MAX SESSIONS Hi, I'm Abba Shapiro, and welcome to Editing Interviews in Premiere Pro, Fast and Fantastic. If you want to find me on the Web, you can find me on my Instagram account @abbashapiro, as well as on my Twitter, which is now X, also at @abbashapiro. Now, this entire Slide Deck will be available to you for download. So don't panic if I go through some of the slides a little more quickly. Now, this session is broken down into three sections. The first part is talking about interview strategies and some production tips. The second part is text-based editing, and we're going to go through that new feature that's available currently in the Premiere Pro (beta). And finally, we're going to look at fixing color to match some clips, if you have different cameras in your sequence, as well as enhancing the audio with a brand-new tool that was just released in the beta, which is amazing for fixing all types of bad audio. So let's get started. First, let's look at my top ten techniques for getting better sound bites. First of all, do your homework. And what that means is learn about the person that you're interviewing. Research them a little bit, know who they are, so when you actually do the interview, you can make a connection, you can develop a rapport with them. And while you're setting up, talk to them, explain to them what's going to happen. A lot of people have never been interviewed before. And also try to find something where the two of you can connect. Look around their space, their office, their environment and maybe you can see pictures of skiing and you both ski or you both scuba dive or you can ask them about their vacation or their family. All of these things will allow you to relate to this person and end up having a conversation as opposed to a question-and-answer experience. And, of course, don't ask yes and no questions, because if you get the answer of yes or no, you're not going to be able to use that sound bite in your interview. And this is also important. Listen to their responses. I can't tell you how many times I've seen people buried in their notes, not really listening to the answer the person is giving. If you listen to the answer, if you're making eye contact, if you're engaging with them, you'll be able to answer follow-on questions and it really will develop into a conversation instead of that question-and-answer situation. The other thing to keep in mind is don't jump in. And what that means is sometimes you're so excited about the sound bite is you start having a conversation and you start talking over each other. And again, you can't use that. So sometimes, even if you're excited and you want to follow up with another question, take a beat, because then you have that space to edit. And this I see happen a lot. Also, remind the viewer that... Not remind the viewer, remind the person being interviewed, that the viewer won't necessarily hear the question you're asking and they should actually take that question and put it in the context of their answer so everything is self-contained. And finally, don't be afraid to ask for another take. And don't be afraid to ask for it to be said more concisely. I can't tell you how many times I've seen interviews where you get a three-minute response that's going to go into a two-minute video, and really what you need is that 20-second sound bite. So keep that in mind. And finally, interview with the edit in mind. Which means, as you're listening, you're thinking, "That's a good sound bite. Oh, I can use that. Oh, that's too long. Oh, maybe there's a lot of umms in there." But we can actually fix the umms with some of the new features in Premiere Pro. Now, when it comes to production, there's a couple of tips I advice. First of all, if you can shoot in 4K, shoot in 4K, most likely you're distributing it in 1080p or even smaller. And what 4K allows you to do is to reframe it in post. You can then create zooms in post, which can be very strategic because a lot of times you may want to push in and land just the time of the most dramatic part of the story. And you can easily do that digitally in Premiere. And if you're shooting 4K, you're not going to lose any resolution if you zoom in to 100%. And finally, shooting in 4K allows you to actually punch into close ups and back to wide shots using the same recording and you won't necessarily see the jump cuts. PRODUCTION TIPS SHOOT WITH MULTIPLE CAMERAS Also, if you can, shoot with multiple cameras, whether it's an older camera you have or maybe even your cell phone. That second camera gives you a lot more flexibility in avoiding jump cuts, and making it visually interesting. And a lot of times, even if your cameras don't necessarily match when you're shooting, you can make them match a lot better once they're in Premiere using the Lumetri Color panel to match color and luminance values and also using the Auto-Match feature in the Essential Sound panel of Premiere Pro. And we're going to look at that towards the end of this presentation. PRODUCTION TIPS SHOOT A WHITE BALANCE CARD Shoot a white card or at least a white piece of paper. That way you can easily balance if there's a color pass by using the Eyedropper in Premiere, especially if you're using multiple cameras. This has saved me a number of times. Shoot B-roll. Whether it's the person performing, in this case, or maybe just the person's hands, so that you have something to cut away to, to avoid the jump