Premiere 6 - how to add black between clips in a sequence automatically

Question

We have regular fulfilment jobs for clients which require us to insert a few seconds of black between each clip in a contiguous file. It's not a great deal of effort to do it once or twice but when the jobs are larger, consisting of 50+ short clips, it seems like some time could be saved if there were a way to get the sequence to automatically and consistently add the black clip every time a footage clip was added.

Can anyone think of a clever way to do this? Would handles help here?

Very grateful for any thoughts!

Thanks.

Answer 1

A workflow involving Adobe Bridge is as follows. If you have Premiere Pro, you probably installed Bridge, if not, please do install.

• Put your batch of clips in a folder. I would use a directory structure like Client Name > Jobs > YYYY_MM_DD > Footage etc.
• Find your footage in Bridge.
• Select all your footage, then under Tools menu select Batch Rename (Shift + Command (Control) + R

• In your Batch Rename settings, change destination folder to something like Renamed, next to your footage folder (to keep everything organised). Under New Filenames just select Sequence Number, add 1 and select Three or Four digits. This will rename your files 0001.mov, 0002.mov etc.

• From Premiere, render a black video with a length you wish or a black frame with the same resolution and pixel aspect ratio with your footage. You will need to duplicate the black footage as much as you need. Rename them with Bridge, this time add a letter a to the end of filename, and rename in the same folder.

• Back in Premiere, import all the footage in your footage folder, including blacks. In your bin panel, sort them by name, they should be sorted in the following order: 0001.mov, 0001a.mov(or png), 0002.mov, 0002a.mov. Select them all and drag to your timeline. They should be placed as you wish, a video clip followed by a black clip.

If you are using still images as blacks, adjust their default length in Premiere's Preferences > General > Still Image Default Duration option.

If the videos are always in the same specs, you can re-use those blacks, by duplicating and renaming again.

Still not the shortest way, but kind of better??