[music] [Tina Lee] Hi, my name is Tina, and today I'm going to talk about-- Hold up. Hold up. You're not just going to do a boring intro in your regular spiel, are you? But why not? Because we're in an attention economy and you need to grab people's attention to keep watching this session. Attention is the new currency. Okay. I have an idea. What if I just make you guys pause and disappear? Much better. All right, now that I have your attention, today I'm going to teach you How to Make Engaging, Creative, Short-form Video Content for Social Media using Adobe Premiere Pro. I think it goes without saying that we live in an attention economy. Whether you're a content creator, business owner, social media manager, designer, or just somebody who wants to grow on social media, you need to grab people's attention. And how can we do that? With creativity. And if you're thinking right now, "But, Tine, this is not for me. I'm not even remotely creative," then you're wrong. This is exactly for you. Creativity is not always a natural born skill but something that can be learned and developed over time. And how do I know this? Because just a few years ago, I was like you. I could never have imagined being able to create what I create today. Let's rewind to 2016 when I was a lingerie designer in New York City. While that sounds glamorous, I was really just drawing repeat floral patterns in Illustrator and filling in tech packs. There was very little creativity involved, so I decided to start my fashion blog as a creative outlet, but I had no idea how to operate a camera, how to edit a photo, let alone how to make engaging videos. Since then, I've learned how to properly set up my camera, how to edit using Lightroom and also Photoshop, and even how to make engaging videos using Premiere Pro and occasionally After Effects. These skills have actually helped me grow to over 1 million followers across my various social platforms. I've gone viral several times, gotten millions of views, and even grown 200,000 followers from one reel alone. Yeah. It was wild. All this growth has allowed me to turn this into a full blown career, work with my dream brands, like Adobe, and even teach thousands of others through my online programs how to grow and edit creatively as well. And while creative editing may look complex, a lot of it can be achieved by learning a few key concepts, concepts that I will be covering today. So pay attention because you'll also be able to make creative videos that'll grow your social media after this session. Today, I'll cover how to use masks to duplicate yourself as well as other use cases of masks, how to use keyframes to animate videos and objects, how to salvage bad audio to improve the overall quality of your videos, and text-based editing to edit your mini vlogs. But before I dive into that, I want to first show you how to optimize your Premiere Pro workspace. Let's start with adjusting the settings of your Sequence to be the correct ratio, of course, 9x16. Then let's go to Window to choose the Vertical workspace layout. Now you're ready to edit. So I actually made a short promo video for this session to promote this session. So let's use the beginning part of that video as an example to demonstrate what I'll be teaching today. Let's take a look. So you want to learn how to duplicate yourself. Like this. Here's a quick tutorial from my Adobe MAX session on how to do exactly that in Premiere Pro and make sure to check out my full session for more tips on how to make creative short-form videos. In order to explain how to create today's duplication video, let's first talk about masks. What is masking? Masking is an effect where you isolate specific areas of a video, and by doing so, if you have multiple layers, you in turn reveal what's beneath that layer. Let's take a look at the masking tool inside Premiere Pro. With your layer selected, you'll find the masking tool in Effect Controls and then Opacity. You can use the preset shapes like oval or rectangle to create masks, or you can use the pen tool to make your custom shaped mask. And the Invert button allows you to invert the mask. Now that you understand the basics of masking, let's talk about how to film the clips. First, you need to make sure you're filming on a sturdy tripod so that the camera position does not move. This is super important so that when you combine your two layers, they match seamlessly. Next, you want to film under even lighting conditions. This way when you combine the two layers, you don't have a huge color or lighting discrepancy like this. Of course, there are ways to fix that, but the more even your lighting is, the easier it is for you to edit. You also want to set up your focus to be manual so the focus doesn't change throughout the video, and the same goes for your exposure settings. Lastly, we want to make sure that two characters are not overlapping. This way your mask won't accidentally delete a part of the other character. Here is clip one. So you want to learn how to duplicate yourself. Here's a quick tutorial from my Adobe MAX session on how to do exactly that in Premiere Pro.
And here is clip two.
Like this.
