Premiere Pro Archives

Changing the Premiere Pro UI Colours back to pre-2023

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In the latest release of Premiere Pro 2024, Adobe thought it would be a great idea to “refresh” the UI colours we see in the timeline and on labels. As a long term Premiere user of nearly 30 years, those innovations annoy the living daylight out of me. I’m all for updates, but they should …

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Adding an Effect to a Source Clip in Premiere Pro

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Premiere Pro has an interesting feature I’ve just discovered: applying effects to source clips. This is helpful if every sequence you’ve created needs an overall colour correction and you’ve forgotten to apply it during editing. Rather than fix 20 clips that reference the same footage, we can fix the footage and the effect will be …

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Full Screen Video Preview in Premiere Pro

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I found out a couple of neat full-screen tips in Premiere Pro. One will remove the status bar at the top, the other one will make the editor window temporarily full screen. It works great, and I can’t believe I’ve never heard of these gems before. Remove the Status Bar in Premiere Pro Press CTRL …

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How to edit audio samples on the Premiere Timeline

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Sometimes one frame is just too large a step when you’re editing audio in Premiere Pro. Thankfully we can infinitely expand the steps in the timeline by showing Audio Time Units. To do that, find the super tiny nondescript hamburger icon in the timeline, just above the timecode display. Click it and choose Show Audio …

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Where does Premiere Pro 2020 store auto save files

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Ever since the past Premiere Pro update, my computer likes to reset itself randomly, particularly during rendering. I should have never hit that update button. Note to self: NEVER update software (or hardware) when everything is working well in principle – no matter how many nags you get. With that mishap on my hands, I …

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Can a 1080p Timeline export 4K UHD in Premiere Pro?

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I was asking myself this very same question. The obvious answer is YES of course, it really depends on the export settings. I had assumed of course that Premiere is clever enough to take the original resolution from whatever media is available, and do its rendering from that. Big mistake. Because it doesn’t do that!

While it is possible to pick a 4K or 4K UHD export preset, or even create your own, Premiere will up-scale your footage from 1080 to the desired resolution.

I’ve done some tests on this recently and can confirm that’s how Premiere works under the hood. If you want to get crisp 4K output from your edit, the timeline needs to be set to 4K or 4K UHD (depending on what aspect resolution you’re editing in).

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How to manually rebuild Media Cache Files in Premiere Pro

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When you’ve been working with Premiere Pro for a while, importing large amounts of data and creating countless projects, there comes the time when you might want to clean up your Media Cache Database. It’s an exotic combination of various files that Premiere creates to make playback and scrolling during editing as fast as possible. …

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How to duplicate an audio channel in Premiere Pro

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I recently had a clip in which the audio was only present on a single channel. Trying to edit that in iMovie proved impossible, because iMovie doesn’t have a way to deal with single tracks of audio. So I thought, I’m sure Premiere can do that. The question was… how? It had occurred to me …

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Multi Camera Editing in Premiere Pro CS 5.5

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Even my ageing version of Premiere Pro CS 5.5 has multi-camera editing capabilities built in. And even my ageing Mac Mini from 2012 can cope with full HD clips during those edits.

It’s a slightly mysterious process, and until very recently I didn’t quite know how to do it, so there are my notes. This workflow is also helpful if you a have single camera feed and want to switch live (vision mixer style) to zoomed-in versions of the same footage.

In short, we need to

  • drag all camera clips into a timeline (all on top of each other)
  • sync all clips in this timeline (select them all, then right-click and choose “synchronize”)
  • create a new sequence from that sequence
  • enable multi camera on that clip
  • open the multi camera monitor, press play and switch live between cameras, creating edits on the fly

Jonathan Lang explains it here:

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How to render media with Alpha Channel in Premiere Pro

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I made some new lower-third captions for my YouTube channel in Premiere the other day. I had a vision for some animations, and rather than spend several hundred dollars on pre-made snazzy clips, I thought I’d take on the task myself. 

For those to be usable on top of other video footage in my screen casting software (Camtasia Studio 3), I needed the animations to be rendered out with an Alpha Channel. That way a mask is automatically created, letting other programmes crop out everything around the titles.

Since I never had to do that before, I asked myself: How do we render a clip with an alpha channel in Premiere? 

After careful research, combined with some tireless trial and error, I found the solution to this puzzle – and here’s how to do it.

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How to export multiple timelines at once in Premiere

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I recently had the need to encode several audio clips I had edited in Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5. That’s easy if you export one timeline at a time, by selecting the sequence, then click File – Export – Media. 

But this principle doesn’t work if you have several sequences that need to be exported. 

An article in the Adobe Forums suggests how to do this using After Effects as an intermediary, but it seemed very convoluted and a total hack. Besides, I don’t have After Effects so that’s not really a solution.

Convinced that there had to be a better way, I had a quick fiddle – and lucky for me I’ve discovered an easy workaround that I’ll share with you here. I’m using Premiere Pro CS 5.5, so I’m assuming it’ll work in later versions too.

