Let’s Make a Music Video with Premiere Pro, Part I
Today, I will show you how to edit a music video together in Adobe Premiere Pro. I will show you how to bring in your footage and audio into a project, edit the clips and export it as a video file. I’ve dabbled in video editing for over ten years now, worked in it professionally for over three, with a background in graphic design. Before I take a break from it for Software Engineering, I’d like to share my knowledge in this blog.
Before I get to the technical stuff, let me explain how I approach a music video. I think of a music video as a way to compliment a song with recorded footage in a way that accentuates the beats and rhythms in a song. Letting the song drive what the video should show. Like calm, slow sections in a song would have calm, slow footage to compliment it. I only deviate from that when I feel its appropriate or to make an contrasting effect, a deviation to create a moment that stands out amongst the rest of the video. I also keep an eye out for movement I like. Say, a hand gesture or facial expression, shift in light or shadow, that I feel must be included in the video with the appropriate sound in the song for it to compliment. As much as the subject matter of the footage can be important or not, I find editing to a song’s beat makes for a stronger video than one ignoring a beat. It just hits better, in my opinion.
Now to the technical stuff, let’s make sure we have all the media resources (video footage, audio files, etc.) we need to make our final video organized and ready to go. Let’s create our primary directory and let’s name it myvideo. Inside that folder, create new directories called footage and audio. Lastly, inside the audio folder, set up two new folders called soundfx and music. This is my default folder setup for most projects I do. Here is what our file tree should look like. (below)
After setting up our directories, let’s throw in our files to the directories where they belong. Throw videos files in myvideo/footage , music files in myvideo/audio/music and our sound effect files in myvideo/audio/soundfx.
Now that we are organized, let’s open Premiere Pro, get acquainted with the program and import our files.
When it’s finished opening, click on New Project… on the left side of the window. (shown below)
Getting to know our Workspace
Below is your Media Bin Panel. It will show you all the media files and folders imported into your project. You will go here to bring find and bring in clips to your Timeline for editing. Bringing in your files is as easy as dragging-and-dropping into the bin from your operating system’s folders. Though you can manage your media here and organize your files, I find it best to organize before importing files.
This panel below is the Source Preview Panel, it allows you to preview footage from your Media Bin before adding it to you sequence in the timeline. Additionally, you can select sections of your footage by pressing I for ‘In’ and O for ‘Out’ in the part of the video you want to drag into the sequence. Just place the playhead where you want to begin the clip selection and press I, then place the playhead on the frame where you want to end the selection and press O. This will make the selection. Clicking-and-dragging from the preview frame to your sequence will bring in your selection only, instead of the whole clip haphazardly. Note, you can select ins and outs on the both the sequence timeline and in the source preview panel.
Here in the Timeline Panel below is where you will bring in your footage, audio and other media to edit. This can be thought of as the main workspace, as it will have instances of your footage and other files in a sort of a digital film reel No flammable film here, just digital, editable, undoable-if-you-mess-up instances. It has a draggable playhead (arrow pointing down on the timeline) that lets you know where in the timeline you are and what content your timeline’s Preview Panel (see below Timeline image) is displaying. In short, its a video scrubber.
Right next to our Timeline, on its right, is our Toolbar. Here we have the tools we can use on our Timeline’s content. The tool I use most is the Cut tool (Keyboard shortcut — ‘C’). It cuts like if you were to to take scissors to a roll of film to cut at a certain frame. Pretty neat considering it used to have to be done for real with a razorblade and a keen eye for looking at film frames in a studio against a lightbox. Premiere’s timeline, like most video editing software, is divided into a video section and audio section, both with their respective layers to allow for complex layering, effects and other fun stuff. In Premiere, the video section is on the top half of the Timeline and the bottom half is for audio. Note, neither the audio or video sections are visible till a sequence has been created and is in use in the Timeline.
Below, is the Timeline’s Sequence Preview Panel. Here is where your timeline’s content will be viewed. Depending on where your playhead is placed in your Timeline and what content is at that playhead’s point will determine the content displayed here. This panel has several tools for playing through your timeline. It can even use a comparative display of two points in your timeline (but we’ll stick with the basics for now)
Let’s Begin…
Now, let’s bring in our first video into our timeline from the media bin and begin editing our footage for key points in our video. It is important to choose the correct first footage clip to bring into the timeline. The first clip dragged into the timeline will have its attributes (framerate, dimensions, etc.) adopted by the sequence file created once the first media content is brought into the timeline, so it is imperative you choose the correct one as it will determine what your video will be like and editing these settings after the fact is not fun and unnecessary.