And make sure to check out my full session for more tips on how to make creative short-form videos. I know the pause is a little awkward, but I am trying to memorize the lines inside my head when I'm doing one so that I can match up the timing of the dialogues together. And we're going to talk more about that later. All right. Now we are in our Premiere Pro workspace. Let's first drag the two clips into the timeline, and then put one clip on top of the other. And we just want to make sure that the dialogues match up or roughly in the timeline so that the timing is correct. So person A is talking, and then person B talks right after without too much of a pause. So what we also want to make sure is that they don't overlap in the frame. So let's first put the opacity of the top layer to 50% so that we can see where the two people are positioned, and we'll just play it through to make sure that the timing of the dialogue is roughly correct. So you want to learn how to duplicate yourself like this. Here's a quick tutorial from my Adobe MAX session on how to do exactly that in Premiere Pro. And make sure to check out my full session for more tips on how to make creative short-form videos. That looks pretty good. We're just going to chop off the unnecessary parts at the end. So now let's combine the layers by adding a mask. With the 50% opacity still on the top layer, so I can easily see where I should create the mask, we go to Effect Controls and go to Opacity. And in here, you can see you can do an oval shape, a rectangular shape. But I'm just used to using the pen tool, so I'm just going to select the pen tool, and I'm going to draw around the blue person right here.
And just like that, you have combined the two layers. And let's bring the opacity back to 100 so we can see. Okay. Now you can see that I have drawn this layer around the person, but there is a harsh line. So what we want to do is with the top layer selected, go to the Mask, and go to Mask Feather. You can also select the Mask so that the blue outline shows up, and then you just increase mask feather. And you can see that the feather is increasing. But you want to be careful not to increase the feather too much that it affects the two layers. So you want to increase it just enough so that the two layers blend seamlessly. The next step I'll do is see if I need to adjust the exposure or the color to either layer to make them match better. I think they look pretty good together, but I might say the layer, the top layer with the person in blue, looks just a little bit darker, as you can see in the pink here, relative to the pink here. So I'm going to go into Lumetri Color and just increase the exposure by a teeny bit. That already looks a lot better. So we're going to leave it at that. For other clips, when you're filming in uneven lighting or the sun is going in and out, you might find that you're going to have to do a lot of adjustments to match up the two layers or multiple layers if you have multiple masks. So that's why I said before that even lighting is really important and will help you speed up your editing process. And remember before when I said we want the dialogue to match up really well one after the other? I do feel like the yellow person speaks, and then there's a little pause between her speaking and then the blue person with their next line right here. In Premiere Pro. And make sure to check out my full-- There's a little pause in there, so I want to shorten the clip so that we can match them up better. So what we're going to do is we're going to take the part where the blue person is not talking and we're going to shorten that clip. So we can select the part where-- Like this. The blue person stops talking, make a cut, and then go forward to the part right before the blue person starts talking again and make another cut. From here, with your keyboard shortcut, tap on R, and you'll see that there's this little symbol that shows up when you're about to adjust the length of the clip. Basically, this means that as you adjust the clip, you're adjusting the speed of the clip to match the length of that final clip. So if I just move it back a little bit, maybe up to here, you'll notice that the speed of the clip has now been sped up to 110.99%. So this way, you can then move. Now let's go back to V so that it's the selection tool, and select this clip, and then just take the latter half of the clip and just move it forward in the timeline so that they match seamlessly. And now you have eliminated the pause between the two people talking and seamlessly connected that top clip even though you have sped up a portion of it. So let's play it again. Here's a quick tutorial from my Adobe MAX session on how to do exactly that in Premiere Pro. And make sure to check out my full session. I might even actually move it even further forward because I feel like she could start talking even sooner. So let's play that again. Exactly that in Premiere Pro. And make sure to check out my full session for more tips on how to make creative short-form videos. This looks great. And now we just need to delete the end part where there's excess footage. Now you have combined the two layers, duplicated yourself, and matched up the dialogue. But when you go to the beginning of the timeline, you'll notice that the mask cuts off half of my face in the beginning because the person in yellow is actually in the middle. So we'll need to animate this mask so that the mask moves in with the person in blue. And that brings us to the next part of our tutorial, Animating using Keyframes.
