Snapping to nearest second or so

[petter72]

Hi,

I'm a relatively new user of Adobe Premiere Pro (Windows). So far, I have succeeded creating some nice tutorial videos and uploading them to YouTube.

Now, I'm working on a software teaser. Thus, I will have a number of titles (like "Wait - there's more..."), a number of video clips from my software, and an audio track. I now want to sync everything, for example to the nearest second. (That way I can get everything to sync to the soundtrack if I compose my music in 120 BPM.)

So: When moving around my clips in the timeline, how do I get them to start at the nearest second? Also, how to I trim them so that they end on a second (= "end on a beat")?

This is something we musicians do all the time in a digital audio workstation, so I'm sure it must be doable in Premiere Pro as well, but my searches for trimming etc end up in other kinds of replies. (Note: I don't care if it snaps to a second per se - bars would work just as well, but it should be reasonable, as opposed to 1/30th of a second or so).

Thanks!

Petter

[Dave Merchant · Accepted solution]

In video editing you can only place things on a frame, so if your sequence is at 24fps and your music is at 120bpm then it'll never be in perfect sync. You can disable the frame snap on the audio layer (by switching to 'show audio time units') but that only allows the audio tracks to be nudged precisely.

There's no inbuilt feature to make the video current time indicator (CTI) snap to exact seconds, or to music beats, but there are options:

• If you want to stay entirely within PrPro and snap to music beats, look at the third-party plugin discussed here: Where is the Beat Detection feature in Adobe Premiere Pro?
• If you want to snap to 1-second intervals (or whatever), then create a new video track and place a bunch of 1-second dummy clips (e..g color mattes or black video)on it, then hide the track. Set this track as an edit source with the buttons on the left, then the joins between those clips will act as snap targets.
• You could also generate an audio click-track with markers on every beat (e.g. with Audition) and use those markers as a snap target.

[petter72]

Thank you so much for your swift, kind, and detailed reply. I'm really surprised to see this (however this explains why I couldn't get it working or fins any info on it...). As far as I understand, video time codes end up on "absolute" seconds anyway (be it 24, 29 or 30 frames per second) so coming from work with DAWs, this seems like a really surprising omission.

I will go for one of your suggestions - duplicating a one-second-long clip seems easy enough...

Thanks again,

Petter

[Dave Merchant]

Video timecodes indicate the start point of each frame, so they can sometimes end on an exact second; it depends on the frame rate. NTSC 29.97fps will always be off, PAL 25fps will always be okay.

Premiere, as with all video editing tools, will only allow video clips to be nudged by whole frames because there's no concept of something happening 'in between' frames, at least in terms of the exported file (some internal processes such as motion blur calculations will make up 'sub-frame samples' to get more accurate results, but they still only generate whole frames as an output). The audio tracks are not restricted in that way, in theory an audio track can be nudged by as little as one sample period - so whenever something has to be as closely-matched as possible it's standard practice to nudge the audio to fit the video, not the other way around. That's what we do when syncing audio using a clapper slate.