Students were invited to submit a video of them dancing in their House colours. The soundtrack didn't matter, as long as they were having fun and submitted a video they were marked as participating. We ended up with 173 videos from JK-Grade 6!
Editing down that many videos can be a logistical and laborious nightmare but here are two tricks that make it a little bit easier in Premiere.
The first is editing to music by setting markers on cut points. Drop your soundtrack into your sequence and lock it by clicking the padlock:
Now play from the beginning and press the 'M' key to set a marker on the timeline wherever you want to cut to a new clip. You can set markers on bass beats, transitions, or pretty much anywhere you think would make a good edit point. With 173 videos in 4 minutes of music I had to set quite a few, and also employ some splitscreens to fit them all in:
Once all your makers are set, drop your clips into a new bin and set the In/Out points to highlight a particularly exciting or interesting few seconds. Hotkeys: 'I' and 'O."
Once you In/Outs are set, select your bin (or a selection of clips) and click Clip > Automate to Sequence:
Some productive tips: the ordering can be set to "Sort Order" which respects the order in your Project panel. So you can group certain clips together or have some sort of linear progression, like time. The Placement should be "At Unnumbered Markers" to automagically trim your videos to fit your markers!
The second workflow tip is using the Multicam features in Premiere to edit live, almost like a live mixer situation. This is an ideal setup for group collaboration videos, similar to Brady Bunch style music videos, where there are multiple tracks synced to an audio track.
Select the clips you want to edit between -- I've successfully used up to 11 on my not-so-speedy Macbook. Right-click and select "Create Multi-Camera Source Sequence":
then syncronize all your clips by selecting "Audio":
This will line up all your clips according to what Premiere thinks is synced to audio on Track Channel 1. Adjust according to what audio track you think is best. Once you hit okay you'll have a stack of clips in your timeline. Create a new sequence from those clips and you'll have access to the Multicam icon:
With this toggled, Premiere now functions like a video mixer. Press play, and click on each source you want to switch to. Premiere will remember the cuts and when done will show splice points in your new sequence leaving your original clips intact on the timeline!