Very quickly, before we move on to keyframes, I want to show you some other use cases of masks. Masks can be incredibly powerful. You can use a mask to combine a photo with a video to create cinemagraphs. This is an example where I'm swirling the wine.
Here's another one with, the bathtub water moving.
And then also another one in the Stockholm subway. Or you can export the current frame to Photoshop, use Generative Fill to create a whole another world, and bring it back and use masks to combine the two. Very cool. You can create a circular mask around your head and make an explainer video just like I'm doing in this session. And that's just a few examples of what you can do with masks. All right, now let's talk about keyframing.
In order to understand keyframes, we have to first understand how the properties of a video is stored. Every single piece of information about a video, whether it's the position, the exposure, the tint, or the size is indicated by a number. For instance, the full size of this video is 100% and half size is 50%. Your exposure can be 0 or it can be 3. Every time you change these numbers, you change the properties of a video. So what are keyframes? It's this little diamond symbol that is created when you generate a keyframe by clicking on Toggle Animation for the various properties of a video. The best way I would describe a keyframe is that it's like an anchor. Let's say you want to have your video size gradually decrease from 100% to 50%, then you'd add a keyframe at the point where you want it to be 100 to anchor that data point. Then move forward it to the point in the timeline where you want it to be 50%, add another keyframe, which acts like another anchor. And between these two points, Premiere Pro will animate your clip so that it gradually goes from 100% to 50%. The length of time between two keyframes decide how fast or slow something animates. To make the video grow smaller quicker, all you need to do is reduce the time between the two keyframes. Pretty straightforward, right? Well, you can add keyframes to many different properties of a video or to any item in a video, really. For instance, I can add keyframes to the position and size of this logo. I can make the logo pop up by making it 0% in size, move forward a few keyframes, and then make it 100%. Then I can add keyframes to the position so that it moves out of the frame. Notice the speed of the animation is quite uniform. It looks a little bit rigid. This is where you can add a speed curve to make the speed of the animation more dynamic. You can do so by right-clicking on the keyframe, go to Temporal Interpolation, and select Ease In or Ease Out. It's just up to how you want it to look. And now when you play your animation, it is no longer animated at a uniform speed and looks a lot less robotic. You can add keyframes to so many different properties. You can add keyframes to your saturation to make a clip go from color to black and white. You can add keyframes to gradually change your exposure. You can even add keyframes to animate your masks.
Like that. And that's what we'll need to do for our duplication clip. Let's head back into the Mask and find the position where you want the animation of the mask to finish. So if we start here, we want the mask to go in with the person in blue and end here. So we're going to click on Toggle Animation to create a keyframe in Mask Path, i.e., the movement of a mask. Now you can move forward in the timeline and find the spot where you want to start animating the mask, roughly here. And all you have to do is just move this mask out, like so. So now, we have animated the mask by creating these two keyframes. These two anchor points where it's storing information on where the position of the mask is. And now, Premiere Pro will animate between these two keyframes so that the mask moves in at an even pace. It will look something like this. So you want to learn how to duplicate yourself. Like this. Here's a quick tutorial for-- Now you notice that there's a little bit of the mask that didn't move fast enough, so we can go in and adjust where the keyframe is to make sure it animates properly. So, you can see here, it moves a little too slow. So with this selected, we can just go into the mask and just move it forward so that it moves faster. And then we can replay that. So you want to learn how to duplicate yourself. Like this. Here's a quick tutorial from my Adobe MAX session on-- So that looks a lot better. Now you no longer have the problem of the mask covering the person in yellow because you have animated the mask to move in with the person in blue. Now, how else can we improve this video? Because I filmed this on a tripod, it's a pretty static video, so I'm going to add some more keyframes to animate the clip and make it more engaging. So in order to do that, we want to first combine these two layers by nesting these two clips. So you just create a Nested Sequence. Now that we have combined the two layers, we can go and add animations to this nested sequence. So in order to do that, you want to click on Toggle Animation for the position and the Scale to create the keyframes. Okay. So let's start to reposition it and see how we want to animate it. So, I want the first frame to be really zoomed in. So, I want our focus to be on this main character because she's in the center. And I'm going to move the position down a little because we want the eye level to roughly be, maybe, a third or a quarter of the frame. And so, as we move forward, when she steps back, I want to reveal the full frame. So I'm going to do the animation roughly here. So I'm going to go and add a keyframe, and then I'm going to select 100% and make sure the position is back to what it was before, which is 1920. So now you see that we have animated from the first frame to that second part where I chose to zoom out here. But I don't want it to zoom out slowly. I want to be focused on the person first and then suddenly zoom out to reveal. So what I'm going to do is select the two keyframes in the beginning and then just move it forward in the timeline to reduce the time in which it is animated. So it will animate faster. So it will look something like this.
