If you have ever opened Premiere Pro and immediately closed it because it looked too complicated, this video is for you. In the next few minutes, we are going to edit a one-minute Instagram reel together from importing clips all the way to export. By the end, you’ll understand every core tool inside Premiere Pro and actually know how to use them in a real project. You can download the files in the description to follow along. So we’ll start by opening Premiere Pro; you can click on this new project button, name the project, and then click on skip. After that, the opening screen should look something like this. If it doesn’t look like this, just go to this button here and click on the editing workspace. You can also go to windows, workspace, and click on editing—there are multiple ways to do the same thing here. Now here you’ll see four sections: one is project monitor, second is timeline, third is program monitor, and fourth is source monitor. Project monitor is basically where you import the clips and add the files; timeline is where you actually edit the videos; program monitor is where you’ll see the output; and source monitor is where you’ll filter the clips. Make sure you remember these names.
Now you can also press shift and then one, two, three, four to switch between each of these monitors, and the tilde key will maximize whichever panel your cursor is on. Now that being said, let’s start by importing the clips. To import the clips, come to the project monitor and then you can click on this import media button or you can double-click here. I would suggest you create folders for everything to keep everything organized. To do that, you can click on this folder button here, and this creates a bin. For example, we can name it A-roll, which is basically the talking clip, and then move the clip inside this. Similarly, you can also drag the clip to the folder and it will create a separate bin. Now we have four bins and everything is organized. Now we can create a sequence. So again, there are multiple ways to create a sequence; we’ll select our main clip from the A-roll folder and just drag it on the timeline. This will create a sequence. A sequence decides your frame rate, frame size, and settings. Now to change it, you can go to sequence and go to sequence settings. Now in the sequence settings, you can change the frame size as needed. Now here on the timeline, you can press space to play the video and you’ll notice this blue bar which is called a playhead. Whatever is below the playhead is displayed on the program monitor. Now to move on the timeline, you can use these handles to minimize and maximize, and you can also use the minus and plus keys to do the same.
Next, you can use the arrow keys to move ahead in the timeline by one frame, you can use shift plus arrow keys to move five frames ahead, and if you want to go to the end of the video, just press the down key. This is the tools panel. The first one is the selection tool; the shortcut key is V. You can use it to select different things on the timeline. Second is the razor tool that we’ll talk about. For example, let’s say on the timeline I have to make a cut, so to do that I’ll just select the razor tool and then click on the video and it will make a cut. Now let’s say I want to remove this pause, so I can add another cut here and then select it and then delete, and if I want to go back I can just undo, which is command plus Z. Now let’s say I want to select everything on the timeline; one option is to just drag and select everything, or you can go to the track select tool or press A and then just select everything and then move. These are all the basic tools that you should know as of now. Now to edit, I want to remove all the pauses first. There is one manual way to do it as I showed you: just use the razor tool and create a cut, and then press V again for the selection tool, and then you can drag it like this and remove the cut. You can also delete it like we did earlier and then just click on it and click on ripple delete so it will move the timeline, but this will take us a lot of time if you do it manually.
So I’ll tell you another way to do it; all you have to do is go to Windows, workspace, and go to text-based editing, and it will open this panel. Then go to transcript and click on transcribe. Now what you’ll notice is it has created text for all that I’m speaking in this video. Now if you click on these three dots, filter it, and use pauses, it has selected all the pauses in the video, and then we’ll click on delete and we’ll click on delete all. Now you’ll see all the pauses have been deleted, which saved us a lot of manual work. So now we’ll play the video once completely and delete everything that is not needed. To fast forward the playback, you need to press L and it will play at twice speed, and you can do that multiple times and filter through all the videos. Now for example, I want to delete this clip without manually moving everything on the timeline; to do that, I’ll just select the clip and then press option and delete, which will ripple delete, which means all the timeline will move ahead. Or you can just go to the end and then press command so the tool will turn yellow, and then you can drag it so it will ripple trim it. As I said, there are multiple ways to do the same thing. You can also just drag the clip and move it ahead, which will delete the other part. Now once the rough structure is ready, we’ll start adding B-roll. You’ll notice that at some point I’m looking at the laptop and speaking, so all that part will cover up with B-roll. So what you see on the screen right now, this is A-roll. A-roll is basically clips of someone speaking; B-roll is supporting footage which you add on top of the A-roll to make the video more interesting. I’ll go back to the project monitor, click on these two arrows, click on project, and here I can see all the folders again.
