Newbie Question: Premier Elements 2020

[araknd]

Hello All,

I am very new to video editing and could use a couple of "pointers".  I am a member of a national car club and volunteered to edit a Zoom meeting recording of our board of directors and over 150 attendees (in webinar format).  I have two primary videos that were captured by Zoom. One is the speaker view and one is of the gallery.  I would like to intersperse some of the video of the gallery into the main video, sort of like B roll when the speaker refers to someone in the attending group.  I guess I need a few suggestion as to how to tackle this process.  I have rendered the timeline so that I can more easily see where my edit points should be, but still need some help with the rest.  

I have previously used iMovie on my MacBook Pro, so I'm familiar with some video editing techniques, but felt that I needed to use something a bit more feature rich, so I got Premier Elements 2020.  

Thanks in advance for any help that you can offer.

Lance Dong

[Steve Grisetti]

In my opinion, Premiere Elements is pretty likely the wrong editor to use for this type of thing. It does not handle these non-traditional video formats well and it doesn't easily edit multicam video. I think you'd find editing this video with Premiere Elements a constant uphill battle. 

Why not continue with iMovie, if it's doing the job?

[araknd]

Thanks for the reply, Steve.  I guess I was a under the impression that PE had more capabilities and functions than iMovie. When I started this, I was doing simple editing of taking out the pauses and irrelevant comments and such. I couldn't figure out how to accomplish the task in iMovie, so I turned to the more commercial that I knew of and could afford. Didn't want to jump into Premier Pro, yet.

Thanks again for your input.

[Bill Sprague]

I know better to disagree with Steve and rarely do.   But....

As a test for a local group I belong to I recorded a Zoom meeting with whatever format Zoom used.  I had no trouble editing that footage with Premiere Elements.  

I have also used Premiere Elements to blend video from multiple cameras.  It works very well when you are NOT trying to sync the sound.  Putting second camera footage on video track two above the primary track works fine.  If you delete the audio for the second camera, it uses audio from the audio 1 track.   So, switching to a silent "gallery" view while the speaker continues to talk should be easy and effective.   The thing that doesn't work is where you have two cameras aimed at the speaker and you want to switch between camera angles with consistant audio when editing.  

I can post some screen shots of a timeline with two video tracks if you need it. 

[araknd]

Thanks for the input.  I guess what I'm grappling with is the process of putting the second camera video in. There a a few moments where the speaker mentions a member and asks for an onscreen response (wave hello), so I would like to insert the gallery image at that point, as B roll, but the audio would still be Audio 1.  I had thought of rendering the Gallery video and making the edits there, chopping out the scenes and inserting those clips as media.  There are about 4-5 of those.

[Bill Sprague]

You don't need to "render" the gallery video.  You can bring the second camera footage into the Project Assets the same as the primary camera.  Then you have two choices.  You can put the whole thing on video track 2 above the primary camera video.  You can trim and cut it with the normal editing tools so that all that remains is the brief "gallery view".  Or if you double click on it in the Project Assets box it will open in a secondary preview window.  There you can set in and out points so that only the part you want display when you drag that preview window to video track 2.  

Premiere Elements provides a top down view.  What is on Video 2 will block what is on Video 1.   You and the final viewer will only see and hear the top track.   To fix the audio, right click on the Video 2 track, unlink the audio and video and then select and delete the audio from track 2.  

[araknd]

Thanks for the tips.  I will give them a try.