Best Practices: Editing efficiently

Mark Leombruni is Head of News Audio at Vice Media

"VICE's use of Premiere was built around speed and for us, post finishing is wildly faster inside Premiere Pro. From a busy daily news room to a long-form scripted TV show, it caters perfectly to a variety of demanding environments. If you consider a typical 30-min scripted TV episode might take 20 hours for post finishing, we can turn the same length program around in less than 3 hours. 

Doing color and audio mix inside the editing program makes it a lot faster than other programs by virtue of the fact that we don't have to export, transfer, and ingest the edit into other post finishing programs. That can take up to a day depending on the length of the project and complexity. It's also a huge time saver if the editor wants to make revisions. No need to roundtrip again to other programs. Finishing in Premiere also allows us the benefit of exporting final deliveries directly from our edit sequence timelines. Skipping the need for an online post process entirely. 

The Essential Sound Panel and its ability to automatically level and treat audio based on the type of source is a huge time saver for roughing out edits and getting a broadcast legal mix while working on the cut.

The Motion Graphics templates workflow from After Effects to Premiere Pro has also proven to be a big timesaver. With it, we created a robust system of templates and workflows that empower teams of editors and artists to pass project files back and forth seamlessly throughout the day, while maintaining a high level of quality control as they work."

Vashi Nedomansky is a Hollywood-based filmmaker, editor, and author of “How we made 6 Below: Feature film post-production from start to finish”

"The creative and post-production world should be aware of what is possible with Premiere Pro. After editing on Premiere Pro for the last 14 years, I have a created a custom workflow that I can quantify as being faster and more efficient than other NLEs. This is based on editing 11 feature films on the 3 most commonly used software options. For me Premiere Pro offers the most powerful, flexible, and stable platform to tackle any project. 

I would love an editing challenge against any combatants to test Premiere Pro against any other option in a real-world situation. If hypothetically, me and two other editors on competing systems were given five hours of dailies from one day of a feature film (average day of filming) and were asked to log, organize and cut the scenes from those five hours…I will easily beat them in organization and cut scenes."

Thomas Bergman is an editor, cinematographer, and colorist and is a co-founder of Silbersalz Film, based in Stuttgart, Germany.

"Man kann im Premiere Pro im Vergleich zum AVID sicherlich 100% schneller auf derselben Maschine sein, indem man Workflows, Premiere Features, Key Commands schlau mit seinem kreativen Prozess verbindet."

Translation: In Premiere Pro I can work at least 100% faster than Avid on the same machine because there’s so much freedom to design your own creative process with Premiere Pro workflows, tools, and custom keyboard commands.

Premiere Pro's customizability allows me to work faster. I map and save shortcuts and workspaces that work the way I think they should work, which allows me to do what I want to do -- in the way I want to do it -- so I can enact edits with the speed at which I'm thinking about them creatively, in real time. It takes time to set up, save, test, and refine these customizations, but once my keyboard, panel settings and preferences are dialed-in -- I don't have to think about what I'm doing, I just do it. 

Features that help me achieve this kind of speed include:

• Saving workspaces for various workflows, such as organizing footage and making selects (starter template projects, smart bins, ingest & proxy presets, sequence presets, short cuts for making subsequences, output presets for review/uploading etc.).
• Using Freeform bins as multi-source monitors allows me to very quickly create rough cuts.
• Using "pancake" timelines when making cut-downs and when performing complicated compositing and finishing work.
• Saving single-key shortcuts for daily timeline editing and dynamic trimming operations.
• Easy access to Essential Graphics, Sound, and Lumetri Color Panels tremendously improve speed -- for every user.
• Panel access to Adobe Stock improves speed (not only for editing but for licensing too).
• Panel access to applications like Wipster improves delivery process for collaboration.
• Advanced features like quickly applying a LUT to an adjustment layer above a rough-cut sequence can make the difference between getting approval in minutes vs hours. 

All of these features, not to mention Dynamic Linking to After Effects and access to Motion Graphics Templates, can result in meeting tight deadlines with great looking sequences -- instead of delivering "acceptably professional" cuts that clearly could have been much better if we had more time. 

Scott Simmons is a video editor and writer at ProVideo Coalition.

It’s in craft editing where I get the real speed advantage with Premiere Pro. That’s where I’m working through footage, logging, organizing, beginning to build cuts. Getting deep into that story building part: that’s the most important part of the process. 

There are multiple ways to do many different tasks. 

For example, when editing from master clips there are options depending on what you’re doing. You can use traditional subclips but I think that’s less efficient. Master clips can be viewed as large thumbnails in a bin where you can mark IN to OUT points and edit right from that bin to a timeline. If you create Selects Sequences, you can then edit from those sequences using the Pancake Timeline method. And best of all you can open those Pancake Timelines in the Source monitor and view that Source Sequence in a Timeline. 

When Trimming you can use the mouse but again that’s not the most efficient way. Dynamic Trimming is possible so you can watch and “feel” your trims in the Viewer. But you can also use keyboard shortcuts to trim in the timeline in a lot of different ways. 

Audio mixing has a lot of options as well. The Essential Sound panel is a fast way to get a lot of things done without having to know too much about the whole process. But I think some of the real power comes in that Premiere offers both CLIP based mixing and TRACK based mixing and Premiere is the only of the major NLEs that offer both of those options. Finally, you can send your mix over to Adobe Audition for the ultimate high-end mixing experience.

Those are three of my favorite places where you have multiple options for how you want to work in Adobe Premiere Pro.