Premiere - Trimming And Adding Audio To My Timeline

Now that I have my video aspects added to my timeline I decided it was time to look at the audio aspects. As mentioned in my previous blog post I have already adapted the audio which accompanies my video clips. I have kept these where they are appropriate but unlinked and deleted them where they were no longer required. My next aspect was to look at songs. The music for a DVD trailer is one of the key aspects as a catchy song can make the DVD trailer more memorable.

As I have mentioned in a previous blog post I have been looking at using the iconic Girls Just Wanna Have Fun song to fit this song however after consideration I have decided that this song doesn't actually fit the beginning of my footage as this aspect is the break up stage. The end of my trailer footage has clips of Paris and then the girls laughing and messing around, this is where the song is much better suited. For this reason I have decided that I will use the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun song for this aspect of my trailer. My next stage was to find some audio to accompany the heartbreak aspect of my trailer. Although I could find some form of clip I prefer to use the song for the reason I mentioned above, it is more catchy. When looking for a song related to heartbreak I came across The Script - Breakeven. This will suite the beginning of my trailer. From this I now have something to start my trailer and finish my trailer. The issue I now have is the very end of my trailer. At the moment this is two different clips of were Owen Wilson sees Sarah Jessica Parker in the restaurant, this clip doesn't really suit the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun clip and hence I have begun to look around for a separate clip to accompany this aspect. This is where I found Beyoncé's Best I Never Had. This suits this clip perfectly as Owen Wilson has gone to Paris to find Carrie after they broke up in New York.

I already had Breakeven and Girls Just Wanna Have Fun however I didn't have access to Best I Never Had. This meant that I needed to source this. To begin with I wasn't sure how I would do this however I then decided that I could download the music video from YouTube. I then imported this into Premiere as I had previously with the video clips. I then unlinked the video and audio and deleted the video. The opposite to what I did for some of the video clips. This now meant that I had three audio clips ready to trim and add to my timeline.

To start trimming my clip I firstly added it to the Source Panel. I was then able to Mark In and Out like I had on the video clips. I began by taking a rough clip from the middle or most notable aspect of the song. The first clip were I did this was Breakeven. This can be seen below.

From this I then added the clip to my Clip Bin. From here I was then able to add this to my timeline. When this was added I decided that it was still slightly too long for the aspect which I wanted it to fit and hence I used the Rolling Edit Tool to trim this further. The screenshot below shows how this then sits on my timeline.

The next element to add was the Girls Just Wanna Have Fun song. I used the same technique as above to Mark In and Out to create a sub clip. This can be seen below.

From this I then added the clip to my Clip Bin. From here I was then able to add this to my timeline. When this was added I decided that it was still slightly too long for the aspect which I wanted it to fit and hence I used the Rolling Edit Tool to trim this further. This is exactly the same as above. The screenshot below shows how this then sits on my timeline. You can see I added this to a separate Audio layer and this will be explained later.

The final stage was to add my final song to my timeline. This was Best I Never Had. I firstly added this to the Source Panel and from there I was able to Mark In and Out to create a smaller clip. This time the clip only had to be a few seconds long as it only had a cover a small element of my timeline. I then added this to the Clips Bin and from here dragged this onto my timeline. I didn't need to use the Rolling Edit tool this time as my clip was at the right length. The screenshots below show these aspects.

So as you can see from my timeline above I didn't add of all these clips to the same audio layer. This was because I wanted to be able to change the volume of the separate clips. It was much easier to change the whole layer than each individual clip. From this I was hence able to turn down the volume of the Breakeven clip as this clip needed to be background music for the actors talking in the clips while the other two clips are really the only audio except a small clip of laughing. I was then able to turn up the volume of A3 and then turn the audio of the laughing clip up even more so this could still be heard. To change the volume of the whole audio layer I simply clicked on a clip in that layer and then went into the Effects Control Panel and scrolled along to the Audio Clip Mixer. I was then able to adjust the volume of the layer. This can be seen below. This volume makes the song appear to be background music. You can still make out the song without it being too prominent which is exactly what I am going for.

 

I was then able to change the volume level for all the clips set on A1. This was the layer which had all of the sound which accompanied my video clips and hence I then turned the volume of this up slightly so that it sat above the volume of the backing track. This can be seen below. You can now compare the two volumes.

 

 

Within this aspect was a small clip of the girls laughing. I wanted to increase the volume of this section in order to make this stand out over the top of the music better. To do this I simply clicked on the clip and then turned the volume up to the maximum of 6dB. This can be seen in the screenshot below.

 

 

Now that all of my video and audio clips have been added I decided to look into adding colour mattes and titles. This can be seen in the blog post to follow.