Chapter 26. Advanced Editing: Creating Your Cut

To explore how Premiere Pro's timeline editing tools behave in a real-world environment, you will edit a typically photographed film scene in this chapter. Specifically, you will piece together an initial edit, inserting and overlaying footage from my short film, Bleach. As I did for the original scene, you will then clean up and fine-tune the rough cut using the Ripple Edit, Rolling Edit, Slip, Slide, and Trim tools.

Your editing should always be motivated by the story and ideas being articulated in the scene you are cutting. The story and its various scenes are captured with numerous shots from multiple angles, each with a different emphasis or focus. The available shots for this example scene are a straightforward mix of actor shots (medium shots) and point-of-view shots (of the objects or people at which the actor is looking, commonly referred to as POVs). You will have the flexibility, for instance, to cut from a shot of the character looking at something to a shot of what the character sees. Whether you show the character or the character's point of view (POV) will be dictated by the scene's rhythm and tempo. Finding that rhythm is the essence of editing.