Top 5 Tips for Premiere Pro Amateurs (2022)

In this blog, you will find some very useful and FREE tips that will help enhance your existing skills with Premiere Pro 2022. You will find that these tips will improve your video capabilities much more, and the best thing about them is the fact that they're super easy to apply!

1- Organize your project media BEFORE you import it:

The common mistake people often make is importing everything they have filmed, and now they're scouring through a tonne of footage and struggling to find what they need to use.

Take the time to organize the footage carefully in separate dedicated folders and import all of these into Premiere Pro for ease of navigation, and it will genuinely speed up your editing process. One main thing I do whenever I migrate to a new laptop is to create a "master file" that contains all the folders inside of it which will enable you to organize the footage quicker. Something similar to the one below. Once that file is created, duplicate and rename it into whatever your project is called.

2- Edit a workspace that WORKS FOR YOU:

This is the second most important step after importing the media into the project you just created on Premiere Pro. The reason for this, is to familiarise yourself with the workspace you are creating content in, so it suits your needs. I for example like to use the "editing" workspace preset created by Adobe (which comes as a default template). I also have another workspace that is "vertical" because in my office I have a screen which is landscape and another one that is vertical.

It is essential to rearrange the different panels and resize them to suit your work setup because it will make the editing process much more efficient and faster.

3- Learn how to use the "Lumetri Color" panel:

Zach Ramelan created a wonderful video on how to use this panel very well and it is a simple 10 minute tutorial that will save you a lot of heartache when getting feedback on your work. He goes through the fundamentals of colour grading and gets into detail regarding the different panels within the lumetri color editor.

I would recommend watching this tutorial before jumping into editing any video as it is a good way to learn how to make your videos have that "professional feel" to them!

4- Time remapping and speed ramping:

I get it, now you feel a little more confident with editing your videos but there's something missing. It's the element of "smooth flow" in your videos. It doesn't quite feel like a pro video yet but LOOKS like one. So how do you step it up a notch? Well, time remapping and speed ramping are two elements that most videos have, which helps increase their production value.

Learning this tool will help smoothen out all the transitions between videos to make it look seamless when going from one shot to the next. Below is a video tutorial created by the talented Robert Janney on 3 ways to use time remapping for creating cool effects in your videos.

5- Motion tracking made simple:

Now your video looks incredible, but it's missing that element of motion tracking for your titles, in those phenomenal mountain shots you've captured with your cool new drone! Fear it no more! Daniel Marchoine explains this seemingly difficult and tedious task in a few simple steps which can be mimicked using Premiere Pro for your own projects.

Create your title or logo design in your chosen editing program and then import them into your project. Once that's done, follow the tutorial below to motion track them to a subject within your video and blow your viewers minds by how awesome and professional it looks!

Okay, now I think you are ready for a BONUS VIDEO on how to animate text in Premiere Pro by the one and only Peter McKinnon.

Remember, this blog is for those who are new to Premiere Pro, but NOT editors who are just starting for the first time ever. There's many tutorials online for that. The purpose of this blog is to give you a boost of knowledge if you are familiar with editing but need to enhance your skills in Premiere Pro. I wish I had someone to guide me through this process when I started but I had to learn the hard way after a long time of making endless amounts of mistakes and disappointing so many clients haha!

I hope you found these tips useful and easy to apply to your projects. Definitely get in touch via Instagram and send me the footage you have edited so I can see your awesome work. I hope this makes editing videos a much more fun process for you!