Here's our complete Alight Motion Tutorial for beginners. I'm gonna show you everything you need to know. All the key features and a ton of video editing tips to get you cutting videos in Premier like a pro fast. Now, if you've already been using Premier for a while, drop a comment down below while you're watching with your number one tip for editing in Premier to help out others that are new. All right, so jumping straight into it.
We're here now in Alight Motion on a Mac. Now, the process is gonna be pretty much exactly the same if you're on Windows as well. So this is what you'll see when you first open up the program. You have a list of all your recent projects in the middle here. So, if you wanna continue working on a project, this is where it will be. Or if you wanna make a new project like we're gonna do here, you wanna come up the top left to new project. So, what we're seeing now is essentially this import tab. The three primary tabs or areas in Adobe Premier now. Import, edit and export. And it's really the three processes or the three main steps that you're going do when you're making a video. So, the first thing
we're gonna do though, is we're gonna give our project a name. So, I'm gonna go Justin edit. We can choose where we want our project to be saved. We can come over here to our import settings and we get to choose whether our media or in any of our files are gonna stay on our computer where they currently are, or if we're gonna copy our media to the same location that we've created our project in. I'm gonna leave this one unchecked. We'll leave our media where it is. We can also specify here to create a new bin or a new folder for any of the footage that we wanna import straightaway here. And we can also choose if we wanna create a new video sequence yet or not. And a video sequence is essentially your edit or your timeline. Now, I can go ahead and turn that one off as well for now, because I wanna show you how to set everything up correctly so that you know that you're using the right settings for your footage and for the videos that you're making. So, we could go through here and we could find our video footage. For me, I've got some saved on the desktop, on the video files. I could come through here and select the footage that I wanna import. But to me, I'd rather do it the more traditional way with Adobe Premier. So, we're just gonna go ahead down the bottom here and hit create.
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So, we're just essentially creating an empty project. So, you can see now that we've done that, we're actually now over on this edit tab. If any time we wanna go back to the import one, we can click that up the top here, edit and export, which we'll get to a little later. Now, quick overview of the interface up here is where we'll be able to view our source video clips and play them and preview them before we're actually using them in our project. We've also allow effect controls and volume and everything. All of that happens up here in this top left corner. Over here on the right, this is our program or playback window. This is where we can preview everything that we are editing. Down the bottom here is your main editing tool. This is the editing timeline. We've got our audio bars over the side here, or the visual representation of how loud or quiet our music and sound effects are.
We've got our editing tool panel in the middle here with a lot of our core editing tools and features. This is where we'll access those. And then down the bottom left hand corner here, this is by default, this is your project window where we can see all the media and assets that we've imported. We've also got access to a media library here and even all of your effects and transitions. They're all down in this area. So, we're gonna leave this for now back on a project. So, this is where we'll be importing our footage. It's down in this area here we can right click and we can choose import, or we can come up the top to file import and we can navigate through and find the video files, music, all the assets that we wanna use in our video. So, mine's on the desktop under video files. I'm just gonna hit import on this to bring in those three folders. And you can see it's actually kept the file and folder structure here as well, so that everything is organized as it was on the computer. The other option you've got is to open up a file browser like in Windows Explorer or in Finder, and you can drag and drop your files into your project that way as well. So now that we have our files in, the next step is to create our editing timeline or our sequence as Premier calls it
So, what I like to do here to make sure we're getting everything set up correctly is I wanna go and find my primary video footage. And I wanna click and drag that into this area. It even says here on the screen. Drop media here to create a sequence. So when we let that go, it's going to create our timeline, our sequence, but it's also going to use the exact format, frame rate, and settings that were used for our primary footage, so that we know that it is an exact match. So, we don't have to manually go in and configure everything. It's going to apply the settings from that main file. So, you wanna go ahead now and drop your primary footage into your timeline here. We can then come back over here. You can see we've got our timeline here, our sequence. We can call this Edit V1 version one. And maybe we'll move it out of this footage folder here and drop it down the bottom so that it's out there on its own. cut our clip. K for cut. Makes perfect sense at that time. So, then all we need to do is select this clip. We can press Delete on the keyboard and it's going to remove it. Now, once again, this does leave the gap here in the timeline. So if we delete that, so we've still got that cut, still split into two clips. We can actually select this clip on the left that we wanna remove and we can press Shift + Delete on Windows or Shift + Function + Delete on Mac, and it's actually gonna remove the clip and it's going to close up the gap automatically. So, it's a ripple delete.
