Adobe Premiere: A Story of Love and Hate

Photo from Pexels

Last week was a quick and smooth week in public relations publications. We worked on social media assets using Canva as our platform of design. This week we began working with Adobe Premiere. Out of all the Adobe programs I can operate thus far in my career, I would have to say that Premiere is my least favorite. That's an understatement. I hate it. But I love it for the cool things it can do. 

GIF from Tumblr.

Video has been a medium that has taken up residence on the back burner of my mind since I have begun college. I have always wanted to take a course specifically dedicated to video and video editing. When I was at Eastern Oklahoma State College working on my associate degree, I had the option of taking video production courses. However, these classes were never offered at times that worked in my schedule. My advisor, who focused in broadcast journalism during her undergrad at OSU, taught the class and knew Premiere very well. I was very sad that I never had the opportunity to take her classes. Regardless, the need to work with video did arise. 

During my final semester at Eastern, I was heavily involved with the Choctaws of EOSC program. Our program adviser knew that I was preparing to transfer to OU and major in public relations so she gave me every possible opportunity to hone my skills for the benefit of the program. She approached me about mid-semester and asked me if I would make a video for our banquet, where the program director of the Choctaw Nation College and Career Resources program would see and, potentially, chief of the Choctaw Nation, Gary Batton. Talk about pressure. Knowing that I had little background in video editing/production, I enlisted one of my friends who focused on it to help me. The video was to feature interviews done with program participants. 

As it turns out, he was busy with other school projects. I shot all the interviews and pieced

Good thing Chief didn't get to see my disarray. GIF from Tumblr. 

together the video all by myself, with the occasional help from my adviser or my friend. In the end, and I mean literally up to the five minutes before we were to show it at the banquet, I was working on it. I failed to export the video properly so I had to scramble to get the ten-minute video exported, which took like 45 minutes. The video was good for my skill level. I knew it could be better. Luckily, Chief Batton was at the banquet that evening. 

I love Premiere because of the cool things you can do with it, like editing sound and creating animations without having to move into Adobe After Effects. Feature-length films like "The Social Network" were edited using Premiere. It is a dynamic tool that allows the user to create moving masterpieces, whether they be docs, how-to-videos or simple short films. 

Me using Premiere. GIF from Tumblr.

It's a dynamic tool with many uses. Now comes the part where I talk about my deep hatred for it. Premiere is not very user-friendly. I say that because I am spoiled to Illustrator and InDesign, that are concerned with 2D, stationary content creation. Premiere can do so much so the interface must be complex in order to do what it is designed to do. People who just want to fly in and edit video, like me, have to take the time to learn the basics before making "Titanic." One little misclick and not making note of it can completely ruin your workflow and, potentially, your project. It's frustrating. 

Now that I got on my soapbox for a hot minute, I can talk about the amazing Lynda.com tutorials we followed in class and outside of class. 

The tutorials we looked at were incredibly helpful. Especially for someone like me, who hasn't used Premiere in a while, and a new version at that. I got a good refresher on how to cut and edit video and sound, how to employ B-roll, how to create titles, etc. I had previously learned all this when working on my Choctaw video. However, I haven't used that knowledge in a year and not on 2017. I knew how to use it in Premiere CS5. It's a complicated process, but when you figure it out, your end product is amazing. You created a film. You. Even if the video is unadulterated garbage, I find it extremely satisfying to see my work. 

GIF from Tumblr

Now that I recovered the basics of Premiere, I am excited to use it to create our video assignment coming up in a couple of weeks. Hopefully, this was enough so that I wouldn't get neck deep in a project and find out that I completely ruined it through personal stupidity.