Improve Premiere Pro's built-in help

[BillNM]

I've had this same experience for YEARS (hence part of the reason for my lack of progress (and patience) learning Premiere).

This morning, all I wanted to do was CROP a video.  Good grief could it get simpler?  So I type, well, "crop a video" into Premier Pro Help - and I get results about masking, trimming, tracking, ETC ETC.  But - without digging and digging and DIGGING for my specific question (which seems pretty basic?), I can NOT find the answer.

This specific example may or not represent the exact help issue I've had for YEARS with Adobe, but it's very similar.

How in the heck can a multi-billion-dollar company not have sorted out it's HELP documentation any better than this?

Now of course I recognize I may be missing some BASIC way of actually getting HELP - but then maybe that's even more emblematic of the global problem - why is it so hard and unintuitive in the first place to type a simple help statement and NOT get the question answered?

So then I search for Youtube videos - and there are of course THOUSANDS - and then have to dig thru those to finally find the answer (maybe) to my question, after sifting thru which VERSION the videos are covering, and on and on.

It's just SO sickening.

Am I really the only one who has this experience, and for YEARS AND YEARS?  And with ALL Adobe products?

Mod note: title was changed to reflect feature request.

[Ann Bens]

The HELP is hopeless in some areas.

This is what Crop means in Premiere lingo.

[BillNM]

OK - got it - thanks very much for the screen grab. 

Part of the issue, I guess, is that I wouldn't think cropping is an "effect", and that cropping would CERTAINLY be available via the right-click menu...or SEQUENCE - CROP, or CLIP - CROP, etc.

Anyway, thanks again.

[Warren Heaton]

The information is there.  I think the challenging part is how to filter out the noise.

Use "Adobe helpx Premiere Pro" at the start of any search to bring results for official Adobe documentation to the top of the search results.

Searching for "Adobe helpx Premiere Pro crop video" showed this at the top of my results:
https://www.adobe.com/creativecloud/video/discover/crop-video-in-premiere-pro.html

[Ann Bens]

I tried to find crop in the help: could not find it either.

[BillNM]

Warren I don't dount the information is out there somewhere - heck the answer to everything knowable is out there somewhere - yes, the problem is Adobe's help files, for some reason, can't understand, ah, what was it I typed?  Oh yea - CROP A VIDEO (and that's WITHIN the PP help dialog box).

That really seems self-evident to me.

And Adobe appends an X onto the end of the word help?  And the X needs typed to find information?

Look, I know I'm being a smart-ass - I guess - but we all pay not insignificant amount of money to Adobe every month - I think it should be expected that Adobe would know how to spell the word HELP, and beyond that, understand the phrase "CROP A VIDEO".

But listen, thanks - I appreciate you jumping in.  Absolutely.

[BillNM]

Also Warren, just FYI, not sure what's happening, but when I type "Adobe helpx Premiere Pro crop video" into the search box that opens after clicking HELP - PREMIERE PRO HELP, I get the usual long list of mish-mash, here:

https://helpx.adobe.com/search.html?q=Adobe+helpx+Premiere+Pro+crop+video&start_index=0&country=US&a...

[R Neil Haugen]

You want to hear something also weird ... the Resolve manual is now over 4,000 pages. So ... everything ... about that also complicated app is in there somewhere.

However, Resolve uses its own "personalized" lingo as the terms for many standard things we do, like ... masks are "power windows" ... and to add to the fun, there is no index whatever.

So unless you know the precise lingo/terminology used, well ... you gotta read through a chunk of that 4,000 page doc to find it.

Making many things as hard to find, even though they have in some ways an awesome manual ... as Premiere's ... whatever it is.

😉

[Warren Heaton]

Use Google, DuckDuckGo, or Bing.

[joergeng84239194]

as of 2023, ask chatgpt or similar tools for help. they can sometimes provide rather nice manuals about such topics where the concept is not very clear

[BillNM]

Thanks Joe - good idea.

Adobe claims to know what AI is and can do - maybe they'll take your suggestion as well. 🙂

[BillNM]

Warren - interestingly, when I use Google, the search results are better without the X...the non-X result is a good/correct search result, while the helpx results return mish-mash.

 

[Ann Bens]

I use Google or YT instead of the Premiere's Help.

@joergeng84239194 

Dont use ChatGP: you will most likely end up with the wrong information.

[joergeng84239194]

the worst thing that can happen with chatgpt is that the solution it suggests doesn't work, or is obviously non-sensical. from my experience, chatgpt has led me more often than not to a working solution, so I wouldn't discount it right away... most definetly a higher success rate than the PP help section...

[Warren Heaton]

@BillNM 

The top result in your screenshot is the same top result that I linked to earlier in this thread.  

It explains how to crop video in three easy to follow steps.

All Adobe support documentation uses "helpx" for the prefix of the domain name.  

It returned exactly what you were looking for.

Pictured: Better web search results using “Adobe helpx”