The default profile can be obtained by clicking the “Reset” button within the Automator Plus.
The default profile is a quick-start profile that anyone can use. It has been developed with a laptop in mind and tries to use keys available on most keyboards. Below we describe the key automations used in each group.
Shot Selection Group #
The Shot Selection group contains automations typically used at the start of any project when you need to go through a lot of footage and identify the shots (parts of clips) that look good and that you’d like to use in your project. Most of the automations in this group are geared at moving the player to the next or previous marker or edit point. Although Premiere Pro has got shortcuts for these, we’ve included them in our plugin to speed up your workflow even more, but feel free to use the native Premiere Pro shortcuts for these actions. A feature that the native Premiere Pro shortcuts can’t do however is to set a number of seconds to move the player left or right. Using the Move Player Back/Forward x Seconds automation we’ve added an automation to the Shot Selection group that moves the player 1 second left and right. Feel free to update this to whatever suits your workflow.
The other significant automation within this group is the “Shot Selection” automation which allows you to move your clips up and down tracks in your timeline. On top of that, you can also set a color for the automation whereby the moved clip will have the new color. The typical use here is to watch through all your footage and move clips that you like to Track 2, clips that you love to Track 3, and clips that are out of this world to Track 4.
Auto Edit Group #
Once you’ve identified the shots that you’d like to form part of your final project, usually you’ll want to get these shots into a rough cut, this is where the automations within the Auto Edit Group come into play. The first automation you’ll want to use is the “Automatically Detect Beats” automation. This automation will detect the beats within the selected mp3 within your timeline and add “Beat Markers” to your timeline. Feel free to add your own Beat Markers using the “Add Beat Marker” automation if you’ve got a song that is not in 4/4 timing.
Once you’ve got the Beat Markers added to your timeline you can use the “Auto Edit All Clips To Beat” automation to use all of the clips that are on your current timeline and auto-edit them within the beat markers. The “Auto Edit All Clips To Beat” and its relatives will create a new sequence within your timeline, copy in the audio clip on the first audio track and start inserting all the clips within the new sequence. The knobs you can play with for this automation include, Shuffle and Fixed Lenght. If you set Shuffle to true then the clips will be edited in a random order, however, if you set Shuffle to false, the auto edit will keep the order in which the clips appear in the original timeline. Using the Fix Length argument you can specify whether to set all the clips to the same length or to use some clips for short cuts, some for medium cuts, and some for long cuts.
There is a relative to the Auto Edit All Clips on Beat automation which is the “Auto Edit Groups On Beat” – this is a bit more advanced automation and I’ll refer to the docs of this automation for an in-depth understanding of how to use these automations. The next two groups are “Scene Selection” and “Auto Edit Markers” which we’ll group together along with explaining the “Auto Edit Scene” automation found in this, the Auto Edit, group.
Scene Selection & Auto Edit Markers #
Let’s paint the scenario. You filmed a 3-day-long music festival and you’d like to edit the festival’s events in roughly chronological order. This is where scenes come in. The same prep steps as with Auto Edit all Clips on the beat exists, namely, do shot selection to identify your best shots and auto add the beat markers to your timeline. Thereafter, you can insert Scene Markers, found within the Scene Selection group, to divide the sections of your songs into scenes. Below is a timeline with a song on track 1 whose beats have already been detected with the blue Beat Markers. The red and the purple markers are the scene markers for scenes 2 and 3 respectively. If we execute the “Auto Edit Scene” automation, with scene 2 set, then clips tagged for scene 2 will be edited on the beat between scene 2 and scene 3 scene markers.
But how does Automator Plus know which clips to use for Scene 2? That is where the “Add Auto Edit Marker” automations in the Auto Edit Markers group come into play. The “Add Auto Edit Marker” automation allows the user to select multiple clips and add an auto edit marker to each of them, essentially tagging them to be edited into the associated scene. Below you can see the rest of the timeline shown above with all the purple clips having an “Auto Edit 2” marker attached to them.
Warp Stabilizer #
Have you tried to apply Premier Pro’s warp stabilizer to multiple clips? If you have, you’ll know there are two problems:
- You can’t select all the clips you want to apply Warp Stabilizer to and drag the effect on all of them as this will take the average motion in all the clips and stabilize the clips on average and not treat each clip separately.
- Sometimes Premiere Pro’s Warp Stabilizer just errors out and doesn’t tell you.
These are the two pain points that we’ve tried to solve with the Automotor Plus Warp Stabilizer automation. Instead of having to apply Warp Stabalizer to each clip manually, you can now add a Warp Marker to the top of each clip if you’d like to apply the Warp Stablizer. Thereafter, you can execute the Apply Warp Stabilizer automation which will go to each of the clips you’ve tagged and apply the effect in isolation. This allows you to walk away from your PC and come back with all of the clips you’ve tagged to be stabilized, stabilized. But what about those clips where Premiere Pro’s warp stabilizer failed, as it sometimes does? In those cases, we add a Warning Marker above those clips that you’re aware of them. Note that one of the conditions we use to check whether Premiere Pro’s Warp Stabilizer has failed is how long it takes for the Warp Stabilizer to apply, if it’s less than 5 seconds, usually the application failed. Unforntlatly this leads to these automations always tagging short videos which have Warp Stabilizer applied as a failed application as the application takes less than 5 seconds.
Auto Effects Group #
We’ve added 3 Auto Effects: Kenburn, Shock Motion, and Saturation, 2 of which are in the Default Profile.
Kenburn #
The Ken Burns effect refers to a technique of moving and zooming in on still images commonly utilized in the production of movies and videos.
Shock Motion #
Quickly zoom in and out of the footage.
Screenshots Group #
Ever wanted to quickly get a screenshot of each clip in your timeline? With the automation in the Screenshots group, you can do so.
Conclusion #
The Default Profile doesn’t contain all the automation, nor is it necessarily the best way to group automatons together. It’s early a quick start guide to quickly get you going using some of the automations within Automator Plus. you can always return the default profile using the Reset button, or you can start fresh using the Clean button and design your profile from scratch which we’ll discuss in the next section.