cut, even them walking into their office or out of their office, which you can use as a segue into the interview. COMMON GOTCHAS Now, there's some common gotchas that get people into a little bit of trouble when they're doing interviews. A lot of times you may need to leave room for graphics, and if you forget to do that during the shoot, it's going to complicate things in the edit. Putting the person in the middle of the frame can be problematic. Now, 4K can save you. And as a matter of fact, I shot some of this footage with the person in the middle of the frame because they kept moving to the left and right of the screen and this way I could follow them by being able to reframe it in post. I've often seen people get put in front of a window and that's one of the worst things that you can do for a couple of reasons. First of all, if you expose for the window, the person's in silhouette. If you expose for the person, you get a giant blown out window behind them. But even if you make it match and this is something that happened to me, we had gelled the window, so everything was perfect. We had a beautiful background, beautiful sky and while the person was talking, a plane flew behind them. But from the camera's point of view, it looked like the plane was flying in one ear and out the other. Now, this was pretty funny at the time, but we could not use that take for the final show. And it was a really good audio bite. So keep that in mind. Also, if you're shooting multiple people for your interview, switch them to the left and right side of the screen, so you have a little bit more flow and a opportunity for differences when you're cutting things together. And this is something that people forget to do and I think it's critical and that's to record room tone, because if you cut out a chunk of audio and just let the show breathe a little bit, you can hear the silence without that tone of the room. So record just 30 seconds at the head or tail. And speaking of room tone, I'm huge on this, which is, sound is critical. And a lot of people don't pay enough mind to getting good audio. That little pinhole mic on your camera or your phone is not going to get the best sound, especially if you're further away from the person. So either use a lavalier that you can plug into your camera, or a wireless mic or even a shotgun because at least you can narrow the field of where the audio is coming from. Now, Premiere has an amazing new tool called Enhance Speech, and this is in the public beta, which can fix incredible things that I could never even do six months ago. And we're gonna look at that towards the very end of this presentation, how you can fix audio that you may have thought you could never use. Another thing to keep in mind is maybe you want to do dual system or dual sync sound and this is where you record your audio with a separate audio recorder and then merge them together once they're in Premiere. And it's really easy to do. Once you've imported both the audio file and the video file, you just select them both, right click and hit Merge Clips. And one thing you can do with Premiere is you can have it replace that bad audio with the good audio and create a new virtual clip. Just remember, you want to get audio on both of your sources because you can have Premiere sync them up using the audio track of both the video and the audio. Now, a couple of general editing tips. Less is more. The tighter the interview, the better! So don't hesitate to cut and keep things tight. Do you really need everything the person is saying or can you tighten it up and cover it with B-roll? Or, in some cases, you can cover it with a Dip to Black or a Dip to White. And don't hesitate to use the Morph Cut, it can do amazing things. The trick is to keep that transition short, usually about six to eight frames. Now, if the person's hand jumps from here to here, yeah, that Morph Cut's going to look a little bit bizarre. But if there's not a lot of movement, you would be surprised how smooth you can make these transitions. I've had entire interviews that look like a single take that were just bits and pieces of a much longer interview that I cut up. Now, let's get to the editing part of this session. Now, everything I'm going to cover is available in the public beta of Premiere Pro. So if you have a Creative Cloud subscription, you'll be able to access the public beta. And by the way, you can have both the release version of Premiere Pro and the public beta on your computer at the same time and launch them individually. So you're not giving up anything to try out a lot of these new features.
So the first thing we want to do is we want to get into the Text-Based Editing workspace, and it's very easy to do. You can do it in a couple of places within the application. Let's actually switch over to Premiere. Looking over here in Premiere Pro, you can either go to this dropdown on the right and switch to Text-Based Editing or you can go under Window, Workspace and also do the same thing. When we switch to that, you'll notice now there's a whole new panel on the left side that has the transcription created internally by Premiere Pro. Now, there's a couple of preferences you may want to modify depending on how you want your workflow to happen for transcribing your media. So we'll go up under the Settings menu. It's located under Premiere Pro on Mac and under the File menu in Windows and we'll choose Transcription.
