From the course: Introduction to Video Editing

Starting the edit: Continuity editing - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Introduction to Video Editing

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Starting the edit: Continuity editing

- Once your project is organized it's sometimes a daunting task to figure out where to start but one of the truly wonderful things about non-linear editing is exactly that. It's non-linear. You don't have to start at the beginning. You can even work in totally different spaces. That is, you can create several different sequences and then join them up later. There really is a lot of flexibility. But where should we start? Well we know that the narrative component to this film is all contained within this folder right here. Okay this comprises scenes one and three. Scene one is where Jean-Michel greets Brandon who drops the avacado and he gets the idea for the avocado truffle and then scene three is where Jean-Michel brings Brandon the avocado truffle to try. So let me expand this a little bit. I'm going to press tilda so we can see everything a little bit better and then so where is scene two? Well scene two lies in the B roll. Primarily the kitchen B roll. This is where we're going to find all of the footage that we're going to edit together in an artsy way where we get to compress the three-day truffle making process into about 45 seconds or so. So if you think about it this is where the largest challenge is of editing this film will be so let's leave that for later. Let's attack the narrative for now. So we're first going to create what is called a scene assembly. And that's just getting our shots in order. Okay the timing and pacing don't matter yet but we want the basic content of each shot correct and we want everything in the right order. Now there are a few ways that you can go about this. Let me show you the additive method first. Let's go ahead and minimize this again, tilda. And all of these shots are pretty well organized so one through 15 are in the general order that the scenes are in the narrative shoot so I'm going to just load this first shot here and this is Jean-Michel putting out the sign. So what I'm going to do is just mark an in and an out around the area that I think this is generally going to take place. So how about right here before the sign enters the frame and then let's get that sign down even see that Jean-Michel is stepping back there but I'll go ahead and mark my out there as he's stepping back. Okay so we've marked our section. This is generally the part of the shot that we think that we're going to include. But don't worry we still have access to all of the rest of the material. In this case all of these frames later if we want it. Okay so this is certainly not cut in stone but let's bring this down. There are a lot of ways to do this and I'll certainly stress keyboard shortcuts in the essential training courses but for this introductory course I'm just going to be as simple as possible and since all three editing applications support drag and drop that's what I'll do here. So we'll go ahead and drag this down. I have my first shot in the timeline and you can see here that the sequence is created in my project pane. I'm going to move that in the correct location real quick so I'm going to expand that and I'm just going to call this chocolate scene assembly and I'm going to put that in my 4.3 bin. That's where we are in the course so we'll go ahead and put that there and let's move on. So we'll go back to our narrative bin here and this is my next shot. Let's go ahead and see what this is. All right so he's putting the sign down there and then he's looking up and he sees Brandon. So let's go to where he's backing up about right there working in and we'll probably cut to Brandon next so I'll go ahead and mark an out there and we'll drag this down. Notice that snapping is on so it's going to snap that edit. If it's not you'll want to enable it right here or press the S key. If you would like your shots to fill the timeline just press the backslash key and you can see things a little bit better. So as we're going across here we've got those two shots and I think they're working pretty well but we'll finesse it later if we need to. By the way I am only cutting in video. If you're doing this in audio as coming down as well you'll just want to turn off your audio track. Notice what happens when I turn on the audio track and do that same operation you can see that I have video and audio. So use your track selector panel to control what comes down. Let me undo that and one more additive shot. We'll go ahead and load shot three and here's Brandon walking by and I'll just ballpark it here. In, out, turn off my audio there and drag it down and I think our sequence is rolling along. Now another method that some editors use is the subtractive method. Where you drag all of the clips that you want to use in one right after another and then use the timeline as a sort of sandbox to move things around. Now fortunately our shots are labeled in order here so this will be pretty easy for us so I'm just going to grab everything from five through 15 so I'll click and then I'll shift+click And let's just bring all of those into the timeline. Now you notice I wasn't careful and got both my video and my audio but not a problem I'm just going to press minus minus a few times to zoom out and if I grab onto my audio you notice the video is selected too so to separate those I just option drag or Alt drag on a PC so that I just grab my audio and I'm going to delete that. All right and now we have all these shots one after another and they don't make sense at all yet but we're going to finesse that right now. So let's go ahead to the very next shot. We've got him setting out the sign he sees Brandon and he waves so the next thing is that Brandon has to drop his avocado so there's a couple of ways that we can do this reductive trimming where we actually take away stuff. One way is to trim so I can just grab the edge here and trim away like so. If I do that you'll notice that I trip a gap. All right so if I wanted to trim to about right there and I just did a traditional trim I'm going to have a gap right here, okay. Let me undo that, Cmd+Z. If I want to actually close up the gap I can do a ripple trim. Ripple trim is this guy right here. That's the B key. So I just press B on the keyboard and grab and drag and notice what happens. Okay, so the gap is closed up and you can see that drop the avocado and the next shot is that avocado. So let's do the same thing. I'll go ahead and ripple trim that and how long do we want the avocado to be down maybe about that long and ripple trim that. Okay to switch from ripple trim back to the select mode where we were before that's the V key or you can just click right here. Now you can drag these through the timeline if you want. Again if snapping is on it will snap to your edits and we've go the first several shots in. Timing doesn't look too bad but we will need to finesse that. Let's just do a couple of more and you know what I'm actually going to need the end of this shot right here where he goes to grab the avocado. Okay so that's up here and there he goes, he sees it. Let's edit that in next. So I'm going to mark an in and an out and I'll drag that down right afterwards like so. Okay so he dives for the avocado and we need to cut to that shot. I'm going to show you one more way to do reductive editing and that's by using the razor tool. That's this tool over here or the C key and I'm just going to press C and my cursor becomes a razor and I'm going to cut there where I want the shot to start and I'm going to cut there where I want it to end. Okay I need to switch back to my selection tool, V to actually select this and then I would just delete it. Okay so I would delete that and I would delete that and I'm left with the portion that I marked. Okay if I did that again maybe here press C here and maybe to there and then switch back to my select tool, V and delete, delete. Okay so some people do that. They just chop away everything they don't need and they click and drag or you can actually also right click in this space and choose ripple delete and it will close the gap for you. During this process if for any reason you need to swap the location of shots say for example you want to swap these two shots even though it doesn't make sense right now you just select it and notice if I click and drag over it's going to override it not what we want to do. Instead I'm going to hold down the Cmd and Option keys That's Ctrl and Alt on a PC and drag and you'll notice that the shot positions have been swapped. Okay so as you're going through this you may need to swap positions of your shots here and there and that's how you do that. Again this reductive editing method is the very messy method not exactly proper video editing techniques. The proper way is usually to mark your in and your out very carefully here and then bring it down but as you're first starting out and first learning you may need to treat your timeline like a sandbox like this and you should feel free to experiment a bit. We're just getting the shots in order to make our scene assembly. All right so I have the scene one and three scene assembly in the 4.3 folder right here and you can see that I have the first few shots laid in in scene one in order and I have the shots here in scene three laid in in order where he gives him the truffle. Okay so we have this big gaping hole in the middle. That's where scene two is going to go and that's what we're going to tackle in the next movie when we play with combining continuity editing which we've already done and complexity editing in a fun and artistic way.

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