Make Reels to Promote Your Podcast: Premiere Pro BASICS Tutorial

Show Notes: 

 

 (01:21): Two main uses for Adobe Premiere Pro for Podcasters

(02:52): How to create and edit guest episode clips

(05:26): How to adjust the frame size of the clip 

(08:47): How to add text 

(14:11): How to export the file with and without Media Encoder

 


Bite-sized action items to go from dreaming to streaming your podcast.

    Transcript

    Hey, Misbah Haque here and I really appreciate you taking the time to hang out with me today. In this video, what I’m going to show you is how to navigate Adobe Premiere Pro, this is going to be tailored towards the technical challenge like myself. And it’s also going to be geared towards podcasters. So how, when, or the scenarios that you need Adobe Premiere Pro.

     

    If you are podcasting, one of the main advantages of adding a video podcast is just the amount of doors that can open for you for distribution, promotion, discoverability, social media, all that good stuff. But it can add a lot of complexity. I’ve been podcasting for six years, and a lot of my success has been with audio-only shows, which I think is encouraging for us podcasters, because that’s why we do this, right. That’s the essence of the medium is to connect with people without this thing there. But we have to accept that video opens up a lot of doors. So let’s embrace whatever technical skills that we do need to learn. I’ve been somebody that has used Final Cut Pro because it came on my MacBook, I switched over to Adobe came back to Final Cut, then went back to Premiere Pro. And it was really just that I didn’t take the time to learn it upfront. There were so many amazing effects and capabilities available within the software. But I had no idea because I was so overwhelmed by the interface.

     

    Let’s real quick talk about the different ways you can use Adobe Premiere Pro if you are an audio-only podcast right now. If you’re looking to dive into this one, you’ve filmed the full video version of it, and use Adobe Premiere Pro to edit it, clean it up and then put it up on YouTube too. You might use it for social media. So you want clips, maybe you want them in portrait style, so you can make reels out of your podcast. The tools that I’m going to show you today will allow you to do things beyond just those two examples. But I think these two are very common. So I’m going to roll with them.



    I want to show you real quick, when you start a new project, what it looks like a blank, you’re going to drop your media in this area here. And I want to show you a live example of a clip that has actually been published as a reel because this example will be the most applicable for teaching purposes. This clip actually, for me got over 20,000 views on reels, it got close to 200 shares, 200 saves, and 800 likes or something like that. What’s very weird about this, by the way, is 25% of all those were kind of in the first day or two of publishing. But when it blew up again, out of nowhere was about a week and a half later, and it just was steady for a good 48 hours. So it gave me a preview that I wanted to share with you. It’s not to brag this has happened to me all the time or with every clip. But it’s something that I wanted to point out that it’s very easy to actually make something like this or your own version of it. And it can get you a lot of reach and aware

    So I opened up a new sequence here just to show you how I would do this from scratch again, now that you saw the finished product. This is the original one-minute file from the clip, I’m just going to copy that I’m gonna come to the end, I’m gonna hit paste. And remember I have to unlink this, right-click hit unlink. And now I’ve separated the audio and video, I’m gonna delete the audio because it’s the exact same thing as this one right here. And then because these are two, the exact two files, right now, what I want to do is stack them on top of each other. And I’m gonna go ahead and apply the crop effect to begin actually cutting these down one by one. So now I’m going to do that sometimes it’s easier to do it when it’s not stacked on top of each other. But right now, I have it this way, and it’ll work, I’m gonna go ahead and hit this area and toggle down to the effects section.

     

     

    Once you hit effects, you’ll see this pop-up in the sidebar. And then in the search, all you’re going to type is a crop, I’m going to grab that effect. And I’m going to apply it to one of these clips. This is the first clip, we’re going to come back and apply it to the second clip as well. But basically, this section that you’re seeing with the clip, this section you’re seeing with the effects can toggle down to the crop area. And now you’ve got the left top right bottom, basically what I’m going to do is start with left, so I’m gonna go 50% there. And then let’s just see, the only way you really know what it’ll look like is if we move it out of that area.

     

    Now highlight your marker over that, and you see how I’ve been cut out. And it’s just slowly over here. So that actually worked perfectly. You can obviously play around with this a little bit more. So you could do okay 60% 70%. If you needed for example, this track, I’m going to need to crop from the right I’m not going to crop from the left because that would cut me out. So I need to come back to the effects section. Drag that effect on top of this clip.

     

     

     In this effect controls section as soon as you drag it this usually does pop up but you want to be in the Effect Controls so Can anyone have that clip highlighted, come back over now to the right area. And I’m just going to go ahead and try 50. Boom, as you can see it cut Willie out perfectly. And so now when I stack this clip on top here in the sequence, see how they both are side by side, obviously, but what they’re separate, which means now we can move on to the next step. 