Now on Mac, you can also use Option + Delete. So, you're pressing one less key and it's gonna do the same thing. Now, if we zoom back out, we go across to the end of our video here. Zoom back in a little bit. You can see that I actually stopped speaking here. So, let's assume the video finishes here and we wanna remove everything on the end. We could just come across here again, grab the end of our video and let it go where we want our video to finish. Or another really fast way to remove all of this with one keyboard button press is just to press W on the keyboard which is a ripple edit to the right. So, it's essentially going to automatically, when we press it, make a cut in our timeline, it's then going to select everything back to our previous edit or to the end of our clip in this case. And it's going to select it and remove it and close up the gap. So, if I press W now, you can see that all of that has happened with one keyboard button press. So, that's to the right, but this also works to the left as well. So, let's say we got a cut in our timeline here. Control + K to make a cut. And we want to remove just this first piece here and start this . So, we can play through or scrub through our can just come over to the type tool. We then come up to the top here and we can draw out a text box and we can literally just start typing. And we can see that that's generated a title down in our timeline, this little pink thing here. Now, if we double click on that pink title, and this is where we can open it up and get far more control over the look and feel of this title. So if I select the text here, then I can change the font. Let's go Oswald. This is our primal video font. Let's go semibold. We can also add a background behind it. We can adjust the opacity on that box. So, let's make it like a light blue, like a primal video, kind of blue. Something like that. Now, if we wanna change the position and maybe move it down a little bit, where you can come over here to our transform tools. So, we can bring this down a little bit here now, and we can even save this once we're happy with it as a style. So, we can come over here to styles. We can choose create a style.
Let's call it PV for primal video. Go okay. Now, next time we wanna create a title, we can just select, we can type in our text and we can select that text and pick our style. And it's now using the same settings as what we saved down the bottom here. Let me come up the top here, where we got that second layer of text. I'm just gonna clear that to delete it. And we've now got some text down the bottom that will appear at this point in the video, at the start, and it will disappear at the end. So if we zoom in on this now, then these also behave just like every other clip so we can shorten them, we can extend it, we can pick it up, we can move it around. So, you wanna go through now and add in any titles or text into your video. Now, you also noticed that when I double clicked on this to open it up, it actually changed up our interface here. We've now got this new essential graphics panel that's appeared here on the right. We can actually at any time go to Window, Workspaces, and we can just go reset to save layout and that's gonna change everything back to our normal layout. So, you wanna go through now and add in any titles or text into your video. From there, we're gonna add in any transitions or effects into our edit. So, if we come over here to effects. Then down here we've got video effects and we've also got video transitions. So, if you open up video transitions, let's just go to dissolve. Now, there's a lot in here to choose from. And a lot of them can make your video look pretty cheap or pretty amateurish. So, what I suggest is that you stick in to things like the dip to black, dip to white or cross dissolve, or even a film dissolve. They're a much more popular, much more widely used in broadcast transitions without going overboard. So, let's say that we wanna fade in our title at the start here. Let's come back to the start of our project and pressing plus to zoom in. We can grab this cross dissolve transition, and we can drop it on the start of our graphic here. And you can see that it goes green, and we now have this cross dissolve on here. So, as we play through this now, you can see that for the length of that transition on here, our clip is fading on. Now, we can shorten that, to speed it up, or we can lengthen it to slow it down. But that's how easy it is to add some of these effects and transitions onto your timelines. So, maybe we'll have one at the end as well. So, our title can fade back out and we'll make it a little bit quicker as well. So we've now got a title that fades in, stays on the screen, and then fades back out at the end. Now, you can also add these transitions between your video clips as well. So, say if we grab this dip to black and let's drag it to the join between the two clips here on our timeline, then our video would play through, would fade out or dip to black and then come back in.
