5 Common Premiere Pro Mistakes

These are 5 common mistakes you might be making in Adobe Premiere Pro and how to fix them Watch the video below or keep reading to learn more.

Whether you're new to working in premiere or you've been at it for a while chances are you will come across one of these mistakes at some point or another. You're not necessarily doing anything wrong, just imagine you're doing the same thing you've always done and all of a sudden it doesn't work the way you think it should.

These mistakes might be caused by accidentally clicking a button or changing a setting without realizing it, and it can really cause a headache if it's not performing the way you think it should. 

These mistakes are easy to fix and they're great to know ahead of time before you ever come across them because then you'll be able to fix them so easily and quickly and get back to editing.

Track targeting

The first mistake you might run into is if your video and audio tracks are not targeted, which you can think of as selected. You can see here on the left that we have V1, V2, V3, A1, A2, A3, and some of them are blue some of them are not. 

If i scroll over it you can see a little text pops up that says toggle the track targeting for this track and over here on the left it's source patching for inserts and overwrites. 

I’m working on a video for a soup recipe and have my source footage in the source monitor. I do not have either of the video tracks selected in the timeline, and I have selected an in and an out for this clip that i want to add from the source monitor.

Normally i would just press the period key (.) to drop it in. If I press that key now it won’t do anything. If I highlight the far left square on V1 and press period it still will not come in. 

I need to highlight the right side toggle to get it to overwrite. If I wanted it to overwrite on V2 I would simply highlight that one and when I press period it will come in on V2.

If you are using the up and down arrows to navigate between cuts in the timeline it will only work on targeted tracks. If you don’t target the tracks, the up and down arrow will just jump to the beginning or end of your sequence.

This is also useful if you are trying to match a frame in the source monitor and you have clips stacked on top of each other. I have no clips selected but I do have V1 targeted, so if I were to come to where I have two clips stacked on top of each other and press F it is going to search for this V1 targeted track. 

If I were to target V2 as well, now it will find V2. If I were to click on a specific clip in the timeline and press F then it would find whichever frame was from the highlighted clip.

Muted or hidden tracks

Another mistake you might come across is muted or hidden audio or video tracks. If you're wondering why your video won't show or your audio isn't playing make sure you haven't hidden or muted the track.

You can find that on the video layer it has a little eye toggle, and if you are hiding it it gets a slash through it. In the audio track, the M mutes the track and you would not hear it. 

If you are not seeing or hearing what you would expect to, just check to make sure this little eye or the M are not toggled. 

Media offline

If you were to open up your project and suddenly realize your media is offline and you are not expecting that, it's possible that you moved your files somewhere on your computer. Your project is going to look for your clips wherever they were when you imported them, so if they get moved they can't link. 

You can do this manually by moving them back to where they originally were or right click or control click on an individual clip and choose link media. From here you just need to find the correct file.

If you were doing this right when opening the project and you linked one, it should link the rest as long as they are all in the same place. 

Choppy playback in the timeline

Another problem you might run into is if your playback in your program monitor is looking really choppy and it's hard to tell what exactly you've accomplished in your timeline. This happened to me when I had an older computer. 

Usually if there is a red line at the top of your timeline it means you have added some effects or transitions or something that's just making the computer work a little harder to process that. If your computer is short on memory your footage may not play smoothly in the timeline, especially after applying those effects or transitions. 

To fix that you can choose to render either a selection by highlighting clips in your timeline and choosing Sequence —> Render Selection, or set an in and out point and choose Render In to Out. You could also render just the audio or render effects in and out, whatever you need to do to watch back your footage and make sure it looks okay. Ghost frames

Ghost frames

The final mistake I want to cover today is if you apply a transition and it looks a little choppy but you can't figure out why you may have ghost frames. These are a few frames of another clip that may be visible only during a transition. For example if I cut my clip close to the start of another clip then add a dissolve, I may not have enough frames of the clip I am using to accommodate that transition.

To fix ghost frames we can either trim our clip itself or try adjusting the length of the transition so that we don't get that ghost frame in there. 

I have made every one of these common Premiere Pro mistakes at some point or another. It's bound to happen and the fix is really so easy for each and every one of them that I hope this is helpful to you and saves you some time in the future. 

As always, let me know if you have any questions, and feel free to join our Facebook group if you’re interested in having a conversation or connecting with other food bloggers creating recipe videos.