Video Editing and Rendering Tutorial in Premiere Pro

For today’s tutorial, I’m going to show you how to edit a video by adding cinematic black bars, cutting out extra footage and later rendering the video in 1080p 60fps using Adobe Premiere Pro CC. As a demonstration, I’m going to be using a video I recorded of me playing World of Warcraft. This tutorial can be used for any type of footage you have available to you and not limited to a video game.

Step 1

The most simple step of this tutorial is to open up premiere pro and start a new project. Name it however you see fit. If you happen to have a dedicated graphics card in your system, select the GPU Acceleration (CUDA) option under renderer. If not then leave it as default.

Step 2

You should now be greeted with the main hub for where all the editing should take place. The only problem is, we have no footage. In the bottom left portion of the screen should be a box with your project name and 5 tabs. To Import your video, click on Media Browser and go to the folder where your footage is located.

Step 3 

If you found the folder where your footage is located, it should show an image of the footage with the name and time stamp of it. For this tutorial, we’re going to use the file name GS Meme 749k dps but for you, the name of your file is going to be different. Right click on the video and select import.

Step 4

After importing your video file, .you’re going to want to drag the file to the right so that we can begin editing the video file.

Step 5 

After dragging over the video to the editing area, we’re going to need to add an adjustment layer. In the same window as your video, right click the empty space, go to new item and then select adjustment layer. When the dialog box come up just hit ok to proceed onward.

Step 6 

Just like you did when we added the video to the editing region, we’re going to do the same thing again. Drag the new adjustment layer to the editing region and place it in the V2 portion which is above the main video footage. Unfortunatel the adjustment layer only covers about a couple of seconds of the video so we’re going to need to extend it. If you hover over the adjustment layer, you should get a symbol that looks like this ]. Take that and drag it all the way to the right until it covers the duration of the video you’re using.

Step 7

The first thing we’re going to do is add black bars to the video to give it a cinematic feel to the video.  Go to the top of your window and select effects. It should bring up a window to the right of your screen. On the right hand side, you’re then going to click on video effects in the drop down menu.

Step 8

Under Video Effects, go to Transform. There’s an effect call crop that we’re going to use. Click and drag crop to your adjustment layer. After you do that, you’re going to be given options in the upper left side of the screen. This is where we’re adding the black bars. In the top and bottom percentage, input 2.5% into both which determines how big the black bars are going to be. You have now added black bars to your video.

Step 9 

The next step we’re going to do is to trim the excess portions of the video that no action is happening. Go to your editing section and you’re going to see a razor like image which is the tool we’re going to be using for this step. Click on the razor and go to the spots where there’s no type of action happening. In my case, 9 secs into the video and nothing has happened. With the razor tool enabled, click on the clip and the adjustment layer exactly on the line. This should split the footage into two which now you’re able to delete. Do this same process everywhere in your footage which you want to delete.

Step 10

As an extra bonus in this tutorial, we’re going to add some music to spice up the video. Once again, you can use any music track you want and doesn’t have to be the same as the one used in the tutorial. To make matters more simpler, go to the folder where your music track is located. Once you located the file, drag and drop it into the A2 track. You have now successfully added a music track to your video edit. Very simple process. But wait, now the music we just added is too loud. Click on the music track and in the upper left portion of your screen should pull up some controls. In the level section, set the dB level to -35. It should be at a good listening level while being able to hear what’s going on in the video.

Step 11

If you made it this far in the tutorial then we’re essentially almost done. The last part we have to do now is render the video. Go to File>Export>Media to begin the process. You should be greeted with the window below. Now lucky for us adobe does all the basic video and audio settings once you select the format and preset. The format we’re selecting here is H.264 which is the basic codec for most mp4 files. Under preset, I’ve found the best quality preset to be  YouTube 1080p HD seeing how we achieve both 1080p video and 60 frames per second. Finally, at the bottom of the window, select Use Maximum Render Quality. At last, hit the queue button at the bottom.

Step 12

After all of that hard work, your video is now being processed in the background in the adobe encoder. The picture below should be the window that pops up after you put the video in que. Just sit back and let Adobe do it’s thing.

Congrats, you just finished editing and rendering your first video. If you feel proud of it then go ahead and upload to a site like YouTube or vimeo which is very simple step. It’s not required but if you want the world to see your accomplishment then go ahead and do that.