London Travel Promo: Resizing & Exporting Video in Premiere Pro

Topics Covered in This Premiere Pro Tutorial:

Duplicating a Sequence, Adjusting Sequence Settings, Resizing Video, Using Auto Reframe, Exporting Video

Exercise Preview

Exercise Overview

In this exercise, we’ll duplicate the London Travel Promo sequence and resize is to be square. Then we’ll export it for use on a social media apps that support square video.

Getting Started

1. You should still have London Travel Promo—Your Name open in Premiere Pro. If you closed it, re-open it now by going to File > Open Project then Desktop > Class Files > Premiere Pro Intermediate > London Travel Promo. We recommend you finish the previous exercises (3A–3C) before starting this one. If you haven’t finished them, do the following sidebar.

   If You Did Not Do the Previous Exercises (3A–3C)

   1. If a project is open in Premiere Pro, go to File > Save, then File > Close Project.
   2. Go to File > Open Project and navigate to Desktop > Class Files > Premiere Pro Intermediate > London Travel Promo > Finished Projects.

   3. Double–click on London Travel—Ready for Export.prproj.

   4. Go to File > Save As. Name it London Travel Promo—Your Name.prproj and save it to Premiere Pro Intermediate > London Travel Promo.

Duplicating & Resizing a Sequence

Throughout this series of exercises we have been working at the native size of our video. This is a very common workflow, especially when you have to produce video of varying aspect ratios for the same project. But now it’s time to convert our sequence so we can export it in a square format.

1. In the Project panel, CTRL–click (Mac) or Right–click (Windows) on the London Travel Promo sequence and choose Duplicate.
2. CTRL–click (Mac) or Right–click (Windows) on the duplicate sequence London Travel Promo Copy 01 and choose Rename.
3. Change the name of this sequence to London Travel Promo—Square
   
4. Double–click on the icon for the London Travel Promo—Square to open the sequence in the Timeline panel.
5. With your new sequence active, choose Sequence > Sequence Settings.

6. In the Video section, change Frame Size: horizontal from 1920 to 1080

   This will give you a video that is now 1080 X 1080 (an aspect ratio of 1:1).

7. Click OK to resize the sequence.

   If you get a message about preview files, click OK.

8. The titles have all been scaled down and they are no longer perfectly centered.

   Move your playhead to the first title.

   NOTE: If you don’t want to use the titles in the smaller video, you could just delete the entire track or turn off the track visibility by clicking off the eye located to the left of the track name on the timeline.

9. Choose the Selection tool .

10. Click on the text in the Program panel to select it.

11. If you’re not already in the Captions and Graphics workspace, choose Window > Workspaces > Captions and Graphics.

12. In the Essential Graphics panel’s Align and Transform section:

    • Change Scale to 100
    • Click the Vertical Center and Horizontal Center buttons.

13. For each of the remaining titles:

    • Move the playhead so you can view the title.
    • Select the title text in the Program panel.
    • Change Scale to 100
    • Center it by clicking the Vertical Center and Horizontal Center buttons.

14. Choose File > Save or hit Cmd–S (Mac) or CTRL–S (Windows).

Auto Reframing Your Video

Now that you have the sequence resized and the titles re-centered another problem becomes noticeable. The video is all a bit off, the main elements of each shot which were nicely framed before are off to the side. You could manually each clip around but there is an effect made to fix problems like this.

1. Choose Window > Workspaces > Editing to return to the editing workspace where you have a bit more room to work.

2. With the Selection tool active, click on the River Thames clip on the Timeline.

3. If the Effects panel isn’t visible in the panel group to the left of the Timeline, choose Window > Effects.

   NOTE: You can also open the Effects panel by pressing Shift–7 or by using the double arrow in the top right corner of the Project panel group and choose Effects.

4. At the top of the Effect panel, in the search field type auto reframe

5. Drag the Auto Reframe effect and drop it onto the River Thames clip (the last video clip) in the Timeline.

   After a short pause, the effect will reframe the clip and if necessary add motion to it to keep what it identifies as the important elements in frame.

6. Click on the Dancing Woman clip, hold Shift and click to select the next 3 clips to the left on the Timeline (do not select the first clip). You should now have the middle 4 video clips selected.

   

7. In the Effects panel, drag Auto Reframe onto any one of the selected clips on the Timeline (which applies it to all of the highlighted clips).

8. Choose File > Save or hit Cmd–S (Mac) or CTRL–S (Windows).

Exporting Square Video

You are almost done, there is just one more step and that’s to export your square video file.

1. Make sure the London Promo Video—Square timeline is selected.

2. Choose File > Export > Media (or click Export at the top left of the window).

   NOTE: The keystroke to export media is Cmd–M (Mac) or CTRL–M (Windows).

3. In the Media File section keep the current File Name (by default it uses the sequence name).

4. Next to Location click on the blue text.

   • Navigate to Desktop > Class Files > Premiere Pro Intermediate > London Travel Promo > Exports.

   • Click Save to close the dialog box.

5. From the Preset menu, choose Match Source—Adaptive High Bitrate

   NOTE: This sets Format to H.264 which is a very common video format.

6. Click the Export button at the bottom right of the window.

   NOTE: Alternatively, you can click Send to Media Encoder to use the Adobe Media Encoder app to export the video (so you can continue working in Premiere). Once in Media Encoder, you would need to click the green arrow at the upper right of that application to render your file.

7. After exporting, choose File > Save or hit Cmd–S (Mac) or CTRL–S (Windows) to save your Premiere Pro project file.

8. You can close this project now you have completed this section.

9. If you would like to preview your video file. Minimize Premiere Pro and on your Desktop, navigate to Class Files > Premiere Pro Intermediate > London Travel Promo > Exports.

10. Double–click on your new video file to preview it.