When I started using Premiere Pro, I was teaching myself. I’d never had the program explained or taught to me, and rather than finding a really good YouTube tutorial, teenage me* decided to just open the program and give it a go.
*not a genius.
I was able to self-teach myself all the basics, and then did go to YouTube as I started learning to colour grade and the basic special effects (like the Doc disappearing video).
But as I was editing in the group, I realised that even though my self-taught skills worked, they were not the most efficient at all. They wasted time and resulted in a messy workspace (though, then I spend time obsessing over cleaning it up… which wastes more time…)
The way I was editing was also confusing to other people, and though I know there’s always an element of different people editing differently, I could see how inefficient I was being.
So, I decided to use the portrait exercise as an opportunity to learn how to arrange footage better.
I searched for a few videos on YouTube, deciding that this time, I would use a tutorial, as I should have so long ago.
I watched this video, going in and not really knowing what to think.
I was not disappointed.
There was a lot of things that I didn’t know about. 
One of the most useful ones was how you can form new clips from old ones simply by setting the in/out and then dragging it down to the project window. Premiere will then save it as a new clip, and that allows you to find it easily later. I often have pages of notes beside me with a clip name followed by “moment at 56 sec…”, so I’m glad those days are finally over.
Another useful thing was how you can drag effects to the master shot in the project window and it will layer those effects over all moments of that video that you have. In the Idem.Yarra project I did, I think that would have been really useful as (towards the end) I had just butchered the footage as far as cutting goes and ended up writing down the exposure/contrast/etc. and clicking into each clip individually, which was time consuming.
There’s also a lot of flickering shots in One Closed Door (a frame or two each), and it will be really helpful there).
The thing he mentioned about Premiere freezing – I’ve never had that issue, but I am sure this is going to be more than useful at some point.
Track select forwards/backwards – pressing A and it will automatically highlight everything to the right of the head, and to go backwards hold shift A – will definitely save me lots of time and anxiety that I’m going to mess something up.
I’d also never used the adjustment layer before either. While I was editing, I put a transition between two shots, and then thought it would look better between two other shots(below), as the goats are almost opposite colors. Rather than having to undo a bunch of edits, I only had too move the adjustment layer across – so even if I was just testing, it would have taken less time.
But the best thing that I saw, the thing that almost made me cry… was changing the proxy of the footage. I can’t believe that I didn’t notice this – as we were editing in 4K, there is a point where my laptop turns around and says nope. Changing the proxy will definitely help with editing and save time, as we won’t have to waste as much time rendering the footage just so it can play smoothly.
Though, in this instance, I’d only filmed in 1080p, so no assistance was needed.
I still did each clip individually as far as colour grading goes, because some shots were inside the barn and some outside. I’d also decided to be a bit extra with the grading, as it’s meant to be about new life.
Overall, I was pretty happy with the result and am looking forwards to exploring further – maybe using a mask to put a lens flare in the opening panning shot.
On a side note – I do still want to continue filming animal documentaries, and this is the first time I’ve really edited the footage coming from it. I’m glad I did, because it was definitely harder than I thought. An animal might do something interesting, but chances are, she’s only going to do it once, so you only really get one take of everything. I guess this is somewhat the same for interviews – even though you can ask a person to repeat something, it may have lost some of the magic.
Additionally, I couldn’t use sound as there was tractors/construction in the background that was unavoidable.
Focusing on them is also hard, because you don’t know where it’s going to move too next. I did experiment a bit with auto/manual focus – I wasn’t quick enough with the manual (in most instances) so I mainly used auto with the high speed tracking setting – which does mean that sometimes it’s more abrupt to focus, rather than smooth, but it was easy enough to cut around these moments.
Sound credits to Kevin Macleod, incompetech.com, ‘Eternal Hope’ and ‘Promises to Keep’.
