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Best Practices: Editing efficiently

In this Best Practice guide, we look at some of the workflows that allow you to edit faster and more efficiently, including more insights from the editors and post-production professionals.

Editing is a creative process which means it is difficult to measure. But editors still have to deliver on schedule. The most important thing about Adobe Premiere Pro is its flexibility, allowing editors to “work the way they think.” Editors consistently tell us that this translates into speed and efficiency.

timeline
Premiere Pro timeline

Editing tools that scale

For broadcasters and post houses, Premiere Pro fits seamlessly into established workflows, and integrates with hundreds of third-party tools. Robust, broad native format support, local, network, and growing file support, and a list of integrated industry standard technologies and workflows help users deliver on time to stringent professional standards. For more information, see Best Practices: Learning from broadcast production.

New editors benefit from Workspaces for different editing tasks, including color, graphics, and audio, which guides them through the video post-production process. Experienced editors take full advantage of the rich toolset and customizability to accelerate their workflows. The results vary for different users and production pipelines, but broadcasters and editors regularly report speed gains from working with Premiere Pro.

  • Mark Leombruni, head of News Audio at Vice Media

    "VICE's use of Premiere was built around speed and for us, post finishing is wildly faster inside Premiere Pro. From a busy daily news room to a long-form scripted TV show, it caters perfectly to a variey of demanding environments. If you consider a typical 30-min scripted TV episode might take 20 hours for post finishing, we can turn the same length program around in less than 3 hours."

  • Thomas Bergman, director, editor, and owner at Silbersalz

    "In Premiere Pro I can work significantly faster because there’s so much freedom to design your own creative process with Premiere Pro workflows, tools, and custom keyboard commands."

  • Jonathon Corbiere, direct of animation on The Animated Mind of Oliver Sacks

    "The ability to copy and paste edited animatics directly from Premiere Pro to After Effects, with media, timings, and scalings all intact, cuts our animation setup time by more than 50%."

  • Vashi Nedomansky, editor, at filmmaker at Vashi Visuals 

    "After editing on Premiere Pro for the last 14 years, I have a created a custom workflow that is faster and more efficient than other NLEs. This is based on editing 11 feature films on the 3 most commonly used software options. For me Premiere Pro offers the most powerful, flexible, and stable platform to tackle any project."

  • Christine Steele, editor and filmmaker at Steele Pictures

    "Premiere Pro's customizability allows me to work up to faster. I map and save shortcuts and workspaces that work the way I think they should work, which allows me to do what I want to do -- in the way I want to do it -- so I can enact edits with the speed at which I'm thinking about them creatively, in real time."

  • Scott Simmons, editor and writer at ProVideo Coalition

    "It’s in craft editing where I get the real speed advantage with Premiere Pro. That’s where I’m working through footage, logging, organizing, beginning to build cuts. Getting deep into that story building part: that’s the most important part of the process."

Best Practices for editing in Premiere Pro

Starting off with project templates streamlines setup and the whole editing workflow. Knowing how to work with file formats is vital for video editing to ensure fast exports. After that, it’s all about editing efficiency.

Premiere Pro Workspaces speed up navigating the user interface, opening up the most useful tools for different tasks so they are close at hand. Each panel in Premiere Pro has its own purpose, whether it’s the Source Monitor for reviewing your footage, the Timeline panel for building your sequences, or the Effect Controls panel for configuring effects. They can all be resized, grouped, stacked, or float in front of the rest of the interface.

Experienced editors use this flexibility to create custom workspaces to suit their editing style. Double-click the name of a panel, or press the ` (accent grave) key to toggle it fullscreen. This is great for focused detail work or to maximize screen real estate on a smaller display.

Editors can use the mouse, keyboard, or even a touchscreen to perform edits, and there are multiple ways to review footage before choosing the takes you want to use in your edit:

  • Preview in the Source Monitor
  • Preview in the Project panel by viewing moving thumbnails
  • Preview and arrange clips into groups using the Freeform view the Project panel
  • Add clips to string-outs on the Timeline to review as a sequence

How the experts edit faster

The combination of easy-access advanced controls, and intelligent automation help editors stay creative, with fewer clicks, and more freedom to explore ideas as they refine their stories.

Experienced editors use keyboard shortcuts to accelerate their work so they can edit as fast as they think. Premiere Pro has a deep set of keyboard shortcuts, but you can customize them to fit your own needs. If you are already familiar with another NLE you can set the default keyboard shortcuts to match the ones you know, such as Avid Media Composer or Apple Final Cut Pro.

The view your keyboard layout, choose the Premiere Pro menu > Keyboard Shortcuts in macOS. On Windows systems, choose the Edit menu > Keyboard Shortcuts. This brings up an overview the keyboard layout.

Editing_hero

From here you can remap the keyboard using existing presets, or your own custom shortcuts. You map keys to the entire application or designate specific different panels, so that the same shortcuts can work differently in different workspaces.  

Here are some specific techniques that accelerate editing in Premiere Pro:

  • Pancake Timelines – Premiere Pro allows you to open multiple Timelines. You can switch between them or open multiple Timelines simultaneously. This allows you to edit between Timelines, which allows you to see and access a lot of footage at once. Hollywood editor Vashi Nedomansky has a great blog post about working with pancake Timelines.
  • Source Track patching – work faster with keyboard-based editing using custom keyboard shortcuts for patching allow the routing of tracks for three-point editing to have assigned keyboard presets. Scott Simmons has a great post about this.
  • Build assembly edits in the Project panel - Preview, mark, arrange, and edit clips straight from the Project panel into sequences
  • Grade in the application – use the advanced colorimetry of the Lumetri Color tools for color correction and creative color grading to finish your project without leaving Premiere Pro.
  • Essential Sound Panel – automatically set Loudness levels and duck music under vocals. Turn long manual audio edits into a few clicks. Check out our Best Practices: Mix audio faster for more information.
  • Motion Graphic Templates – Add pre-designed editable motion graphics to your project. See our Best Practices: Faster graphics workflows.
  • Copy and paste between Premiere Pro and After Effects – interoperability between these two industry standard applications allows editors to drag or copy and paste clips to share creative work.

Giving the experts the last word

Like any craft, the key to efficient editing is practice. What’s special about Premiere Pro is that you can use it to work the way you need to so and just feels intuitive.

To conclude this article, here are the full quotes from the editors we spoke with, offering more detail and insight into how you can edit faster in Premiere Pro.

About these Best Practice guides

Adobe helps you get to the finish line faster. See our Best Practice guides for video editing and production:

Contributors

  • Jeff Greenberg is a consultant, master trainer, and author of Adobe Premiere Pro Studio Techniques
  • Maxim Jago is a Paris-based filmmaker, master trainer, and author of Premiere Pro Classroom in a Book.
  • Jarle Leirpoll is a filmmaker, editor, and Master trainer based in Norway. He's also the author of The Cool Stuff in Premiere Pro.
  • Alex Macleod is a production professional, broadcasting consultant, and owner of Media City Training in the UK.
  • Joe Newcombe is head of sales and marketing at Support Partners, a system integrator for broadcasters and post-production facilities. He’s based in the UK.
  • Ian Robinson is a broadcast motion designer, and regular Adobe MAX trainer. Ian is based in Silverthorne, Colorado

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