Here you have an option to have Premiere automatically transcribe all the clips when you import them. And sometimes this is beneficial because it'll do it in the background and it does this all internally, nothing has to be sent up to the cloud. So if I choose that, and I select Automatically Transcribe Clips, I have a couple of options. I can have it automatically transcribe only the clips that I throw into a sequence or all the clips that I import. You also have the option to have Premiere separate the speakers and basically it listens to the different voices and uses artificial intelligence to determine which speaker is who. It will be listed as Speaker one, two and so forth, so you'll go in and change those names. But it really is a time-saving feature. I'm going to turn this off because I want to also show you how you can transcribe individual clips once they've been imported. So we'll simply hit Cancel. And I have some clips here that I brought in that were not transcribed. And to transcribe those clips, all I need to do is select them and you'll notice that I have a Transcribe option now in that left panel which I can click on or I can simply right click on a single or multiple clips inside my project pane and transcribe them all again in the background. If I do it this way, it's going to give me that dialog box to verify if I want to separate my speakers and also my primary language. However, if that language is wrong, it will use AI to figure out what the language is. And there are a variety of languages available for you to do these automatic transcriptions. I'm going to click on Transcribe and this is going to start transcribing in the background. You can see it's pretty quick. And depending on the age of your computer or how new a computer is, this can be really fast or it can take a little bit of time if you're using a really old system. Once the transcription is done, you can see that the panel now updates with all the words that the person has said. Now a nice feature is, once the transcriptions are done, I can export out a text file to do a paper edit. All I need to do is click on these three dots, then I get a dropdown. There's Export, and what you want to do is export a text file, which you can then open up in any Word processing document. And the beauty of this is you can then do an offline paper edit and then go back into Premiere and cut really quickly without having to search through hours and hours of footage. Now, let's take a look exactly how the text-based editor works inside of Premiere. So we have our transcribed clip and I want to just put one of these sound bites and now it labels things Speaker one and Speaker two. -So let me figure out who's who. -Let me tell you about my... So I'm Speaker one. And I'm going to label the speaker's name, so I can easily look through these.
I'm gonna label Speaker two.
And save that. So now, I know when Kristen is speaking and when I'm speaking make it a lot easier when reading this transcript. So we'll take this first sound bite, and I want the whole piece in here. I'm simply going to highlight it, and as soon as I highlight that section, you'll notice that Premiere has marked an in and an out point in the source clip. And all I need to do is drag it down to the timeline, and I have that exact bite. You'll also notice that the left side of my screen has changed to just that audio or just that transcript. And if you look at the bottom left-hand corner of the interface, there's a little checkmark here, and I can choose to have Premiere automatically switch to whichever source I'm looking at. So in this case, if I'm looking at my sequence, I see the transcription of the sequence. If I open up any of the source clips, it'll show me the transcript of that source clip. There are times when I don't want to switch back and forth, such as now, so I'm going to uncheck that. So now as I bring all these individual pieces into my sequence, it doesn't keep switching back and forth. I'm going to make sure my playhead is at the end of all my clips, and I'll grab another section.
I asked about what musicians she liked, and I don't need my part, so I'm going to just grab this and all I need to do again is drag it in. Or I can use the keyboard shortcut, the period key, to do an overwrite edit and this speeds up the workflow. I don't have to necessarily bring this in, in order. I could grab this other bite here. I could highlight just the part that I want and go ahead, hit the period key and bring it in. And I'm going to zoom out a little by hitting the minus key, so we can see each of the sections. And you'll notice that I have these big chunks here. And if I want to rearrange them, I'm going to switch over to "follow the active monitor" so I'm actually looking now at the transcription of the clips in my sequence. If I rearrange these, if I say move this first clip to the end, you'll notice that the transcription updates, and I'm going to close this gap by simply right clicking on it and doing a Ripple Delete. Now, I want to remove some of the parts of these sound bites and I can do that real easily. All I need to do is highlight a section that I want to remove. So maybe, so it's a lot like Guitar Center instruments. I can highlight that section. And now, Premiere marks an in and out point in my sequence, which I can then delete that section. I can either do it with the Delete key or right click on that section that I just highlighted and either click Extract or Ripple Delete. The difference is, when you do an Extract, you can basically do a Paste, so you're cutting and pasting. Either way, I'm going to have the same result, I remove that little section. And I can go through and remove little chunks that I want, bring things in from other sound bites that I have and completely edit this. Now, one of the things that's really cool is the ability for me to quickly remove filler words, and pauses. Filler words are like when people say "umm", and this