I think, maybe, it could be even shorter so that it animates even faster.
I like that. That looks good. So then it has, like, a sudden reveal effect. Now, we also want to make the animation more dynamic. So with the last two keyframes selected, I'm going to right click, go to Temporal Interpolation, and I'm just going to choose Ease In because it's just the style that I like. And then if you open this up by clicking on the little arrow button, you can see that now the shape of the curve of the animation is no longer a straight line. And you can actually go into this little anchor and change it. So I can make it move even faster like this. If I just drag it forward, you'll notice the curve goes really fast and then it gradually slows down. So then now the animation will look very dynamic. It would look something like this. So you want to learn how to duplicate yourself. Like this. Here's a quick tutorial from my Adobe MAX session on how to do exactly that in Premiere Pro. All right. Now you have successfully animated your clips. I make many videos on my tripod, so using keyframes to animate the clips are a huge part of my editing process. It can be subtle movements, but it still makes a big difference and makes the video more engaging. Now let's make small tweaks to the video before exporting. We all know that audio is a huge part of the viewing experience. It's just as important as having quality video as it is to create engaging visuals. I want to share with you a tool I use that has saved a ton of my project. It's called Enhanced Speech. Now if you look at our audio clips, you'll see there are these little symbols. These are Essential Sound badge tools. So these indicate what type of audio it is, whether it's a sound effect, ambiance, music, or a dialogue. So here you can see it's a talking head, so it represents a dialogue. Now all you have to do to enhance your speech is to select all the clips, make sure you're in the Essential Sound tab, and just click on Enhance. You can do this altogether with all of your dialogues. It may take a little bit of time to render the enhanced speech. And you can also adjust the amount that you want to enhance it. I generally leave it at the default or maybe I will reduce it a little bit. But here is what it sounds like before and what it sounds like after. So you want to learn how to duplicate yourself. Like this. Here's a quick tutorial from my Adobe MAX session on how to do exactly that in Premiere Pro. And make sure to check out my full session for more tips on how to make creative short-form videos. And this is what it sounds like after enhanced speech. So you want to learn how to duplicate yourself. Like this. Here's a quick tutorial from my Adobe MAX session on how to do exactly that in Premiere Pro. And make sure to check out my full session for more tips on how to make creative short-form videos. Much better. I love the Enhanced Speech tool, and I use it for almost every single project that I have done. And it has honestly salvaged a lot of the bad audio from my clips. Lastly, let's adjust the color and the exposure before exporting this clip. To do that, I'm going to go in and add a new Adjustment Layer right here. So add the adjustment layer. Click on OK, and just drag it on top of your clips on your timeline and make sure it ends at the same point and same endpoint in your timeline. And now with the adjustment layer selected, you can go into Lumetri Color, and you can start making your adjustments. Think of it like you're slapping on a filter on top of the clips, and then you can make any sort of adjustment you want. So I'm just going to increase the temperature, increase the tint because I like my videos to look a little more vibrant. Increase the saturation here, maybe up to 116 or 117. The exposure looks okay, but I will increase the contrast a lot more because this was filmed on a full frame camera, so sometimes it can look a little less saturated and less contrasty. I'm going to reduce the highlight a little bit, increase the shadows, but then increase the whites and decrease the blacks to just bring more contrast. Now I just want to say these are very basic adjustments. This is just my personal preference. There's no correct way to do it. It's just up to your personal taste. Now we are ready to export the video. All you have to do to export is go to the Export tab here, and I actually have a preset setting, an export setting that I have saved called IG REEL 1080P. And I'll just walk you through it a little bit. So the format is the H264. And inside here, you'll see that the size of the frame I export at 1080P and not 4k. And this is because when we upload it to platforms like Instagram, if you upload 4k, it's more likely that your file will get compressed, and it could affect the quality of the final uploaded video, even though you exported it at super high quality. So I always export at 1080P. If we tap into More, I Render at maximum depth, and I use maximum render quality. And for the target bitrate, I put it at somewhere around 30. It's pretty high. And that's about it. And I just-- The audio is, honestly, I think the default settings. But you can take a look. This is not a strict science. This is just how I have been exporting my social media videos, and it has worked very well for me. Generally, my uploads turn out pretty high quality. And that is it. Now all you have to do is export. Before we move on to the last editing tip, I want to first show you all the edits that are possible with keyframes and by combining keyframes and masking. You can animate flying clothes onto your body like this...
