10 Tips to Edit 10x Faster in Premiere Pro

hey how's it going Parker while back here with full-time filemaker.com alongside Lanham by the way the winner of our recent team editing competition if you haven't seen that video make sure to check it out as you can see in that video Landon is our best editor on our team and we actually each busted out those 30-second car commercials in less than six hours of editing and so today we're going to teach you how you can become a more efficient editor by sharing with you our top 10 tips to editing 10 times faster in Premiere Pro and big thanks to Asus for sponsoring this video they sentenced their newest flagship laptop and we're excited to show you what it can do later in this video now one of the reasons we've been successful in running your own video production companies is our ability to manage time work efficiently and turn around projects quickly and editing is usually the biggest bottleneck to finishing projects which limits how many projects you can take thus limiting how much money you can make in your business so let's dive into our tips to help you speed up your workflow so you can start taking on more clients alright tip number one is to use the proper hardware so the first thing that you can do to speed up your editing process is to make sure that your computer has the proper specs video editing takes a lot of processing power and your computer needs to have sufficient hardware in order for it to handle what you're throwing at it now our team primarily uses IMAX and MacBook Pros for our editing but we're often asked what pcs we'd recommend for those who prefer the Windows operating system that we honestly didn't really have a great answer until recently when aces came out with their newest flagship laptop the Zenbook pro duo we were super stoked to see what this machine could do so we asked them to send us one and they did just that so again this video is sponsored by Asus but as always we only promote products that we actually believe in and after testing this laptop out for the past couple of weeks we're confident to say that it is our number one laptop choice for video editors who prefer the Windows operating system now with any computer you first need to look closely at the specs in order to determine if it's going to be able to handle editing 4k footage when we're buying a computer there are four main specs we look for the processor or CPU the memory or the RAM the graphics or GPU and the storage or the SSD or HDD and I'm actually going to start out talking about number four storage because if this is slow everything else in your computer will be slow as well we recommend SSDs or solid-state drives because they don't have any moving parts so they operate around two of four times faster than a traditional hard drive which does have moving parts so for video editing definitely make sure you have an SSD the Zenbook pro duo has a one terabyte solid-state drive that operates at extremely fast speeds so you can open applications and edit 4k footage with virtually no lag and the next most important spec would be the processor so this determines how quickly your videos will render and export so a better processor will typically have more processing cores and operate at a faster clock speed so our iMac pro has 18 cores clocked at 2.3 gigahertz but honestly I'd say this is a bit overkill and if we could go back we'd probably only have gotten around 10 to 12 cores at faster speeds per core now the Zen Book Pro duo has an Intel Core I 9 processor with 8 cores with each running at a clock speed of 2.4 gigahertz plus it has the ability to turbo boost up to 5 gigahertz now for several years I did all of my editing on high performing gaming PC's like this one because it was easy to overclock your processor and be able to render your clips nearly twice as fast as a traditional laptop so right before hitting export on my video I'll click the overclock key on my keyboard and it'll supply more air to the internal components so that they can run at a higher speed so we recommend 8 cores if possible as that seems to be a sweet spot for a good performance at a good price now the next most important spec would be Ram Premiere Pro needs at least 8 gigabytes of RAM to run properly the RAM on your computer is responsible for allowing a certain amount of memory to each application so if you only have 8 gigs of ram installed and you're using Premiere Pro then you won't be able to run any other programs without experiencing some lag all of our IMAX have at least 64 gigs of RAM and our MacBook Pros have 32 gigs of ram and the Zen Book Pro duo has up to 32 gigs of RAM which means you'll be able to edit video in Premiere Pro while also touching up photos in Photoshop doing some animations and After Effects and even listening to some music on Spotify and you'll still have RAM to spare so again 32 gigs is probably that sweet spot we recommend for good performance at a good price and the last thing to look at on your computer is the graphics card or the GPU so video editing is primarily dependent on the CPU but having a good GPU will add a little extra horsepower to your machine and help you more quickly move along your timeline and preview your footage now the amount of memory available on your GPU follows the same concept as the total amount of on your ramp the more you have available to you the easier it'll be to pre-render and view your videos while editing now our iMac pro is equipped with the Radeon Pro Vegas 64 with 16 gigabytes of memory which is a huge amount and really helps us move through the Edit faster because we rarely experience any lag the Zenbook pro duo has the NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 2060 which gives you 6 gigabytes of RAM which is planning to keep your timeline moving and preview any of your clips so hopefully that gives you a good idea of the different