is great if you're doing, say, a video podcast and you want to just remove the dead space. And sometimes people say "umm" a lot and you can cut that out and then cover it with B-roll. So to do that, I'm going to go to this text search box, which, by the way, would allow me to find any phrase or word in my transcript. And that's also great. If, for instance, somebody says a word poorly and you want to replace it with another instance of that same word, you can simply find every instance of, say, the word "musician" and find a better version and replace that clip. But right now, I want to replace just all my pauses and all my filler words. So I'm gonna click on Filler Words, and look at these highlights. -When I play each of these... -Umm, as... ...that I play to be kind of, Just... To be kind of. So that was just like a umm. And we have another one here. Another umm. So I can either select an individual clip or delete them all at once. I'm going to click Delete. It gives me that option to delete just the one clip that I've highlighted. I'm going to delete all of my umms and it breaks it all apart. I also want to delete all of the pauses, all of that empty space. So I can go here and select it, Pauses. There's not a lot here. And I'm going to delete all of them. But that's how you'd edit individual source clips into an empty sequence, and here's all the steps. Another cool thing you can do is you can take a really long clip and edit it directly in the sequence. As I referenced earlier, this is great for, say, a video podcast, just a really long interview that you need to cut out and get out of the door quickly. So these are the steps that we're going to go through, but let's actually go through them inside of Premiere. So instead of creating a new sequence and throwing the clip in, I can have the clip selected. If I right click on it, there's an option to create a new sequence from a selected clip. So that saves a lot of steps. And there's all of my transcript. And there's a lot of just junk at the beginning. So we're going to cut this down really quick. As a matter of fact, I can see visually that I'm walking in front. She does. There we go. She's ready for the sound bite. I'm going to cut all the beginning of that. I'm going to use a traditional tool, which is the Cue key, which cuts everything to the left of the playhead. The W key would cut everything to the right of the playhead. And now, I can quickly clean up this clip. So the first thing I want to do is go down and get rid of all my talking. And I'm just going to select all this inside of the text-based editor and hit Delete, it updates in my timeline. The backslash key will let me expand that clip, so I see the whole area. And now, I want to go ahead and maybe take out some of the end of me talking, highlight that, hit Delete. Now, that's gone. And I want to simply remove all the pauses and filler words. Select those. Delete. Delete All, switch over to the Pauses. I did the pauses, the Filler Words. There we go. No filler words. Got all the pauses and it's cut down. ...song, and then, like, a more, like, pop rock vibe. So that was a really quick way to remove all that extra junk from a clip directly in the sequence. And as you can see, this is how you can remove pauses and umms. And it's just brilliant how it works. Now, I want to talk a little bit about some of the new audio features inside of Premiere. One is Automatic Tagging of audio clips, which basically means Premiere will look at a bunch of clips and determine if they're dialogue or music or ambiance or sound effects. And then once it does that, it will show you in the Audio workspace some of the best modifiers you have to enhance and correct those clips. And two of the things we're going to look at specifically once we've auto-tagged items are the Enhance Speech and the Auto-Match. So when we go through this process, you'll see, it can create four different types of clips. We're going to be working exclusively with dialogue. And once you select Dialogue, these are the two features that will really make your interview sing, especially if you have bad audio. And I, intentionally, have a lot of bad audio. Back in Premiere, we want to switch to the Audio workspace. Go to the dropdown and choose Audio. And there we see the tagging option. And all I have to do is select all the clips in my sequence. I'm going to hit the backslash key to make sure I have them all selected. Actually, I don't want to work with this. I want to work with one I defined as Bad Audio, intentional bad audio. Select all of the clips, and I go Auto Tag. It will analyze these clips, which will all be dialogue, and then gives me the best selection of tools to fix this audio. And I'm only going to use two, and it's going to be pretty amazing. So let's listen to each of these clips and fix them. I have country, hard rock, an acoustic song and then... So this is a mic that's a little bit far away. We have an air conditioner in the background. There's not a lot of presence to her audio with it. The clip selected, I'm going to go down here and choose, under Enhance Speech, the Enhance button. Premiere will analyze this clip and then let's hear how it fixes it. ...fifteen. There's everything. I have country, hard rock... And that's the after. This is the before. An acoustic song. Not a big difference, but here's the magic. I can notch up this slider and have it be a lot more aggressive. I would say it's a combo. Like, I do a lot, like, all my...
My old albums from when I was 15. You don't hear any of that background air conditioner. Here's another bad piece of audio. Everything, I have country. This is the mic that was on the camera, the little pinhole mic. And not only is it echoey and the volume is low, you really have that background noise. Again, with the clip selected. I'm going to switch over here, click on Enhance. Premiere will analyze the clip. And let's listen to it. ...hard rock. Needs to be pushed again.
