Subclips: What? Why? How?

Adobe Premiere Pro Tutorial at Creative COW

Andrew Devis

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Article Focus:
Subclips are essential when you need to organise a long piece of footage into smaller, more manageable chunks so that you can keep track of your project. In this Adobe Premiere Pro tutorial, Andrew Devis explains what subclips are, why you may want to use them and how to create and edit them.

This tutorial is also available as a podcast.

Comments

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Re: Subclips: What? Why? How?
by Andrew Devis

Hi Peter

That extra footage is called head and tail footage and is the extra at the front and end of the clip. To get access to head and tail footage on a subclip simply select more than you want to use for the subclip then double click it in the project panel to open it in the source monitor and set an in and out point that are slightly in from the the start and finish of the clip. The footage before the in point will be your head footage and the footage after the out point will be your tail footage.

As for the way PP deals with head and tail footage, this has to do with the various transitions and how they achieve their transition. Some transitions will use the head or tail footage to disolve with if it is there or, if it isn't there, they repeat frames to get the disolve effect.

A couple of ways to deal with it would be either to make the transition single ended (ie you put it to one side or the other of a cut) or, to use the razor tool and litterally cut the clip a frame in from its end which will also have the effect of cutting off any head or tail footage. This would then make the transition use repeated frames rather than possibly pulling in some bad frames later on.

In time, I will be doing a tutorial on transitions and covering much of this, but transitions can be a bit of a black art at times!

Hope this helps
Andrew

... because it's all about stories ...

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Re: Subclips: What? Why? How?
by Peter Lovibond

Many thanks Andrew - that's extremely helpful. I'll look forward to the transitions tutorial!

- Peter

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Re: Subclips: What? Why? How?
by Alex Udell

Hi...

Another way to deal with heads and tails footage: Use track to track editing as opposed to single track editing.

In other words, alternate placing clips on track 1 and then track 2.

In this way you can create the amount of overlap you want between clips you want and see it visually.

Then when you add the transitions, typically to the heads and tails to the events on track 2, it will apply within the bounds of the clips as you have them edited and NOT expose additional heads and tails.

This is a little more of a filmic style of editing, and same track editing is a little more of a video approach.

does that help?

Alex

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Re: Subclips: What? Why? How?
by Peter Lovibond

Hi Andrew,

Another very helpful Premiere Pro tutorial. I found the tutorial was very clear, but along the way it raised an issue that I have never completely understood: the way in which PPro uses footage outside of the designated in and out points. For example even though you turned the clip into a subclip at the end, you could still recover the missing footage. However I have noticed that when using a subclip made using the first approach in your tutorial, PPro will not provide access to the unselected footage from the original clip, eg when it needs additional frames for a cross-dissolve or when you attempt to extend the clip. This whole issue of in and out points is slightly confusing anyway, even for regular clips - eg is there any way of stopping PPro from using footage outside of the in and out points, which is often not what I want?

Anyway, thanks again for your very clear tutorials.

- Peter

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