Editing video clips

Premiere Rush offers multiple ways to edit video clips. In this lesson, we'll explore many of the different methods for editing and arranging video footage in a project.

When editing video, the majority of your work will be done on the timeline, which is shown in the following image:

The timeline consists of the following pieces:

• Video and audio tracks: The video and audio tracks hold the clips that compose your project. While a project starts with one track, additional tracks can be added as needed to overlap video and audio files.
• Playhead: This indicates the current frame displayed in the preview monitor.
• Clips: These are the individual files, or pieces of files, that compose your video. Video clips will show individual frames of video on the timeline, while still images will only show one image. Audio clips on the timeline will show a small waveform of the audio file.

The timeline is where your video will come together. Clips can be added to the timeline and rearranged as needed to tell the story you want your video to tell. All of the content on the timeline — including audio clips, video clips, and still images — is collectively referred to as a sequence. Once on the timeline, clips can be edited in various ways, including trimming out unwanted content, splitting a clip in two, adjusting a clip's speed, and muting a clip's audio track. Additionally, clips can be duplicated or deleted as needed. We'll learn how to perform all these tasks in this lesson.

Before getting started with the lesson

Before starting this lesson, you'll need to complete the following steps:

1. Download the exercise files for this lesson and extract them to your desktop, if you haven't already done so.
2. Create a new project named Editing Clips, and import the following exercise files from the RushBasics_EditingClips folder following the steps outlined in the lesson Starting a project and importing media:
   • cat-fountain.jpg
   • cat-with-toy.mp4
   • playful-cat.mp4

Zooming in and out on the timeline

Sometimes, we might want to get a closer look at files on the timeline, so we can be more precise in our edits. We can do this with the zoom control at the bottom of the timeline – this also doubles as a scroll bar, allowing us to scroll through our project if needed. The zoom handles will appear on the scrollbar when we hover over it, as seen in the following screenshot:

We can press and drag these handles to zoom in and view our clips in more detail, or to zoom out and see our entire sequence all at once.

Since it may be necessary to zoom in and out of the timeline many times while editing a project, we'll take the time to practice using the zoom control before moving on.

Adding and removing clips

While Premiere Rush automatically adds clips to the timeline as you add them to the project, there may be times where you need to re-add a clip that's been deleted or add a duplicate copy of a clip. These tasks can be easily accomplished using the Project Assets panel, which is shown in the following screenshot:

From here, we can easily add clips to the timeline. Additionally, if we need to remove media from the timeline, we can do that right from the timeline.

Let's practice adding a clip to the timeline, then removing it.

Rearranging media on the timeline

As mentioned previously, in Premiere Rush, the clips you select when creating a new project are automatically added to the timeline. What's important to note is that Premiere Rush adds clips in the order you selected them in — which may not necessarily be the order you want the clips in for the finished project. Fortunately, we can rearrange clips on the timeline as needed. Let's move cat-fountain.jpg so that it's between cat-with-toy.mp4 and playful-cat.mp4.

Trimming and splitting clips

Occasionally, there may be content at the beginning and end of a clip that we might want to trim out. This can easily be done right on the timeline, either by using the split tool to split a clip into pieces, or by pressing and dragging the beginning or end of a clip to adjust the duration.

To help with making precise video edits, we'll make use of the timecode at the bottom of the preview monitor:

This shows us exactly what frame we're on in our project, and can help us when we want to trim or split a clip at a precise point.

Let's go ahead and practice trimming and splitting clips, using the timecode to help in the process.

Adjusting the duration of still images

When incorporating still images in a sequence, you may want to adjust the length of time the images show on the screen. The default duration for still images is two seconds — however, we can make that longer or shorter as needed. While we can press and drag the ends of a still image clip to adjust the duration, there's a more precise method of changing the length of a clip. Using the Speed panel, we can set the duration of a still image to a specific length of time.

Let's use the Speed panel to change the duration of the image of the cat at the water fountain (cat_fountain.jpg) to 5 seconds. 

At this point, we can close the project and move to the next lesson.