Understanding automation modes - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- So we just learned how to use the Track Mixer to make adjustments on the faders. So how do we then do these adjustments and keep them recorded so that we come back to them over time without re-doing it over and over again? - Yeah, you may want to create fades or transitions. And while that can be done with keyframes, it can get a little tedious to have to keep stopping, and clicking, and pulling up or pulling down. You can let Premiere Pro do this for you. Let's go ahead and open up a new sequence here. And I'll show you a quick example of this. And what I think is important is, this is a little bit touchy, literally. - Literally, yes. - [Male Instructor] Let's go ahead and we'll go to the beginning, and we'll scroll down here to the music track, and do a bit of mixing on it. So here we go, we've got some music here right? There we go on track eight, and track seven. Alright, so let's work with track seven initially. And so I see that up here in our mixer, and what we're going to do is we're going to want to make that so that as we move the slider up and down, things change. - Right. - So there are a handful of choices here, break them down for us. - [Female Instructor] Sure. Write is basically exactly how it sounds. You'll be writing the automation as you move the fader up and down. And it will remember those moves, or those keyframes if you were, on that track. So basically as it is, Write. - [Male Instructor] Okay so let's try that first. And I'm going to solo that track, just so we're working with just that track and it's a little easier. And so now, as you make adjustments with this mixer, it's going to add keyframes, right? - [Female Instructor] Right, it won't do it as, you won't see them being formed as you write it, but when you stop, you'll see the keyframes written. - [Male Instructor] Okay so press Play and start to mix. (musical tones playing) - [Female Instructor] Going to make some big moves here just so that you can really see what's happening when we hit Stop. - [Male Instructor] Alright, let's go ahead and stop that and see what it looks like. - [Female Instructor] Okay. - [Male Instructor] Yeah let's see, did it add those frames in? - [Female Instructor] It will add it on the Track keyframes, not the Clip keyframes. - [Male Instructor] Ah very good. So we need to make sure we switch over because that's a little tricky. So good. - Right, exactly. Ah! - A lot of keyframes. Probably more than we want actually, so what's the danger of having too many keyframes? - [Female Instructor] It can get jittery or caught up on itself so you don't want that to happen. - [Male Instructor] So there's a Preference here that actually makes this a bit better. So under Audio, we can choose keyframe thinning which helps, and then we can set a minimal time interval, and this is in milliseconds. So let's bump this up to say, 300 milliseconds, which is going to be less frequent, and I'll choose Undo, unfortunately those all go away, and so now why don't you do that again. - [Female Instructor] Sure. (musical tones playing) Okay let's see what that looks like then. - [Male Instructor] Alright so we have a lot of keyframes, but not nearly as many. It looks like now they're spread out across. So this would be easier to edit, and this is subjective. You may want to even less than this. So you can make it less sensitive or more sensitive. It's really a personal choice, right? - [Female Instructor] Absolutely. And I often, like I said before, do this pass really fast, and then you can just grab a keyframe and move it. And you don't have to rewrite it, you can do both. It's like a combination, it's almost like word processing for automation. - [Male Instructor] And with the pen tool, we can just right-click and delete a keyframe if there's a stray one. So if you decide that that's more than you wanted, you can pull that out and that gives it a lot of flexibility there to easily manipulate. - [Female Instructor] Right. And often times when I've done something that I really don't like and I want to delete a bunch, I can highlight them and hit Delete. - [Male Instructor] But you need to use the pen tool for that to be most effective. With the arrow tool it's a little bit trickier. You try to lasso them and it doesn't understand it. - [Female Instructor] It doesn't. It's very frustrating when you don't realize that. - [Male Instructor] P for pen to control the points. The pen tool adds points and subtracts points. The power of the pen. Alright so that made sense, let's undo and put those back. And so that was the ability here. And I noticed that it's switched from Write to Touch. Why did it automatically switch then? - [Female Instructor] After you've done your first pass in Write, it automatically goes into Touch. Touch is the same as Write, but what it