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How to run Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 in 2017

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I had some editing to do the other day that, for one reason or another, I wanted to do on my Windows machine. I tried several open-source utilities, but none of them can cut the mustard like Adobe Premiere Pro can.

However, the only legitimate version I have is Premiere Pro CS3, vintage 2007, purchased for good money back then (which I’ve all made back, thanks to a three-day editing job I got for BBC interactive, literally a week after I bought it). Those were the days before Full HD video was commonplace, and way before anyone dared to mention the idea of 4K. But I digress.

So I tried to install Premiere under Windows 10, and to my surprise all worked rather well – until the registration part came and told me that this app could no longer be activated. 

Let’s see how we can bring this version back to live in 2017.

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Handy Keyboard Shortcuts in Adobe Premiere Pro

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Here’s a list of handy keyboard shortcuts for Adobe Premiere Pro. I keep forgetting these little helpers every 6 months or so…  By no means an extensive or complete list, here are the ones that I like using: Timeline SPACE – Playback at 100% K – Stop J – Play 100% backwards (multiple presses accelerates …

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How to mute the mic when recording a voice over in Premiere Pro

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I recently recorded a quick voiceover in Adobe Premiere Pro CS 5.5, but I ran into an issue for which the fix wasn’t exactly obvious. Here’s the problem: When you mark a track to record some audio and start the recording, the full mix is being played back through your speakers (or headphones). This includes …

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How to export 4k video with Premiere Pro CS 5.5

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I’ve finally worked out how to export 4k and 2.7k footage with my 6 year old version of Premiere Pro. That’s exciting news and gives the software a new lease on life!

With the standard export presets, tweaked to a resolution higher than 1920×1080, I’ve always encountered the following error message:

Invalid framesize/framerate for this Level. Please lower the Frame Dimensions, Frame Rate or increase the Profile and Level and try again.

Turns out Premiere has actually given me the answer to my problem right there in that error message, I just never really read beyond “lower the frame dimensions”.

Let me show you how to overcome this 1080p limitation in Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and export hi-res video without a hitch, but first make sure to check video production company phoenix so that you can get a quote.

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How to render an image sequence as video in Photoshop

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Up until now I had always used Premiere Pro to assemble image sequences of a rendered animation.

I’m still using Premiere Pro CS 5.5 and I’m not currently subscribing to the whole Creative Cloud package. As such, my version of Premiere is stuck somewhere in the past, when 4K was barely an idea, and 1080p was the highest result you would ever need.

The trouble is, I was working on an animation whose resolution was larger than 1920×1080. While Premiere Pro CS 5.5 can handle this and higher resolutions for editing, there doesn’t seem a way to export it at anything above 1920×1080.

My editing needs were moderate at best: assemble 250 frames, repeat those several times, and add a fade to black either end. Which application would be capable of doing this swiftly and efficiently, I wondered?

Photoshop CC can do it! Would you believe it? Here’s how.

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How to export a single frame from your timeline in Adobe Premiere Pro

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There’s an extremely handy shortcut that allows us to export single frames from the playhead’s current position in Premiere’s timeline. It’s not available via a menu command, it’s not particularly advertised, and it saves having to go via the File – Media – Export option, potentially downsizing the original footage. Take a look at your …

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How to clear temporary files in Adobe Premiere Pro

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Premiere writes a lot of temp files to various locations – the most obvious of those are saved at the same location as the current project, in a folder simply called Adobe Premiere Pro Preview Files. If you delete an old project, make sure to delete this folder too. But Premiere does create temporary files in …

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How to avoid empty audio tracks in Premiere Pro

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Why

Have you ever wondered why a source clip’s audio ends up at the very bottom of the timeline, even though you have several empty tracks above it? Well I have, and I was convinced there had to be some kind of setting responsible for this.

And there is: it has to do with the way a Sequence is setup when you first create it. Let me explain how this works and how to change such behaviour to avoid annoyances in the future.

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How to reset User Preferences in Premiere Pro

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The other day my copy of Adobe Premiere Pro started exhibiting strange behaviour: new projects opened with four timelines (three of which were always empty), audio never made it to the target track (only ever to track 6) – so I thought, perhaps I’ll reset my preferences. But how do we do that in Premiere? …

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How to animate motion with Bezier Tweeners in Premiere Pro

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Premiere-Tweener

Tired of linear animations in Premiere Pro? We’re in luck, because Premiere does support full control over ease-in and ease-out controls when you animate with keyframes. It’s just extremely clunky to use.

The process of rendering such frames in between is sometimes referred to as “tweening”. Let’s find out how to use it.

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How to display frames instead of timecode in Adobe Premiere Pro

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No matter what preset you select for your sequence, Premiere will always default to showing timecode in your timeline. This will be automatically adjusted to the relevant EBU or SMPTE timecode. Some advice from the Memory Tree Video Production team: “Full frames on the other hand can be very useful for things like animations where …

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