How to Edit a Music Video: 5 Adobe Music Video Editing Tips

My timeline for the $20 Rap Video

In Part One of my behind the scenes look into the production of “ PIMP in the SERP,” I exposed how we prepped and shot the video with no budget and only 69 minutes of access to a downtown Los Angeles skyscraper.

In Part Two, I want to walk you through the post-production workflow of how I cut, colored and accomplished the sound mix in 4 days. I would like to share 5 Adobe CS6 editing tips that will save you time, energy and hopefully a couple brain cells as we all know how strenuous and taxing low budget productions can be! I’ve been using Adobe Creative Suite almost exclusively for the past several years and will focus on how I use Adobe Premiere, After Effects and Audition to speed up my workflow and get high quality results in the shortest time possible.

  • TIP #1 – BINS, BINS and MORE BINS.
    The best way to have an effective workflow is to organize your project. The time you spend up front will be paid back tenfold once you are buried deep in the edit. Bins are your friend. Make a lot of them. Make a few more. Try not to float assets in the project window, as it will bite you in the ass.

Organized bins

Here is a link to my Adobe CS6 Premiere Pro Template that I use every time I start a new project. It’s very simple, clean and numbered. The 7 Master Bins cover the basic categories needed to organize any project while editing in Adobe CS6.

  • TIP #2 – THUMBNAIL YOUR FOOTAGE
    Editing is a marathon, not a sprint, so use the CPU in your head efficiently.  Staying sharp over long periods of time is a trait of the most successful editors. I choose Icon view over List view every time.  In Premiere, you can resize the thumbnails to fit the bin relative to your screen size.

  • TIP #3 – THE PANCAKE TIMELINE
    This is a technique I use for dramatically speeding up my initial rough cut. I call it…The Pancake Timeline.
    On projects with gargantuan amounts of footage…the editor must plow through hundreds of hours and pluck out the selects.

  • TIP #4 – DYNAMIC LINK THE VFX
    With the addition of Dynamic Link in Adobe CS5…my days of rendering out a quicktime, importing into After Effects, rendering out another quicktime and finally importing back into Premiere…were gone forever.

My workflow in Premiere was to send the entire locked sequence to After Effects using Dynamic Link.

  • TIP #5 – SONIC SECRET SAUCE – ADOBE AUDITION TIPS AND TRICKS
    Back inside Premiere…my scratch track audio from the Canon 5Dmkii were already in my timeline.

First, I used the Izotope RX plug-in for noise reduction. To process the vocals, I used 4 effects in this specific order.

  1. Izotope RX – noise reduction
  2. Audition 20-band graphic equalizer
  3. Audition hard limiter
  4. Izotope Ozone 5 – mastering

I saved my work in Audition and chose Multitrack Mixdown, Entire Session and picked the Wave PCM 48KHz, Stereo, 32-bit option…uncompressed and floating point.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read my ramblings and I hope this article was able to open your eyes up to some helpful tips and techniques. Please feel free to share any tips you have used or experiences with the software that I utilized in “PIMP in the SERP!” Originally published February 16, 2013 and updated April 19, 2018.