For example, if the first media you bring into the timeline is a video with the dimensions of 320 x 240 pixels (a very low quality video in 2020), your sequence will adopt these dimensions and if you bring in a second video at 3840 x 2160 pixels(4k), only 320 of 3840 pixels in width by 240 of 2160 in height will display on your previewer (only a small section of your 4k footage). You will have to resize the video clip to fit into the sequence’s frame or resize your sequence after the fact. Might as well have imported the 4k footage first so the sequence would adopt its attributes and allow for a wider array of footage to be fully viewable in-frame. Imagine that the only part of your 4k footage you could see is a close-up of someone’s nose because the sequence frame cannot fit all its pixels in it. Now that’s not something I’d like to deal with the hard way.
On a similar note, if a video at 15 frames per second (fps), which is an old animation frame rate, is brought into the timeline first, a live action video placed in the timeline will come off as choppy. Unless its a stylistic choice, choppy video probably isn’t something we want. It’s like watching an old GIF. 24 fps is the film standard to get smooth live action movement, 30 fps is the newer standard in digital form, 48 fps is Peter Jackson’s Hobbit Trilogy standard (an attempt to double the film framerate, it did not pan out), 60 fps is good for smooth digital video, 240 fps is often used to playback in slow motion, most frame rates above 240 fps do the same and with the higher the framerate the slower the video can be played before it starts to look choppy.
After bringing in your first video clip into the timeline (hopefully a 4k clip at 24–30 fps, my preference), you can remove it from the timeline, and subsequently, the sequence created by bring it in in the first place. We only chose it for its attributes. Drag the song you want into the Timeline now, it will be the base for which our video is edited and we don’t want to edit the song itself so lock its layer. Study the song, study footage too and see which parts of your footage you want to use to compliment certain parts of the song. One thing I sometimes do streamline the work is I leave markers on the peaks of a song’s waveform (press ‘m’ to leave a marker) to allow for easy snap-on to each beat with a video clip. So when a beat hits, the clip can cut to the next clip, emphasizing the beat ever so subtly. The more the edit is in sync with the music, the better the video will come off.
After bringing in the clips you want into the timeline, edit their placement and length to your preference over the song in sections. Piece by piece, you will fill up your timeline over the song and soon enough you will have a video to export. Note, right-click on a clip in the timeline for more options. One option I often use is Speed/Duration. Changing its speed value (in percentage) will change the speed at which the selected clip will play in. For example, 50% speed will slow a video to half its speed, making the video clip longer in the timeline (as it will take twice as much time to play it all out) and give the video a slo-mo effect.
To make it smoother, as some footage may have too low of a frame-rate to slow without it getting choppy, you can check select the option Optical Flow to have Premiere auto-generate missing frames between the existing frames in an attempt to create the appearance that the missing frames exist and the video is of a higher frame-rate, hence making a smoother slo-mo effect. Word of caution, glitchy looking artifacting can become an issue with too slowed-down and too-low frame rate clips as Premiere is not prefect in creating these missing frames yet. There are entire applications solely for the purpose of creating these missing frames for slo-mo that Premiere does well enough though not perfectly. One thing I like to do is speed up a section of a clip to about 300%, cut it where I want it to stop the ramped up speed and slow down the subsequent cut clip to 30% or so to make a cinematically interesting sequence. One example of this (minus the ramped up speed) can be found in Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows’ forest chase scene. Observe, there are a lot of slow-downs and speed-back-ups in this clip.
After you’ve finished overlaying clips to your song and editing them to you preference, it’s color correction time. For the sake of keeping a consistent base look to our video, we have to make sure all the clips we have in our timeline are as close to each other’s (to put it shortly) look, as possible. And I will explain how to do that in Part II of this tutorial.
See you in the next post, fellow reader :)
Next time in Part II:
We will color-correct our video clip, color-grade it to our preferred stylized look, add effects to our video as a finishing touch and export it into a video file.
PS. If you’re interested in seeing one example of my outputs, check out this video I edited together a couple years ago on my free time.
