Figure 8 that gaps can get left in the layout as you drag the clips around. This is because Premiere doesn’t automatically reshuffle clips every time you move them. If you want the holes closed up, you can click on the wing menu button (the triangle just below the window’s close button) and choose the “Clean Up” option.

The “Automate to Timeline” feature that the Storyboard window offered does still exist – it has just been renamed to “Automate to Sequence”, as shown in Figure 9. There are a number of options that the window presents to allow you to get the clips down to the timeline in just the way you want. For example, you can put them down in the sort order or in the order you selected the clips. You can place the clips sequentially or at unnumbered markers (which is useful if you’ve already got some video or audio clips in the time line and worked out where you want these clips to go). You can insert them or overlay them onto existing clips. You can specify how much you want the clips to overlap. Finally, you can specify whether or not you want the default transitions applied.


Figure 9: Automate to Sequence window. Click on the image for the full size image. (16KB)

What’s A Sequence?
Ah – one of the best new features in Premiere Pro! If you’ve ever used virtual clips in a previous version of Premiere, then sequences are like virtual clips on steroids. If you’ve never used virtual clips, here comes a better explanation :)

A sequence is a collection of video and audio tracks, containing clips with transitions and effects applied. You can then take that sequence and … here comes the good bit … use it within another sequence as if it were a clip itself! Fantastic! It might help if I gave some examples of when & how you could find yourself using sequences …

• Importing an existing project
  If you import a project into a project, the timeline for that project appears as a sequence. If the imported project is a Premiere Pro project, you get all of the sequences from that project. The great thing about this is that it allows you to create stock projects (such as copyright closing sequences) that you can then easily add to a new project, thus ensuring consistency.
  
  
• Complicated transitions and effects
  An example here might be that you’ve got a clip of people watching TV in a living room and you want to superimpose some video onto the TV. You could use one sequence to control the TV content and then place that sequence inside the living room sequence with an appropriate scale & move effect so that the TV content appears on the screen of the TV. Yes, you could do this without using multiple sequences, but the beauty of it is that once you’ve got the TV content sequence correctly scaled onto the screen of the TV, you can change the clips that appear without having to re-apply the scaling to the clips.
  
  
• A long project
  Last year, I finished a mammoth project that had taken me three years to complete. The idea was to create a different video for each decade of our family history. I created a separate Premiere project for each decade, output the results as a video file, then created a master project that combined all of the decade files together with some titles and transitions. With Premiere Pro, it would be easier and better to keep each decade as a separate sequence and then use a master sequence to bring them all together.

Another cool thing about sequences is that they can each have a different number of video and audio tracks. This becomes particularly important if you are working on a project that requires different sorts of audio tracks (i.e. mono, stereo and 5.1) but I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here – more on audio later. :D

One limitation of the way sequences are used within a project is that the aspect ratio of the video (e.g. 4:3, 16:9) is a project setting rather than a sequence setting. It would be nice to have this as a sequence setting because it would then be very easy to take, say, a 16:9 sequence and apply an effect to trim it or letterbox it down to 4:3, without having to go through the rendering & re-importing process I needed to use with my family history project.