How Premiere Pro’s Text-Based Editing Transformed My Filmmaking
By Jennifer P
In her blog post for Frame.io Insider, Sandra Lucille discusses the challenges documentary editors face and the transformative impact of Adobe Premiere Pro’s new Text-Based Editing feature. Documentary editors, responsible for crafting narratives from vast amounts of footage, audio, and interviews, often relied on time-consuming and inefficient methods for selecting sound bites and creating a storyline.
Historically, editors had to create timecoded transcripts, print them out, and manually highlight and annotate them. They would then go back into Premiere Pro to locate corresponding phrases in the footage, a labor-intensive process. However, Adobe’s Text-Based Editing feature changed the game, allowing editors to use transcribed text as the primary representation of audio or video content. This feature enabled them to see, edit, rearrange, add, or remove sentences in the transcript, with the text edits automatically synchronized with the audio or video.
This new approach, particularly beneficial for documentary editors, streamlined the workflow, making it easier to navigate interviews and restructure story elements quickly. Editors could use the Text panel to initiate Speech-to-Text transcription, and the transcript would sync with the audio and video. This synchronization allowed for real-time tracking of spoken words in the transcript, simplifying content navigation.
Editors could create sequences for sound bite selects and use Text-Based Editing to find, select, and insert phrases into these sequences. The selected phrases were added as multicam excerpts, making the process much more efficient.
Sandra shared her experience using this new workflow on a specific project and highlighted how it allowed her to work more creatively and imaginatively. She also discussed how it improved the process of creating a radio edit, a phase where the editor lays out all the audio components of the narrative. With Text-Based Editing, she could easily find alternatives for specific words and refine the intonation of dialogue to enhance the narrative flow.
Additionally, the feature made it easier to remove unnecessary sound bites or words, resulting in a stronger story with fewer words. Sandra emphasized the ability to create harmony between interview subjects’ answers and smoothly transition sound bites by adding keywords, ultimately improving the overall storytelling process.
Read the full story by Sandra Lucille for Frame.io Insider HERE