Mastering Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 Hotshot: Take your video editing skills to new and exciting levels with eight fantastic projects

The primary objective of this project is for you to learn the various workflows Premiere Pro CS6 offers for editing a short film. The aim is to take the clips supplied with this book and create a scene that tells a story lasting around 60 seconds. Once again, as in Project 1, Creating a Movie Montage – the Easy Way, you will be encouraged to use as many keyboard shortcuts as possible in order to create a frame-accurate Timeline similar to the following screenshot:

You'll start Project 2 in the same way you started Project 1, by making sure everything you need is in the right place, then setting up Premiere Pro CS6 to edit those assets into a short film. However, in this project you will be able to save some time by using the template you created in Project 1. You will then use a new feature in Premiere Pro CS6 to work out what sort of clips you are using and to automatically set the timeline sequence to match those clips.

Once this preparation is out of the way, you will quickly use the tools and shortcuts learned in Project 1 to create a simple story from three of the clips in your Video folder.

The Timeline is now set to tell a story: the journey of a small insect through the glade where it lives. The insect encounters a snake, a frog (it appears very quickly at around 09;09), then lands on an ear of corn. Sadly here the insect is trod on by a horse. Such is life. The real problem is some of these events occur too fast to make any impact. In this section you will attempt to correct that lack of impact by using material from the other clips in the Video bin. They will provide alternative camera angles, allowing the viewer to better understand the details of the story. You'll do this by performing a three-point edit, one of the more commonly used editing techniques, and one that works particularly well with keyboard shortcuts.

In the previous task you performed various three-point edits in order to embellish the conflict between the insect and the snake. However, the insect's escape from the snake is a little sudden, so you will add a portion of another snake clip (Snake_Rear.avi), but using a four-point edit in order to control the new clip's duration on the Timeline.

Four-point edits are used to speed up or slow down a clip so that it can fit into a user-defined space on the Timeline. In this case you will use it to slow the content of a clip down by 50 percent, but keep the continuity of the action constant.

After the insect escapes it is also attacked by a frog; however, this is so quick the viewer will never have a chance to see it. To correct this you will combine three- and four-point edits to slow down part of this new clip (BB_Flyby.avi) to make the frog's attack a more prominent feature of the scene.

The scene is now looking a lot better than the original 'story' you created in the first task. It's also about 10 seconds longer. The aim of this project is to create a 60-second scene, the introduction perhaps to a much longer film, so you still have around 10 seconds of action to play with.

In this task you will fill up that time by reclaiming some footage lost during the overwrite of the BB_Flyby.avi clip. You'll accomplish this with the Trim tool, and then go on to use the same tool to tidy up some of the other clips on the Timeline. Once again, you will attempt to do as much of this as possible using just the keyboard.

Playback the scene now and you can see it has really started to come together, but there are still some minor problems that need to be tweaked away. In the BB_Landing.avi clip a hoof is visible in the shot before the insect is stomped on. To retain the suspense of the stomp it would be best if the hoof had been hidden from view until the very last second. Likewise, the actual shot of the insect landing on the grass stalk is too brief and should really last a few seconds longer. Using various techniques learned so far in this book you can correct both of these problems.

Video tells a story all by itself; even though your short film lacks any kind of sound, it would still get its message across to the viewer. However, that's not good enough for a Hotshot book, so in this section you will add some simple audio effects to the Timeline. These audio effects should have been gathered inside the Audio folder on your designated video drive as laid out in the instructions given in the Prepare for Lift Off section at the start of this project. If you skimmed that section a bit, but want to add sound, then go back and read it again. Return when you have completed the suggested preparations and gathered enough media to complete this task.

This section shouldn't take you long to complete; it's just going to be a matter of drag-and-drop, with a little bit of trimming. But it's still worth doing as sound adds an extra dimension to your projects, which is worth going the extra distance to achieve.

One of the cool things you can do in Premiere Pro CS6 is make your movies look a little less like home videos and a little more like an actual Hollywood movie. You probably can't afford to film under professional lights, or you might have, as in this case, received the footage with no say in how it was filmed. That doesn't matter; you can still use a little creativity to change the tone and look of your footage no matter how it may have been produced.

In this task you will use an adjustment layer, a new feature in Premiere Pro CS6 that allows you to make global changes (like color grades) to the whole sequence without having to copy and paste the settings on to every single clip on the Timeline.

In this project you have created a short film, or at least the opening scene, and learned the various different ways to trim clips on the Timeline. You have also discovered how to create a film look using only those effects shipped with Premiere Pro CS6 as standard. There is no need for expensive plugins with this book!

On top of that you've learned a little bit about the sound capabilities of Premiere Pro and as a bonus you should have created a pretty cool film. That's not a bad list of achievements when you consider how short the short film actually is. As with everything in this book, the actual task completed is just a stepping stone towards learning the core skills needed to be an effective video editor using Premiere Pro CS6.

Once you have your project saved, start again! Create a new sequence and see what you can come up with using the exact same clips, and to see if you can recreate this edit using the keyboard as much as possible (without referring back to the instructions in this project).

When it comes to adding the clips, make your own decisions on how the film should play out, what sort of speed changes you should make, and how stylized your movie look should be. Go crazy and experiment; it really is the best way to learn.

Also note that one clip, BB_Above.avi, wasn't used at all in this project. Perhaps you would like to include it in your version? That decision, as the editor in charge, is up to you. If you are feeling adventurous, why not create a flashback version of this film, or a comedy one with strange speed increases.

Whatever you do, I look forward to seeing your movies on YouTube. Don't forget to send me the link to my e-mail address <PaulEkert@PaulEkert...