    So the next step is, let’s say, we want to turn this into a reel, what you’re going to do is hit sequence settings. And right now it’s on whatever the clip was, it kind of matched that, and the only thing you’re going to really tweak is the frame size. So let’s say you wanted to do really that is 1080 by 1920. So you go 1080 x 1920 And then hit OK. It’ll just, you can hit OK, here. And then boom, as you can see, it’s completely changed about what this kind of looks like.

     

     

    Now I have room to play with basically moving first my clip to the bottom. So I’m going to double tap, once I’ve highlighted the clip. And now you can easily kind QUEUE. I pulled this down to the bottom, maybe I’d pull it even more just eyeballing it, even it out. And then I want to fill that little space at the end there. Okay, so I’m filling up the full screen, just like that, maybe make it a little bit bigger. And then you can always use your arrows to move it very precisely. And then I’m gonna click out. Okay, so now the second clip, I’m going to drag over on top here, but then make sure that I highlight my markers, I can see that square, the right clip is selected, I’m going to double-tap lilies. And once I do that same thing, I’m going to try to enlarge it and match the proportions to what I did. And as you can see, on her clip, there’s a lot of white space above her head, so I can I have room to actually just move that up. And that lands pretty perfectly in the center, there is a tiny bit of black space here. And so what I wanted to do on my clip, I’m gonna double-tap that, and then just hit the up arrow a couple of times, and boom, click out. And now I have made a relatively even version of this, you can always see the precise numbers. For example, when you’re cropping things, and you want it to be very, very, very proportional, you would basically just double-tap this or hit that button effect controls. And as you can see even the exact position of the video, it says negative 12.7, and then three to 6.3. So if I needed to match that exact same position, or maybe even the rotation, if I rotated the clip, and I need to match that, you’re basically going to copy that exact number, right, so 12.7. And I could come over into this eclipse effect. And if you just watch I go 12.7, boom, it moved me out of there to that position. I’m gonna undo that and bring it back down. But that’s an easy way for you to make sure things are proportional between.

     

     

    Now you’ve basically done a bulk of the work here, because if you are making a clip for reels using Adobe Premiere Pro, you want to use some of the features that Instagram or Tiktok that stuff has, so they have the captions feature. So what I’m doing is I’m not going to use this to build in my options, were right in the center area here, I’m gonna use the caption feature that comes with reels or in your stories. And I will just place that over here. Now, I could also add a title if I wanted to. But I’m not going to do that. 



    And if I do want to add a title, I’m going to basically add that with the reel. That way, it’s faster and easier to navigate. But if you did, for any reason want to add the text built-in and burnt into this video, all you have to do is come over to this text box area here. And anywhere I click that is going to create a text box. Okay, it basically creates this graphic that you can see right over here, and I’m just going to type in really, yeah, there we go. Just for example’s sake.

     

     

    Now, this can be a very big nightmare if you don’t switch back to the selector tool. So make sure you do that. And then I need to basically easily be able to move this around. I can also make it bigger and do whatever I want to do. But if you look over here in the Effect Controls panel, you’ve got the text and if I expand this, now you have a lot more control over okay, what font do I actually want to use here? How big is it going to be? Is it all small caps, all uppercase? You have unlimited options over here the color and the appearance of it that you want to do you can mess around with that. So that is one way that you can add your text it will show up as another layer in the sequence. And then now you if you want it to stay throughout the whole video, what I would do is just expand that all the way through. Okay, if you didn’t want that, and you just want it for the first 29 seconds, then obviously just to trim that area or cut it down and delete that and you are good to go. There are more advanced ways for you to add and customize text and make those cool motion effects and things like that. But to keep this very simple, I wanted to focus on how do you basically just stack these things on top of each other, make the orientation right, trim it down to the right proportions, which remember is just the C button to trim, trim, and then V button to come back to selector tool.

     

     

    And you do rinse and repeat the same thing. And then if you want to delete all these things at once you basically highlight and just hit delete. So if you know that skill, and you know how to apply the crop effect, and change the sequence to make it look like this, you are 90% more knowledgeable than most people when it comes to doing that within Adobe Premiere Pro. 

    How to edit the audio 




    So the other thing that I want to show you in case you have to do this is how to work with the audio, I showed you the Effects panel, I showed you how to trim stuff, I showed you how to add some text, but let’s say that you want to mess around with the audio. So I’m just going to tap this over here, this is the main track, it’s also highlighting the video. That’s okay with me for now, I’m going to tap this button over here and toggle over to the audio section.

     

    Now, let’s say you wanted to adjust the clip volume, or you want to mute the track completely that is controlled by doing that here, you don’t really need to do that because we’ve auto-matched it. But if it was music or something and you’re like oh, I want to bring it down to here, I would just tap that and lower the volume. But I’m gonna go ahead and uncheck that. And that’s mainly what you need to know for the audio portion of navigating Adobe Premiere Pro. So we went over a lot of different things today. 



