Premiere Elements automatically places the selected items in the Timeline, thus creating your slideshow.
Chapter 7
Trimming and Editing Video Clips
In This Chapter
Reviewing your clips
Setting In points and Out points Marking your place with clip markers Fine-tuning your clips
Undoing mistakes
Like plays, movies are made up of scenes that are put together in a certain order so that the show makes sense and is enjoyable to watch. Before you can turn scenes into a movie in Premiere Elements, you need to identify just what those scenes will be. Each scene — called a clip in video-editing parlance — must be previewed both for video and audio content. Then you decide which portions of a clip you want to use, and in some cases you may want to leave virtual sticky-notes on some scenes to remind yourself later of an important spot in the scene.
After you’ve captured some video as described in Chapter 6, this chapter leads you through the next steps — previewing your video clips, selecting portions of clips to use in projects, and performing other tasks to make your clips ready for use in a movie project.
Reviewing Your Clips
Clips that you capture or import into Premiere Elements all wind up in the Media window (see Chapter 6 for more on capturing and importing clips).
Clips come in many flavors, from video to audio, still graphics, titles, color mattes, and black video. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
You can generate any of the last five items in this list by clicking the New Item button at the bottom of the Media window. (For more on working with titles, see Chapter 14. See Chapter 15 for information on when and how to use bars and tone, black video, and counting leaders.)
Getting the details on your clips
You can learn a lot about a clip in the Media window. To view a brief summary, click a clip. The clip is loaded into the preview area in the upper-left corner of the Media window, as shown in Figure 7-1. You’ll also see a summary of the clip’s length, frame size, and audio quality as appropriate. This summary appears just to the right of the preview window.
If the preview area doesn’t appear at the top of your Media window, click the More button in the upper-right corner of the Media window and choose View➪
Preview Area. The Preview area appears as shown in Figure 7-1.
When you review the details of a clip, there are several things you should look at:
Frame size: Does the frame size of the video clip or still image match your project? Clips that you imported into Premiere Elements may not have the same frame size as clips that you captured from your digital camcorder.
For example, if you imported a clip with the frame size 320 x 240, the image quality of that clip may appear blocky and pixilated when it’s inserted into a project that consists mainly of DV-format video.
Pixel aspect ratio: Next to the frame size is a number in parentheses.
This number is the pixel aspect ratio. (I explain pixel aspect ratios in Chapter 4.) A pixel aspect ratio of 1.0 means that the pixels are square.
A number above or below 1.0 indicates rectangular pixels. NTSC video usually has a pixel aspect ratio of 0.9, and PAL footage usually has a pixel aspect ratio of 1.067.
If the pixel aspect ratios for your still images and video don’t match up, the still images might appear slightly squished when you export your movie. To avoid this hazard, resize still images before you import them into your project. See Chapter 6 for the exact steps and sizes to use when preparing still images for use in a video project. Resized stills will still show a 1.0 pixel aspect ratio in the Premiere Elements Media window, but if you resize the images as described in Chapter 6, these stills will appear properly in the movie.
Frame rate: Does the frame rate for all of your video clips match? If you mix frame rates in a single project, jerky video may be the sad result.
If you have a clip with a frame rate that doesn’t match the rest of your video, import that clip into a new Premiere Elements project. Place the clip in the Timeline and export it as an MPEG or AVI file with a frame rate that matches your original project. Then import the new clip into your original project.
Audio quality: The audio sample rate is listed, as well as whether the clip is stereo or mono. I show you how to work with audio in Chapter 13.
If you require even more information about a clip, right-click it in the Media window and choose Properties from the menu that appears. A Properties dialog box opens, containing more detailed information than you likely need to know about the clip. These details can help you troubleshoot problems that you may be experiencing with that clip.
Playing clips in the Monitor window
When you select a clip in the Media window, a preview of it appears in the tiny preview window in the upper-left corner. If the clip is audio or video, you can play it by clicking the Play button just to the left of the preview window. You can move to specific parts of the clip using the slider underneath the preview window.
As you can see, the clip previews provided in the Media window are pretty small. If you get tired of squinting, you may want to load the clip into the Monitor window to preview it. Besides giving you a bigger window in which to preview the clip, the Monitor is also where you will pare the clip down to
Set Poster Frame
Play Clip length and frame rate
Frame size and pixel aspect ratio
Audio quality
Figure 7-1:
The Media window can tell you a lot about your clips.
just the portion you want to use in your movie. Follow these steps to play your clip in the Monitor window:
1. Switch to the Editing workspace mode by choosing Window➪
Workspace➪Editing.
Or you can click the Edit button on the Premiere Elements toolbar.
The Monitor window appears, if it wasn’t already open.