I’ll click on the B-roll folder. Now I can’t directly drag this clip on the timeline because everything will come here—we want very specific shots as B-roll. For example, here I’m saying that I got a large amount of footage, so we’ll go through this long-form video, double-click on it, and it will open on the source monitor. Here you’ll see this blue marker, and if I move it ahead, the video plays, and here I’ll find the clip where it shows the specific number. So for example, here’s the part that I want to include and it starts here, so I’ll press I on the keyboard for in-point, play the video again, and press O for out-point. Now I just need the visuals from here, not the audio, so what I’ll do is click on this button which says drag video only and then drag it to the timeline. Now I want this video to cover the entire section, the entire line, so what I’ll do is reduce the speed. To do that, I’ll select the video, go to the rate stretch tool, and just drag it ahead, so I have basically slowed down the clip by half.
There’s another way to do it: I can just right-click on the clip, go to speed and duration, and reduce the duration by half. Now what you’ll notice is the B-roll is horizontal and it’s not covering the entire vertical video. Now to fix this, you can click on the video and then go to effects control. If you don’t see it, you can go to windows and then click on effects control here. Here you’ll see a lot of motion properties, for example, position, scale, rotation, and also opacity. Position basically changes the position of the video, then you can rotate the video and also decrease the transparency. So now here we want to scale it, so we’ll just select the video, click on scale, and just scale it so it fills the video, and then position it so it’s in the frame. And now similarly, I’ll go through the entire video and add B-roll wherever needed. I have added all the B-roll. Now instead of manually scaling everything, I can just go to the first clip, scale and position it, and just copy. Then I can select the remaining clips, right-click, and paste attributes, then just paste attributes of motion. So now that all the videos are scaled up, next let’s add captions.
To do that, go to Windows, workspace, and then go to text-based editing again. Now here we have already generated the transcript before; now we’ll go to captions and click on create captions from transcript. Here you can select how many characters you want, what should be the duration of the captions, and if you want a single line or double line. Then you can click on create captions and you’ll notice that the entire video has captions now. Now I want to change the style of the captions; to do that, I just double-click on the first one and it will open this properties tab on the right side. Now here I can select the font, adjust the size, and I can also decide where I want to position it, so I want it close to my mic. Now once I’m happy with it, I’ll just go to this plus icon on track style and create a style. Now once I do that, all captions will have the same style. Next let’s say you want to add a text and animate it; to do that, click on the type tool and type the text, and you’ll see a new layer has been created. You can move it to the right spot, and then use the razor tool, cut it, delete the extra part, and here you can use the motion properties and place it at the center of the video
. If you’re not sure if the text is in the center or not, you can just press command and move it and you’ll see this line here, so now the text is in the center. Now let’s say you want the text to zoom in, so for that, we need to do some keyframe animation. To do that, click on the text layer and we’ll go to effects control again, and here you’ll see the motion matrix and right next to it you’ll see this toggle animation or stopwatch icon. So for example, at the start of the text layer we want the scale to be zero, which means that at this point on the timeline the scale would be zero, and if we go ahead
and change the scale to one hundred, now you’ll see the text animates in. Next, let’s quickly add some music and sound effects. Drag your music track from the folder straight into the timeline and use the remix tool to change its duration so it perfectly fits your edit; you can also add sound effects if needed. Next, let’s move on to color. In the program monitor, click on the new item and then click on adjustment layer. Drag the adjustment layer from the project monitor to the timeline and extend it so it covers the entire timeline. An adjustment layer sits above your entire edit and lets you color correct everything at once. Next, go to windows, workspace, and then color; inside that, you can select your adjustment layer and then click on Lumetri colors. Here you can adjust your exposure, contrast, and saturation. Once done, your video is ready to export.