specs that you need to look for when upgrading or buying a new computer so we purposely made tip number 1 of this video about your computer specs because without taking a close look at the hardware and making sure it performs at a high enough level the rest of these tips will have little effect on your overall workflow and again we highly recommend the Zen book line of computers from Asus the main standout feature that really appealed to us besides the great specs for editing is the dual screens built into this device we love putting our premiere pro time line on the bottom screen so that we can utilize the full dimensions of the top screen for viewing our video neither of us have seen anything like this in a laptop so that is definitely a huge selling point and something that really sets this device apart so if you want to learn more go ahead and click the link in the description moving on down to tip number two is to shoot to edit before you ever get into the editing room one of the best ways to speed up the time it takes to edit a project is to do some pre-planning before you shoot till you don't shoot any excess amount of footage for no reason if you're on set running around shooting everything in sight and you don't have a clear vision of what you want your final video to look like then you're gonna waste a lot of time once you sit down to try and bring it all together now I'm not saying that you always need to shoot exactly for the edit but if you're trying to cut down the time it takes for you to finish a video you should at least have a pretty good idea of how you want it to flow I find that when I storyboard a video shot for shot the Edit only takes a few hours versus if I shoot hours of random footage those edits usually take several days to compile so that's one of the easiest ways to immediately cut down on your editing time is to do a little pre-planning have a vision of the final edit in mind and learn how to shoot to edit moving on now to tip number three is to use a codec that'll lighten the load that Premiere Pro has to carry now your camera and the format in which it records determines the codec that is used to compress the video data so the more compressed your footage the slower your editing is going to be this is why drone footage typically takes a lot to edit because DJI for example uses an inefficient highly compressed codec so even on our fully maxed out iMac pros we still experience lags sometimes with DJI drone footage so before spending a ton of cash on an expensive new computer check first to make sure your lag issues aren't with the codecs of your video files because the issue may be with your camera's codec not with your computer specs regardless of the computer you use though if you're editing a codec that is hard on your machine you might want to consider using proxies our proxy is a converted video file that you use in place of the real video file it is an easier to read codec at a lower resolution thus making it much easier to edit so to make a proxy and Premiere Pro all you have to do is select all of your footage right click and then hover over to proxy then create proxy from here Adobe Media encoder will import your footage and you can select the codec resolution and bitrate of your new proxy file so if you want to learn more about proxy files we have a full video inside the paid course as well as over 30 other videos just on Premiere Pro so we'll drop a link below if you want to check that out tip number four is hard drive speeds matter the drives that you put the footage on matters just as much as the computer specs for speed of editing I see a lot of beginning editors editing off of cheap slow hard drives your computer can only edit as fast as your hard drive can send the information to your computer so don't go cheap on the hard drives if you're on a budget buy a bigger cheaper drive to store all of your footage but for active projects store that footage on hard drives with fast read and write speeds as a baseline again make sure you're using a solid-state drive not spinning drives and I look for at least around 500 megabits per second like these sand disk drives that we use for on-the-go editing but even these drives will slow down your editing on a nicer computer so when I'm at home editing on my fast computers I use a G speed shuttle XL from G tech that will give you transfer rates of up to 2,000 megabits per second not only will this allow you to use the full specs of your computer but it will also allow you to dump footage much faster allowing you to start editing sooner so don't go cheap on your drives because you'll pay for it in time tip number five is data management data management is a super important part of your job as a videographer especially if you want to speed up your editing workflow any of your drives were to crash you'll want to quickly be able to recover your files and finish the edit as if nothing had happened now I highly recommend keeping at least two copies of video and Premiere Pro project files so I use a program called Carbon Copy cloner to backup all of my footage and the reason I love this program is because you can configure your backup to never be overwritten so there's no chance of losing footage on that drive plus you can put it on a schedule so that it'll automatically backup at a certain time I have mine running backup every night at 3 a.m. which is perfect because by the time I sit down at my desk in the morning it's finished running and I know that all of my projects are safe and I'm ready to go if you're editing a big project with a lot of different footage from multiple cameras plus extra b-roll sound effects music etc the last thing you want to do is waste time trying to find any of these files so the obvious solution to this would be to stay organized and have a set folder structure for all of your projects there's not necessarily a right and