So, if you want to fade between one scene and another, then that's normally something you would do with a transition. Now, in terms of a transition in a video like this, where essentially it's the same shot before and after the transition, I wouldn't normally do this. So, I'm gonna click on that and I'm gonna press delete to remove it. Instead, what I would do with our YouTube content is just zoom in on one of the clips so that it'll look like it was essentially a separate camera angle or a more zoomed in shot to break it up for the viewer. So to do that, I would just select one of the clips. Come up here to affect controls, come down here to scale, and I would increase this number. Now, you don't wanna go too much depending on how you've shot this and your setup here. You could actually be lowering the quality of your video slightly. So, don't go overboard with this. And you can see now if we look at the difference in the shot. That's the original, and then when it hits this point, it zooms in for this next part of the video breaking it up for the viewer. Now, in order to really sell this effect, you wanna make sure that if you've got someone's face on screen, you wanna try and keep their eyes in a very similar position. So, I'm just gonna move this across now to try and line up my eyes. So it's not perfect, but it's much closer now that that effect is gonna be more subtle for your viewers watching. Now, when you're going through in adding effects, if you do wanna speed up or slow down a clip or play a clip backwards, you can just , these are just the same as every other type of clip. We can click on it, pick it up, we can move it around. So, let's make it start at the start of our video. We can go across to the end of our video, make sure that it's going to finish at the same time as our edit. So, we trim the end off. And if you needed to make any cuts or remove any sections or even repeat sections of your audio track, then again, you can use it using this same tools I showed you for editing at the start. Sot back and I'm gonna see what that sounds like. And then we can make adjustments up and down from there if it's too loud or too quiet. Now, one other thing I like to do when I am adjusting my volume levels is to zoom in on this section of the timeline as well. Now, we can do it down here with these little sliders here, going up and down on the side. We can make these video layers bigger or smaller so we could stretch this up. We can then slide this down and then we can access more detail on what it is we're looking at.
Now, you can also see that now that we've zoomed in, we also have this little line across the bottom here. Now, this is also our volume level. So, if I click on this and drag it up, we can see that the volume has increased back to, in this case 0.1 decibels. And we can drop that back down to where we had it at minus 33, just by lifting this line up and down if I undo that. But what we can also do is key frame or manually adjust our volume levels throughout the entire track, because sometimes you'll want it louder in one point and then quiet in another. We can do all of that with key frames. So, let's say that we wanted our audio here starting at the minus 33. And then for a section up here, we want it much louder. We want it back to full volume. We can click on this little create key frame button. We can then come across along a little bit more and we can add a new key frame. And then from here, we can grab this line again and move it up to the volume that we want. And our volume now is at that point for the remainder of the video. So, then we work out where we want it to come back down to a quieter volume.
We can again add a transition point or a key frame it's called where we want that transition to start and where we want it to end. And then we can make the adjustments in there back to lower our volume back down. And these are things that you can come back in and you can adjust afterwards. You can pick them up, you can move them around all to really get that granular control over your sound. Once we're done with our volume levels, the next thing we're gonna do is to color grade or color correct your video footage. So again, I like to do this on the first clip first, because you'll probably find like in this case, it's the same camera, same light, so we can apply the same color grade or color effect that we're gonna apply to the bulk of our footage and then make any minor tweaks or adjustments to individual clips as we need to. So, we're gonna select down first clip. We're gonna come up here to Window and we're going to turn on what's called Lumetri color. Now, there is a ton of settings in here all to help you really dial in and bring out the look and feel for the video that you're after. So, we are by no means gonna cover off everything in here. But by default under this creative tab, so if you're not seeing it, you can click on creative. This is the default panel that shows up. In here, you've got some looks and think of these as if they're like Instagram filters, where you got different presets or different looks that you can go through and apply to your videos. Now, obviously we can go through, we can customize these up with a bunch of tools in here as well. But the idea here is if you find something that matches close to what you're after, it might make sense to start with one of these looks first and then make minor adjustments instead of starting with your raw footage, and trying to work towards one of these looks. But because we're not gonna go overboard with color correcting here, I'm gonna go back to the top here and select none. So, we don't have any of these filters or looks applied.
