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Inspiring
July 8, 2020
Question

Is it possible in Premiere Pro 2020 to repeat the same edit across multiple frames?

  • July 8, 2020
  • 1 reply
  • 1260 views

I’ve performed numerous searches online and have not been able to find an answer to my question about the following type of scenario in Premiere Pro 2020.  I apologize in advance if the answer is obvious to someone who has taken the time to RTFM.

 

I am working with a short video clip.  It is the only layer in the project, i.e. the only clip.  There is a dancing figure in the foreground.  There is also an object in the background that I want to delete.  It is never occluded by the dancing figure in the foreground, i.e. it always appears in its entirety.  Other than for this background object, all the rest of the video besides the dancing figure in the foreground is a drab monotonous color, as if the dancing figure had been standing in front of a green screen when the video footage was shot.  There’s one other key point – the color of the background changes regularly, as if the dancing figure had first been in front of a green screen, was then in front of a red screen, was then in front of a purple screen, with all of the individual clips taken in front of the different colored screens stitched together to make a single video clip with the dancer smoothly going through his moves in the foreground with a background that rapidly changes color.  Plus the one object in the background that I want to edit out.

 

Based on my experience with Photoshop, what I can imagine myself doing is something akin to the following:

 

  1. Start with the very first frame in the clip, viewing it as a still image
  2. Select a rectangular area that contains the unwanted object in the background
  3. Delete that area
  4. Use the eyedropper tool to capture the current color of the background
  5. Use the paint bucket tool to pour the current color of the background into the hole that was left when the unwanted background object was deleted
  6. Move on to the next frame

 

Apply the same steps to the next frame, and to every succeeding frame throughout the entire clip so that what remains is the figure dancing in the foreground against a background the colors of which change rapidly but with the unwanted object in the background no longer present, having been replaced by whatever the solid background color was on a per-frame basis.

 

If instead of using Premiere Pro I had been using a text editor like vim and had performed steps 1 through 6 above on a large text file that had 101 pages, all I would have to do to get that sequence of six steps to repeat itself 100 more times would be to type “100 .” (that’s a dot symbol, not a punctuation mark, after the “100”).  Or a macro could be created that contains the six steps described above, and the macro could be instructed to execute 101 times through the entry of a key sequence like “101@q”.

 

So, my question is, how can I accomplish this type of repetitive edit on each frame of a clip in Premiere Pro 2020?

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1 reply

R Neil Haugen
Legend
July 8, 2020

Using AfterEffects "Content aware fill" might be a better solution. Have you tried that?

 

Neil

Everyone's mileage always varies ...
Inspiring
July 9, 2020

Hi Neil, I had heard of After Effects but until now have not used it.  I am now enrolling in a class on how to use it and will see if I can get it to do what I want done in my current Premiere Pro project.

 

Thanks for the suggestion!

Richard