Country, hard rock, an acoustic song. That's crazy. This is without. And then... This is with. Umm, like, a more, like, pop rock. So other than that, I think unbelievable that I don't have to jump through any other hoops with removing, any cueing, taking out umm, one click and it's basically fixed, a little bit of an adjustment of a slider. Now, we have two more clips that I want to work with.
Umm, and then ukulele. So in this case, her mic was rubbing against her hair. It was clipped to her sweater. It wasn't a great mic to start with. So we want to fix that. And then we have this second clip. Acoustic song. And then... Again, horrible. I need to make them both good and I need to make them both match. So I'm going to select these. Click on Enhance. Let it do it's magic in the background. I'll properly have to move the sliders up a little bit, kind of know that. So I'll save some time because we did that before. This is the clip with all of that rumble. Very similar, but a lot different techniques. Don't even hear the sweater anymore.
Like, a more, like... Want to dial out some of that bad audio.
An acoustic song. And then... If you push it too hard, you might want to draw back in case you get that... -A lot, you know... -That's pretty good. But now I want them to match. I want the volumes to match. So I'm going to go under Loudness and I'm going to click on Auto-Match. And what this does is it makes sure that all of the audio reaches a certain appropriate volume for distribution. So we'll Auto-Match this one. And now, let's hear how they sound back-to-back.
And then I write music as well. I have country, hard rock. I mean, that's really, really clean. This was before.
And then I write music as well. I have country... Oh, forgot to turn off the Enhance on the first clip. Sounded too good. Harmonica.
And then I write music as well. I have country... So, we have all that rumble. I'm gonna turn them both back on because I'm so blown away by this feature. We have the Auto-Match turned on and here we go. Harmonica.
And then I write music as well. I have country... I just think it's crazy, that Enhance Speech feature. Worth downloading the beta just to use that feature. And by the way, this is all done locally on your computer. Nothing needs to be uploaded to the cloud to prepare this audio. I want to now talk a little bit about some of the color features in Premiere and how you can leverage them for your interviews. So we're going to get into the Lumetri Color panel, which is in the Color Workspace and we have a badly exposed clip and we're going to use the Auto Balance to fix that. And then we're going to match two clips to each other, and you'll see how quickly you can get things to work well. Now, I have a pretty horrible clip for us to work with. So let's switch over to our Color.
And open up that horrible clip. Fix and Match Color. Look at this. Really beyond dialed up the orange in this clip. So the first thing I may want to do is select the clip and just do an Auto color balance. And this is going to improve things a lot. It still is a little bit too orange. I'm going to add a little more blue to it, add a little more red. Oops, I overshot. There, and it's getting closer. But I want it to match this clip here. This is pretty well exposed. So what I want to do after I do the Auto-Match, now if I had done and I did, but we're not going to use that on this clip, is I could use the Eyedropper and click on something white if you didn't shoot a white card. Sometimes we can do people's teeth, but it doesn't always get the right color because it's only getting one pixel. So a lot of times you find if you don't do a white card, doesn't work. Let me undo that. But what I want to do is use this as a reference to make this clip look better. So I'm going to go down here under Color Wheels & Match and click on this area here that says Comparison View. And what happens when I click on that? I see two different screens. On the right is the clip that I am affecting that I want to modify. On the left, I can choose what clip in my sequence that I want to match it to. So this is the first clip. This is the second clip. I want it to look more like this. And then all I need to do is click Apply Match. Now, there is a checkbox here and if you have it checked, it's going to try to match skin tones first before it tries to match the rest of the scene. If I had a scene where I didn't have people in it, I may uncheck this. So I'll hit Apply Match. It will improve. It won't be perfect.
It's a lot closer. Her skin tones pretty much match. The sweater's still a little bit off because I really pushed it. So in this case, I might have to go through and play with some elements such as the contrast and the shadows and maybe even pull out a little bit more of the orange, and I can bring that down. I want to add a little blue to that, maybe. But it's a lot closer than it was. This is without that fix. And this is with the fix. And you'll see the skin tone kind of matches. But if you tweak with this, you can really get it close. So those are a bunch of the features that you can use in Premiere to improve your interviews, whether you're going to improve it by doing a better interview or whether you're improving it by using Text-Based Editing to do it quicker, or that Enhance Speech, which absolutely knocks my socks off. So with that, these are all the steps we just did for Matching Shots. I want to thank you all for attending. Enjoy watching the rest of MAX. Thank you.