a wrong way to organize and name your folders but I'll at least show you how I do it in case you want to take any of these ideas and use it in your own workflow so on the root of my editing Drive I have a folder for current projects and another one specifically for assets in the current projects folder there are more folders for each individual project that I'm working on so if we click on this project folder for example we'll see inside a project files folder where I keep the Premiere Pro and After Effects files a footage folder where I keep all the raw footage from the shoot then finally a folder called renders where I export the final edits of my project so staying organized like this will help you save time searching for missing files and it'll help you always know where everything is if you ever have to go back and revisit old projects now since we've talked about the assets folder on the root of my editing drive that actually brings us to tip number 6 which is having an asset library now I say assets because that encompasses every type of add-on that I'll be using to complete my video this could be music sound effects overlays like lens flares and light leaks nuts and so on so if there's a general asset that I've used or plan on using across multiple projects or if I have a recurring client and I often use their company logo or any other resources I keep it in my general assets folder on the root of my editing drive so by keeping them here in a central folder I can quickly access that folder and import it into my project rather than having duplicate assets and keeping them inside the individual project folders on my editing drive so by doing this you're gonna save space and you'll easily know where to find all of your assets and we have loads of assets that we share inside a full time filmmaker to help you start building your library but moving on now to tip number seven is keyboard or cuts regardless of the program you use it is crucial to either learn the default keyboard shortcuts for your program or create your own I'd say my editing workflow has gotten two to three times faster just by mastering this one tip of using keyboard shortcuts every extra click that you have to make to accomplish a task while editing our extra seconds that eventually lead to extra minutes that turn into hours of wasted time by the way we do have too many courses on both Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro X where we show you our exact keyboard shortcuts and even give you a downloadable file so that you can import dozens of shortcuts that we use so again link in the description to check that out we don't have time to go over all the keyboard shortcuts we use but we're gonna show you the top three most useful shortcuts that we use in Premiere Pro so the first one that I use is gonna help you with sifting sifting is one of those tasks that takes even professional editors a long time to accomplish but if you follow tip number three and shot with the Edit in mind all you really need to do is thumb through your footage and pull out the best clips that you're gonna be using now the default shortcuts that I use in Premiere Pro are I which marks the end point of my clip and o which marks the out point so on the project window you can switch to icon view and then hover over your clip and use the in-and-out shortcuts to trim it then drag it onto your timeline or you can also double click on the file in the project window so you can make the clip bigger and use the same shortcuts to trim it then there's a bonus you can click the comma key and it'll add it directly to your timeline the second one is the marker which will help you mark specific points on your timeline and quickly snap your clips into place so the default for this shortcut is simply M so it's easy to remember I use this shortcut most often when I want to mark a drum hit or a beat from a song that I'm using I do that so I can quickly just grab my clip and snap it right up against that marker point now if you're not able to snap clips into place on your timeline just make sure that the magnet icon is highlighted and that should fix it and one of my favorite keyboard shortcuts is called ripple delete when cutting out a piece of a clip I used to click on the clip push delete then click on the space then hit delete again to snap the remaining clips together but now I have ripple delete set to F on my keyboard click on the clip push F and it deletes the clip and the space at the same time cutting my time in half for that one simple task now it only saves maybe two seconds but when you do that hundreds of times on a project it ends up saving a lot of time so we can't emphasize enough take the time to learn and master keyboard shortcuts alright so number eight is creating or buying presets presets are an easy way to immediately speed up your overall workflow there are tons of creators out there who make their own presets like Lud sand transition packs then resell them for other people to use many times that I use my own presets is for color correction so if there's a specific look that I use across multiple projects and I'll make a preset for it for example on this piece of footage I color corrected it until it looked just right then I went over to effect controls scroll down to the met recolor right clicked then hit save preset so now when I'm editing a piece of footage that needs a similar color grade I can just go to the presets folder in my effects panel and drag it on over to my clip and I can still make adjustments in the color panel in case it still needs to be touched up now other times that we use presets are for transitions like the smooth transition fact that we have included inside the full time filemaker course and our seamless video pro mini course this preset animates the movement of your clip so instead of having to manually drag and drop each individual effect