And what I'm gonna choose here is the basic correction panel. And the first adjustment I'm going to make is to the exposure or the brightness of the shot. So, I'm gonna come down here, I'm gonna grab this slider. If we wanna make it brighter, we drag it to the right. We wanna make it darker, we drag it to the left. So, you wanna make sure that the brightness is where you want it for your shot first. And again, I want you to remember that this is art. This is a creative thing. There is no right or wrong. This is gonna help with the feeling that your video is creating based on how it looks. So, I usually start off first with the exposure and then the contrast. Again, if we slide this one way, we're going to remove contrast. We're gonna increase contrast if we go the other way. So, I've darkened up some of those blacks. The next one I adjust is the white balance. Now, we could just grab this little eye dropper here and select something white in our scene, like this shelf here and that's gonna get it pretty close, or we can manually use these sliders here for temperature and add more blue or cool down our shot a little bit, or likewise back the other way add more warmth by adding more orange, and the same with the tint. We can add more green or remove green by adding more pink using the next slider. Now, if you wanna see a before and after we can come up here where we've got basic correction. This little check box here, we can turn that off and on. So, this is the before. This is the after.
So, we've really just brightened it up and added a bit more color. And the last slider that is pretty helpful as well is the saturation one here. If we wanna boost the colors or amplify them, we can just move this a little bit. You don't wanna go too much or you'll look totally sunburnt. But likewise, back the other way you can remove color too. So, it might add a little bit more color here. Something like that. And again, if this is something that we wanna apply to the rest of our clips, we can come over here to our effect controls and you'll see that we've got the Lumetri color tab in here. Again, we can copy the settings that we've applied there. We can select the rest of our footage here and we can paste it. Edit, paste. And that's gonna apply those same color grades or same effects to the remaining clips. So, you wanna go through now, color grade all of your footage including any of your B-roll clips as well. And then, it is time to export your video. So, I wanna come over here then to the export tab. And then as with everything in Premier, you got a ton of options in here. Now, there are presets for things like YouTube and Vimeo and Twitter. You can see here down the left. And if you're going to use these, you can automatically upload your video to YouTube as well. As you can sign into your YouTube channel, enter your title, description, all of that, all from Premier. So once your video has finished exporting, it's also going to upload to YouTube for you. Now, this actually does work really well, but personally, what I do instead is I go for a media file. So, I'm just exporting an MP4 or a regular video file and saving that to my computer. And I'm manually uploading it once I'm happy with it.
So, I wanna preview it and check it's all good before it goes off to YouTube. So for that, we wanna go to media file. We can choose a file name here. We can choose our location where we're gonna save our file. Now, typically the settings here by default are usually pretty good because they're based on your project settings which were based on your primary footage when we created our timeline back at the start. So we can see here just the default settings are matching 1920x1080, 25 frames per second. That's our video source. The output that it's suggesting is 1920x1080, 25 frames per second, so it's matched that. And it's also got a suggested quality or a target bit rate here as well. But what I like about this in Premier is it also tells you the file size that it's going to create for you too. So, if you need to create a video with a specific file size, or you need to try and keep it small, then this is gonna give you an estimated file size here before you have to wait for the thing to export. Now, if you ask someone who needs to customize everything up, obviously you've got all the settings in here to be able to really dial everything in.
But again, for most people, you'll probably find that default settings here are going to be pretty close to what you're after. Then all you need to do is hit export and your file is going to save out. Once it's done, you wanna play it back and preview it ideally on a mobile device as well. That's where a lot of people are gonna be consuming your content. You wanna make sure that you're happy with how it looks and sounds and everything there. If you've got any changes, come back into Premier, make them and obviously export again. Once you're happy with it, that's when you can go ahead and share your video out. So, that's a complete walkthrough using Adobe Premier. Now, if you wanna print out and download the exact step by step process that I just took you through in this video that will actually apply to any editing app or program to help you edit faster and more efficiently, then grab your free copy using the link on screen now, and I'll see you in the next video.
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