    The only other thing I’m thinking that you might want to know, we went over a lot of different things today and I wanted to keep it pretty bare bones. So let’s just say I’m wrapped up with this video, I’m ready to rock I’m done. And I’m going to export it and get it onto my phone. So the way I’m going to do that is hit file. I’m going to go over to the export section and then hidden now this is where I like to definitely change up the actual name of because this is going to show up in your computer. You want to make sure it goes to a location where you can actually find it. So let’s just say blink rate. I like to put kind of the orientation so it’s like okay portrait, and that’s good. leave this alone habit match source format should be H dot 264. A quick trick here as if you wanted to grab just the audio of this, all you would do is tap this section Over here, you would scroll down. And then you would either hit waveform audio, or you could hit mp3, which is right over here. And that would give you just the audio version. But we’re going to keep the video, you’re not really going to mess with too much in any of the settings, I just basically go ahead and hit X, you want to make sure everything’s selected, this all looks good. And then once I would hit export, it goes and begins to do that.

     

     

    Now, once I’ve done this, I’m going to make sure to select dialogue if I am using music, and then I would use music or if it was an effect, then I would use this but I’m going to go with and then the first thing I like to do is auto-match to a standard level of loudness. So if you hit this button, it basically would go ahead and do that takes a little bit of time. But then you’ll see right now it says not matched. Okay, and as you can see now just got matched to negative 23. Okay, and as you can see, now it just got auto-matched, I’m gonna collapse this, go into the repair section. If you need to reduce background noise or rumble or anything like that, you can go ahead and tap on these, it does have this default of being kind of a heavy effect in the middle, I like to bring it down all the way as low as it can go. Because it does, you can tell that you’ve added a bit of an effect to it. So the more that you add to it, it’s going to make you sound a row body and weird. So keep all the effects out of it as much as you can until it’s needed. And then if you need to increase it, go ahead and do so let’s see how much you can get away with by just being on that lower end. So let’s say I want to reduce some background noise and I’m good at 1.6. Here, a reverb is basically like Echo. And then deessing is basically like the harsh sounds, that kind of the sounds that sound that kind of pops up a little bit, right. But I kind of leave a lot of that alone. Sometimes, especially if all the facts have already been added and edited within this in the final video, you won’t need to do that in the clip. But just to show you, this is what I would do in the full version. If I was editing the audio. Once you hit clarity, I’m definitely going to add some dynamics to this, I would go ahead and hit dynamics, and then some EQ. If you expand this, you’re gonna either select podcast voice, so if it was just me talking, I might select subtle boosts male but podcast voices is pretty good right there. Again, you can increase and decrease it, but keeping it here is usually nice. And you’ll just notice that dramatically makes just sound a little bit more clear, a little bit more professional, crisper. So those two effects are something I would apply.

     

     

    Now something that’s really important about this part is that while it’s exporting, you can actually work on anything else. So let me show you how I would actually go about doing this because videos do take a while for you to export, especially if it is a full podcast episode that’s an hour long, might take an hour or two hours. So I’m going to hit cancel. And what I’m going to do is go back to File, Export, and media, and then the same settings are going to pop up this time around what I’m going to do differently, instead of exporting it directly within Premiere Pro, I’m gonna send it to Media Encoder. And the reason for doing this is because it can be added to a queue, where it’s being worked on in the background. And you can still continue to use Premiere Pro to edit more clips or do any other work that use Adobe Media Encoder is something that you can download, I don’t think there’s any extra cost for downloading that if you already have Premiere Pro or you have their suite. But basically, once you download that this is what the inside of it looks like you never really need it open unless you’re actually exporting stuff. So once I’ve sent it over here, it doesn’t automatically start exporting, I need to make sure to hit this green play button. So this is going to start the and then you just let it do its thing, it’s going to go ahead and actually continue to export, I could go back into Premiere Pro, let’s say I want to make a new sequence and work on another clip, I would hit File, hit new sequence and just go through the process of making that and my workflow isn’t interrupted whatsoever. When I’m ready to export again, either hit this export button or go to File, Export. And then or even if you just want to, let’s say spit the audio version out through here as well. That would be another file that would get sent to the Media Encoder. And it would just be added to the queue and working in the background while you keep doing your thing. I know I could go on for hours and show you all the different effects and tools that are deployable here. But that would make this video very, very complicated for a technical challenge like me and I would probably exit out but that doesn’t mean that you don’t want to know how to color great or how to add B roll or how to add more music in the background and things of that nature. So I wanted to make myself available.

     

     

    If you have any questions on how to do that, make sure to drop a comment or reach out to [email protected]. If you run into any trouble at all, make sure to hit me up I would love to hear from you and connect even if it’s just questions, comments or nerding out about podcasting.

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