that you need to get to that animation you can just drag over a single preset and it's ready to go now there are tons of preset packs out there for you to use so we'll link a few of our favorites in the description below tip number nine is to adopt an assembly line method a common time waster that I see a lot of editors do is rewatching your edit over and over in between small progress increments so you'll add a clip color grade it add sound effects then go back to the beginning of the edit and watch to see how that one little clip fits into the whole edit don't do that only review the parts you made changes to I know it's fun to go back and watch what you've done so far but resist that temptation to take a break and just entertain yourself after every small adjustment stay focused on completing the Edit before watching your video over and over again there's obviously times when you want to review the whole edit like when you're checking that a color correction matches across the entire edit or the audio levels are consistent throughout the whole edit or sometimes I'll go back and watch from the beginning if I'm having a creative block and not sure how to proceed but you shouldn't be watching back your edit nearly as frequently as you are and you know it so to prevent this from happening I'd highly recommend having an assembly-line process that you use every time you edit a video so for me I sift through all of my footage and keep only the best clips then I place down my audio track at all of my basic clips until I get to the end of the video then I'll swing back around go through and fine-tune all of the cuts and transitions then I'll start from the top again and color-correct all the way through then one time I'll go through and fine-tune the audio and do my sound design so having a method like this where you focus on one task for all of the clips instead of transitioning between different tasks for each individual clip is going to be much more efficient and reduce the temptation of previewing your edit after every new clip that you add just think of an assembly line assembly lines are effective and are the industry standard in manufacturing because every worker has one task that plays a specific role in creating the overall product and they get really fast at that one job so if each worker was tasked to create the product from start to finish there would be a lot of time wasted transitioning between tasks editing is no different do it in steps and I promise you'll move more quickly through your video and speed up your turnaround time then tip number ten is to remove all distractions if none of these tips that we've listed are helping you then the last and possibly most important thing we recommend doing to increase your editing speed is to remove everything that's distracting you as humans who really aren't as good as we think when it comes to multitasking trust me you can't be editing a video talk on the phone and check Instagram all at the same time if you want to quickly get through your edits you need to eliminate all distractions and focus solely on the project you're working on something that's helped us in our productivity is knowing how to get what's called in the momentum zone it's been said that it takes between 18 and 23 minutes on average to get into the zone meaning you're most concentrated and productive State then once in that zone you are two to three times more productive because you've generated momentum in those first 18 to 23 minutes to illustrate this concept think about someone pulling a car it takes around 20 seconds in the very beginning for the person to gain momentum but once they're in that momentum zone they can pull the car about three times faster many people will manage to get in that momentum zone but then become distracted by their phone or something else which forces them to spend another 18 23 minutes to get back into that zone to return to their most productive state so if you want to get through your edits faster remove anything that's distracting you while you're editing put your phone on silent turn off email and social media notifications use noise cancelling headphones turn off your internet on your computer whatever you need to do to not get distracted take those precautions as soon as you sit down at your desk this does take discipline but it will change your business if you can develop some good time management skills and remove those distractions I'm huge on this topic and have a whole other 20 minute video in the course giving tips on time management but suffice it say it's something a lot of people struggle with that's really hurting their businesses so don't take it lightly all right guys those are our top 10 tips to editing 10 times faster in Premiere Pro if you like these tips then you'll love our premier pro mini course where we show you how to become a master in Premiere Pro so feel free to check that out by clicking the link below or if you're a final cut editor we have a mini course for you as well we also have over 300 videos in the full course full time filmmaker where you can learn not only how to edit like a pro but also filming and editing techniques how to build a six-figure your video business and so much more so I'll put a link down below to check that out and for a preview of the course check out our free filmmaking training where you can check out our top 10 tips to getting cinematic shots and lastly don't forget to subscribe for more content just like this and if you have any further questions please let us know

Channel: Parker Walbeck

Views: 817,520

Keywords: premiere pro, editing tips, productivity, adobe, edit faster, video editing, filmmaking, editing, parker walbeck, full time filmmaker, asus, imac, macbook pro, editing speed, keyboard shortcuts

Id: 1M9PzQlH1Nk

Length: 18min 35sec (1115 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 10 2020