What is Text Based Editing?
What exactly is text-based editing? To put it simply, it's editing your video like a Word document. Also, a special thanks to our friends over at MixKit for sponsoring today's video. You can go to MixKit to download thousands of free assets for your video using my link below, and I'll show you how to use some of their assets later on. For now, let's go ahead and jump on in.
So text-based editing isn't anything new. It's been around in Descript for a while now and also is available as a plugin by Digital Anarchy. It was called Transcriptive Rough Cutter. So it's been around for a while, but finally they're developing it built in in Premiere Pro and right now you can test it out yourself. You just need an Adobe Creative Cloud plan.
Opening the Beta
And if you go to the desktop app here, you can go to beta apps and install the most recent version and open this up to follow along with this video.
New Import Panel
So here in the beta from the import workspace, I'm going to select my talking headshot in my other angle, which is my screen recording. And then over on the right, there's something new. There's automatic transcription, which we have automatically turned on. So you can choose your language, in my case, English, speaker labeling, or your preferences. So if you want to auto transcribe all imported media, which is what I'm going to do, or only clips in the sequence, and I have it to auto create a new sequence right up here and press create.
Auto-Transcription & New Workspace
So what it did was play the clips in the sequence and it auto transcribe both of the clips. So now we have the transcription here over on the left. Also there's a new workspace which I'm in and it's called text based editing workspace, which basically places your text panel on the left super big. So it's easier to see one other thing that's really cool is if you double click on the clip, it actually transcribed the clip itself. So you don't need it in a sequence to see the transcript. This is actually displaying in the source monitor, which is at the clip level, not from the program monitor, which is on the sequence level. Before I show you two methods for editing first, just a couple navigation tips from the text panel up here, there's a search bar.
Navigating Text Panel
So if you want to search for any text inside of your transcript, you can search right here and it will highlight those words for you. And also under any segment here, if you want to make an update, for example, you can just press enter and then you'll be able to go in and update the text and everything here is time coded. So if I select a new word, it'll take me to that moment inside of the timeline. So because this is a multi camera shot, which is my talking head in a screen recording, I'm actually going to synchronize the shots together.
Multi-camera Synchronization
So I'm going to bring up this shot and then the screen recording underneath and roll this over and lasso and select them and right click and select synchronize. And the reason I'm doing this is because I have two camera angles, any cuts that I make, I also want them to be applied to the other camera angle, the screen recording in this case. So I have our two angles synchronized and I can go ahead and D link these by pressing command L and disable this audio track and delete these because they are unnecessary. So we have our disabled audio track and our good audio and everything synchronized. And the reason why I'm doing this is if we make edits from the transcript on the left, they will be applied to both clips at the same time. So we don't have to redo the edits for the other camera angle. So here's the first way of editing your rough cut using the text panel. So you can see here visually, I did my intro several times.
First Method: How to Delete Portions of Text
I messed up a bunch. This was the last take that I did. So I can actually select all of this and delete it. So we can press the apostrophe key or we can click on this extract icon. So pressing the apostrophe key, watch what happens. Bam, it deleted it.
Showing and Deleting Pauses
You'll also notice that there's these three dots in green throughout, and those are pauses. If you go down to the right corner, you can choose to display pauses as an ellipsis. So if I turn this on, you can see where the pauses are. And if you display them and you delete them, it'll delete those pauses, which is really useful. One thing that I could see being very useful here is also filtering our transcript for ums and uhs and likes those filler words. So if there was something up here that said like filler word removal, that would be something I would love to see. And if you would love to see it too, leave a comment just down below. So now I'm going to edit my rough cut using that shortcut key, the apostrophe to cut out bad takes and streamline my edit. This could just be a bug inside the beta, but I noticed that it doesn't show one of the pauses right here. So there's a gap visually that you can see inside my timeline, but there's no pause here.
So I can see that there's already some improvement that could be made at how the pauses are displayed. And I would love it if I could just click on the pause and right click on it and select delete. For example, right now that's grayed out, so I can't delete those pauses. I'd have to select it and then press the apostrophe. So I think that it could just work better if I could just right click on it. For example, here's a gap that I can select and it's 32 seconds. So you can see how it gets highlighted in the timeline. I can press extract apostrophe and it ripple deletes the pause so they get smushed together. I would also like to have an option where I can go up here and just right click and delete all pauses or delete all silences. That way I don't have to select each one individually to delete the pauses. That'll save us a lot of time. Another thing you can do is copy and paste sentences. So this part I actually said earlier, but I want it to be at the end.
Copy and Pasting Portions of Text
So I can press command X to cut this and then here I can right click and press paste or command V and it will paste that at the end. All right, so that's the first way you can build a rough cut. Now I'm going to show you method two, but first I'm going to tell you about Mixkit.