Or do something similar like this.
You can use keyframes to animate your mask so that it goes from the top to the bottom like this.
You can even use an animated mask to wipe in and out of the subway like this.
Pretty amazing, right? Now what if your content is more dialogue heavy? How can we make that more engaging? Well, first of all, making sure that you have a lot of visuals to support your narration is crucial, whether that's using B-roll footage or images or text, but appropriately trimming down your dialogue also is key. The tool that I like to use to quickly edit my talking head videos or even full podcast is text-based editing.
Let me show you how this works in Premiere Pro. So let's say you have a two-minute long video of talking and there's a lot of pauses and filler words and you want to quickly identify which parts you want to delete, then all you have to do is, with the clip selected, go to Text and then Transcribe. Now once the text is transcribed, you can actually delete all of the filler words in one go. You can delete all of the pauses in one go. So for instance, you can see now we have the dialogue transcribed into text. All you have to do is go to this filter button and select Pauses. So now it has identified all of the pauses in here. Now what's cool is you can even change the search settings. For example, you can say, I want the pause length to be anything that is 0.5 seconds I want you to identify. And then you save that, and you can then click on the Delete button to delete all of the pauses in the video in one go. And that makes it really easy. And now when you look at the timeline, you can see that it has chopped up the clips in multiple places to reduce all of the pauses. Now you can do the same for filler words. So you can also just go in and look through the filler words that it has identified and make sure that it is actually a filler word, and we can also delete that with one click. And that's already done a lot of the heavy lifting for you. And at a glance, you can really quickly skim through the text to be able to identify which parts are repeat. So, for example, I have identified that from this part all the way up to here, this is a repeat, like I've made a mistake, and it will automatically select this part. And all you have to do is tap on delete, and you have removed all of the parts that you want to remove simply by looking at the text and quickly identifying it. And, also, now we can use this text that we have generated to create closed captions. All you have to do is go to this button here, Create Captions, and you can see there are some preferences that you can select. For example, I want my captions to be a little shorter and to pop up faster. So I want to reduce the minimum duration, reduce the maximum length. I want them to be a single line so people don't have to read two lines of closed captions, and then I will create the captions. Now this is very important because a lot of people on social media actually don't watch with sound on. So if you don't have closed captions, they won't even know what's going on, and they will quickly swipe away. Now you can select all of your captions and go into Essential Graphics and Edit, and you can change the font. For example, I like to use the Futura font. I like to add a little stroke, a black stroke on the outside of it to make it more visible. And, also, I like to position it a little bit higher but below the middle so that it doesn't get covered by the Instagram captions and so on. All right. So that concludes all of the tips that I wanted to share with you and the tutorials for today's session. If you can learn the key functions and core foundations of editing, you can create all kinds of unique edits, and the rest is just using your imagination. I hope this was helpful and make sure to check out all the other amazing Adobe MAX sessions. And if you want to learn more from me, then check out my Instagram and come say hi. I'll see you there. [music]
