Tutorial: Applying Effects and Adjustments to Multiple Clips in Adobe Premiere Pro CC

Applying Subjective Adjustments to Multiple Clips with Adjustment Layers

Those two approaches (Paste Attributes and saving a preset) work very well when you’re dealing with an objective adjustment. We know exactly where we want to put these slides. But let’s look at a bit more of a subjective adjustment.

For this part of the tutorial we’ll work with footage from a talking-head video shoot where I have two clips, and a bunch of different scenes in the timeline that I carved out of those two clips. Overall, the video is actually pretty good. The only problem is, because of the blue background and the gray shirt, the face looks a little bit cold (Figure 13, below).

Figure 13. We need to warm up the face in this clip.

For the first clip, I used the Three-Way Color Corrector to boost Saturation in the Midtones (Figure 14, below) from 100 to 157, and that gave me a little more warmth in the face that you can see when you compare Figures 13 and 14.

Figure 14. Saturation boosted in the Three-Way Color Corrector.

This is the kind of subjective adjustment that, when you render the clip to make a DVD or output an MP4 clip, you may look at it and decide you want to increase it or dial it down a bit. To make a new adjustment (say, increasing Saturation to 170 or decreasing it to 150) once and apply it to all the other clips, you could use Copy and Paste Attributes or create a preset, but if you did, you’d have to either remove the effect and re-apply it, or adjust each clip individually.

But there’s an easier way to do that. It’s called Adjustment Layers. When you create an Adjustment Layer you need to have the sequence that you’re targeting open in the timeline. Then go to the Project panel to the left of the timeline and then choose File > New > Adjustment Layer, and the Adjustment Layer dialog opens (Figure 15, below). The Adjustment Layer, as you can see in Figure 15, is customized for the resolution of the open sequence. That’s why it’s important to open the sequence first.

Figure 15. The Adjustment Layer dialog.

Figure 16 (below) shows the new Adjustment Layer. I take it and place it over all the clips in the timeline that I want to adjust. In this example we’ll copy and paste the adjustment we made to the first clip onto the Adjustment Layer. Now what I’ve done is I’ve pasted the effect onto the Adjustment Layer, and all the clips beneath the Adjustment Layer have that effect. Move to any clip on the timeline and toggle the effect on and off in the Adjustment Layer, and you’ll see that the effect has been applied to that clip.

Figure 16. The new Adjustment Layer in the timeline.

So, there you have it. Repetitive tasks are part of editing, but they don’t have to be tedious in Adobe Premiere Pro CC if you use one of the multiple techniques described in this tutorial.

To read more about these and other techniques in Adobe Premiere Pro CC, check out my Adobe Premiere Pro CC Visual QuickStart Guide.