Mixkit
So this is the Mixkit website and I love sharing this with creators because it's free and who doesn't like free, right? You can have thousands of free stock video, stock music, sound effects, and video templates. And there's no sign in, no login. You literally just click on an asset. If we scroll down and we want to get this 4k clip of the ocean, we can just go ahead and choose 4k and download free 4k video. And they recently added vertical videos. If you select vertical and you scroll down, you can see that there's stock video clips that already have been cropped in the 9 by 16 vertical format, ready to be used for Instagram reels or TikToks. Let me show you how to download a template. You can go over here to templates, choose your software. In this case, we will use Premiere Pro. Let's say we want to download a lower third, click on that. And let's say I want to try this lower third. Let's click on it and select download free template. The downloaded as a motion graphics template. So we need to import this into Premiere Pro. Let's go into our caption and graphics workspace. And from here we can get onto this plus icon. Then we can drag this moment into our central graphics panel.
I'm just going to search for Mixkit. And here we go. Here is the template. Let's drag and drop this on top of our video. And here's the motion graphics template. We can select it. And from here we can make edits to the source text and change the color. Hey, I'm Kelsey, the creator of Premiere Gal, a YouTube channel dedicated to sharing. And that's just one example of the hundreds of templates that you can download for free from Mixkit. You'll also see that Envato Elements is promoted on Mixkit. And that's because Envato is the parent company of Mixkit. So they basically take in a taster of the millions of assets that are available on Envato and put them on Mixkit. So if you're interested in trying out Envato Elements where you can access more, I put a link below where you can sign up for a seven day free trial. Thanks so much to Mixkit for sponsoring today's video. And now let's jump back into text based editing.
Second Way to Edit Text
So the second method works great if there's multiple people talking. So if you're editing in a documentary or even a mockumentary or something like that, you can use what is called the text based inserts. So this is not starting from the transcript and making cuts to one talking headshot, which is what we just did. In this case, we're going to start with an empty sequence. So what we're going to do is right click up here to create a new sequence and press OK. And now I'm going to double click on the video clip itself. So it's not actually in the sequence. This is just the source clip that has been transcribed. So from the clip transcription, which is displayed here currently in the text panel, I can make a selection.
Making an Insert
For example, this take right here, I can select this and then instead of extracting it, what I can do is click on insert or comma. This will put it inside of my sequence. So it's basically taking inserts and building your rough cuts. You can go through all your footage. You can search your transcripts for the next section and go down here and make a new selection and press comma to insert it. So this is the second way, right? It's where you can open up the individual media clips, use the transcript to select the text and then press comma to insert it in your timeline. This will help shorten the process of refining your rough edit.
Text Panel Keyboard Shortcuts
If you want to get familiar with all of the text based editing shortcuts from the support page, you can scroll down and there is an image here that has all of the shortcuts that you can start to memorize and integrate into your rough cut text based editing workflow. Here are my final thoughts on text based editing.
The Issue with Text-Based Editing
I think that it's very useful for documentary filmmaking where you can search the transcripts and start doing inserts. But there's also something called cadence and delivery with the way that people speak and deliver their sentences. For example, in the very beginning, I may have introduced myself three or four times. So text based text based editing. So we're going to take a look at the new. So we're going to take a look at the first version of this in the Premiere Pro beta. But how will the Word document know which one had the best delivery? Of course, I can see when I paused or made a mistake or said some filler words that will definitely happen. But if I smile a little bit more, or if I say something sarcastically, the Word document can't pick that up. And that's because video is different from a Word doc. So I guess what I'm trying to get at here is that you can't solely rely on the text. You also need to watch through the footage as well before you start making those cuts. So I think the text based editing will be good for removing longer pauses, bigger gaps in the timeline that you can just ripple delete together and removing those excess filler words as well. But if I do multiple takes, I'm still going to want to watch them back before I make that decision. So right now AI cannot detect which one has the best cadence because to be honest, that is subjective. Will we ever get an AI tool that can have that subjective filter? I don't know. This is 2023.
I don't know what it'll be hundreds of years from now. But right now, this is just a tool to help you get your rough cut done faster.
How to Request a Feature or Report a Bug
So if there was something you would like to see in this new text based editing, you can actually go here next to this beaker and click on provide feedback and you can report a bug or request a feature because it's currently being developed. So this is what's so cool right now about the community and Adobe Creative Cloud is you can influence how the product is going to be developed.
So thanks so much for watching today's video. Don't forget to download the beta and start testing. And as always, keep creating a better video with Gal. Bye! Bye.