does is that after you've started, and you're touching it and you get to a place and you're happy, you let go. The fader, the volume levels gradually slide back to wherever you've written before. - [Male Instructor] Okay, so let's do that here. We've got Automation turned on, why don't you go ahead and make a few changes to this one. (musical tones playing) And then. - Then I'll let go. - [Male Instructor] Okay and if we stop, let's see what happens. Alright, so it didn't get rid of everything after. If we had switched back to Write, it would have just held that last keyframe and it would have overwritten the other ones. - [Female Instructor] Yes, actually Latch does that very thing. But Latch is the opposite of Touch. When you use Latch, Latch allows you to touch, and until you stop it will hang on to that very point. And when you hit Stop, it'll jump to the place where next keyframe is. - [Male Instructor] Okay. So Write would have overwritten the keyframes. But now that we're on Latch, go ahead and play it back and make a few edits. (musical tones playing) - [Female Instructor] Make these very obvious, so that you can see what I mean. I'm going to let go now. - [Male Instructor] Okay. - [Female Instructor] And then we're going to stop. You can see where I hit Stop, it held that volume until the next keyframe. This is very helpful especially if you've made some moves that aren't very elegant and you just want a clean slate without, but yet you want it to be a certain way and to a certain point. - [Male Instructor] Yeah, maybe the second half was good and you just wanted to redo part of it. So this allows you to mix within a section. And if we started in the middle here, and made those same sort of adjustments, (musical tones playing) and then I stop, I see that what came before and after was left alone. - [Female Instructor] Correct. - [Male Instructor] Alright so it's changing your mind a little bit. - [Female Instructor] Right, Touch is my favorite mode to be in because it allows me to quickly grab a fader, do a move when I'm thinking about it and let go, and it doesn't mess up anything after it. - [Male Instructor] All right, and Read is kind of saying no matter what I do to the slider, don't change it, just leave what was there from before? - [Female Instructor] Right but not all off Read. Off means that it won't read any of the automation. So Read does, it reads it and nothing that you do will change it. Like if you decide on the fly you want to change that fader, it won't. (musical tones playing) - Even if I did that. - Well it does on playback, but it won't change your automation at all. - [Male Instructor] Okay so it affects the playback, but it basically is like a way of saying, protect me from me. - Yes, exactly. - [Male Instructor] I'm done with this one, let's just call it baked. But then if you totally change your mind, The other method is Off, which basically turns off the automation so we can just hear it without the automation mixing, but it's still left in the Timeline if we decide we want to go back and use it. - [Female Instructor] In you want to check that, like A-B it before and after. - [Male Instructor] Alright, well this makes a lot of sense. And you saw this automation method, remember we do have total control in the Timeline still. So you can come down to the Timeline, and make any changes that you want down here. Using these controls, you can step in and make sure that the right style is selected. You'll also find these great buttons to conveniently move from one keyframe to the next if you decide you want to make a change. This makes it easy. And if you wanted to add a keyframe manually, we could just be right here and click to add the keyframe, and now it put that keyframe in place. So that allows you, maybe you wanted to anchor that point there, but then come before it and pull it down. That's an easier way sometimes to just to make a key for and then jump back a little. So all-in-all what I'm seeing here is a natural evolution. The ability to make changes in the Timeline level, or use a dedicated tool that's more representative of traditional mixer. And when you're working in your edit suites, you're in an audio editing suite, you often use full control services. Why might somebody step up to a tangent control service, something that they can put their fingers on and move? - [Female Instructor] If you have trouble using a trackball or a trackpad to do your fader moves, you may want to try to get a single fader or a small fader pack that works with Premier through its interface HUI or MIDI, and it allows you to actually have a tactile interface. Often they come combined with Stop, Play, Repeat, those type of functions. - [Male Instructor] Mow that we've kind of got some tracks where we want, it's time to think about where those tracks go, and that comes down to dealing with sub-mixes and routing.