Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 Studio Techniques

Once you have added clips to your timeline, Premiere Pro offers lots of features to help you organize and arrange them. When you are editing and rearranging in the Timeline panel, you drag media from its current position and drop it where you want it to be. The same way you can choose to overlay or insert when you drop a clip, you can lift or extract a clip when you drag it within the Timeline panel. The opposite of overlaying, lifting is the default behavior. Extracting is the Ctrl-modified behavior, and it is the opposite of inserting.

Notes

When you are dragging and dropping in the timeline or trimming the edges of a clip, watch the Program Monitor for feedback as to the frames you are editing. For example, when you are dropping a clip into the timeline, the Program Monitor shows you the last frame of the media before your inserted or overlaid shot and the first of media after the last frame of your inserted or overlaid shot (Figure 6.12).

Figure 6.12. For Insert and Overlay edits, the Program Monitor's two-up display tells you the last frame before your cut and the first frame after your cut. Because I am performing an Insert edit, notice that the two-up frames are consecutive. My Insert edit will occur between the value of 00;00;02;03 and 00;00;02;04 for the clip in the timeline

Lifting and Extracting

In addition to Overlay and Insert, which are functions for dropping media in the timeline, Premiere Pro has two unique functions for moving and dragging media from its timeline position: Lift and Extract. To understand how they work, continue working with the SOURCE EDIT sequence.

1.

Select the center clip, Saleen_Car_02 and drag it up to Video 2 (Figure 6.13).

Figure 6.13. Premiere's default move for dragging clips is the Lift, which moves the clip from its current position and preserves the position of all other media in the timeline. Notice that once the clip is lifted, when it is being dropped it displays the Overlay icon

Notice that the space that Car_02 occupied on Video 1 is now empty. This is the default Lift behavior: You drag a clip from its positionlifting the media from its original spotand the space defined by the clip's former boundaries remains open and preserved in the timeline. Like overlaying, lifting does not disturb or modify any elements surrounding the clips that you are lifting. Although Premiere does not give you any feedback to indicate you are in Lift mode, it is the default for dragging and moving a clip.

2.

Press Ctrl+Z to undo your Lift edit so you can try an Extract edit.

3.

Hold your mouse over Saleen_Car_02, then press and hold down the Ctrl key. To perform an Extract edit, you must hold down the Ctrl modifier before you click on a clip to select it (Figures 6.14a , b, and c). With the Ctrl key pressed, the icon next to the cursor is now a left-pointing arrow to indicate you're in Extract mode. The text in the bottom status bar tells you as well.

Figures 6.14a, b, and c. Before you click and move the clip from its current position, hold the Ctrl key down to put the cursor into Extract mode (a). Before you release the clip and drop it onto Video 2, you can release the Ctrl key to drop the clip back in Overlay mode (b). Now, because this clip was extracted from Video 1 and then overlaid on Video 2, the space it occupied on Video 1 is ripple deleted and the clip overlays above the other clips on Video 2 (c)

4.

With the Ctrl key and mouse button held down, drag Car_02 to a new position on Video 2. First release the Ctrl key, then release the mouse. If you are still holding Ctrl when you release the clip after your move, you are immediately thrown into Insert mode. If you release Ctrl before the clip, you are in Overlay mode. Because you were in Overlay mode here, no shifting of track contents occurred.

These are the fundamental functions of dragging clips in the timeline. Use Lift to preserve the space the dragged media occupied and Extract to ripple delete the space that it occupied. When you link both the dragging (Lift and Extract) and dropping (Overlay and Insert) editing modes together, you will get a taste for what makes the editing workflow so powerful in Premiere Pro.

One Move, Four Choices

I want to take a few moments to reiterate the last step of the last lesson. Once you decide the dragging method (Lift or Extract) for moving your clip from its current timeline position, you can choose not only a new location for the clip, but also how you want to drop it in (Insert or Overlay). Realizing this was my epiphany about the new power of Premiere Pro. Never before have Premiere's timeline editing tools offered such powerful options. Remember, as long as you hold down your mouse button while dragging a clip, you can decide whether to perform an Overlay edit or to press Ctrl to perform an Insert edit.

Consider a sequence of five clips arranged 1-2-3-4-5. Say you want to reorder the clips 4-1-2-3-5. In former versions of Premiere, you would have to perform about four steps to achieve what you can now do in one: Press the Ctrl key and drag Clip 4 from its current position (Extract) to the left. Your cursor snaps to the head (beginning) of the timeline with Clip 4 covering Clip 1. Press the Ctrl key and release the mouse and Clip 4 (Insert edit). Because you performed an Extract, Premiere closed the space formerly occupied by Clip 4, cutting Clip 3 directly to 5. Because you toggled to Insert mode, Premiere slides Clip 1 to the right to make room for Clip 4 at the beginning of the timeline before Clip 1. This is a monumental moment in the Premiere Pro editing experience.

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