Course description

Adobe Premiere (called Premiere Pro until 2026) is a professional video editor used in workplaces and colleges. This course teaches you to use it properly, from your first import to a finished, captioned film exported to a brief: organising footage, editing and trimming on the timeline, shaping an interview into a story, cleaning and mixing sound, correcting colour, adding titles and captions, making vertical versions for social media and exporting files people can actually use.

It's a full, hands-on course, not a quick tour. There are 10 sections and 50 written lessons, each with a worked example, common questions and a short task to do in Premiere. You follow Akilah, the communications officer at a small canal charity in Stoke-on-Trent, and Faolan, a college student on placement, as they make a two and a half minute volunteer recruitment film and three vertical versions, including the slips they made and how they put them right. Every section has a practice pack with a worksheet, key points and files to practise on: drawn practice clips and generated sound, a footage log, a paper edit, an edit decision list, trim drills, a transcript, a caption file with planted mistakes, cards, checklists and planners, all made for the course.

Premiere changes several times a year, so the course describes what each tool does before its label, says plainly what was true at the time of writing, and shows you how to find anything that has moved.

What you'll learn

• Getting started: what Premiere is now (Adobe renamed Premiere Pro as Adobe Premiere in 2026), how people get access, installing it safely, the workspace and a first edit in twenty minutes.
• Projects and media: a folder for every project, importing, bins and labels, proxies for smooth playback, saving, Auto Save and relinking offline media.
• Sequences and editing: sequence settings, the Source Monitor, insert and overwrite, three-point editing, the timeline, keyboard playback and building an assembly from a paper edit.
• Timeline tools: every tool and its key, ripple, rolling, slip and slide edits, precise trimming in Trim mode, speed changes, slow motion and freeze frames.
• Shaping the story: rough cut to fine cut, J and L cuts, cutaways, editing from a transcript with Text-Based Editing, and two-camera interviews with multicam.
• Sound: reading the meters, setting levels, the Essential Sound panel, cleaning up speech, and music that ducks under speech, with a loudness check.
• Colour: the Lumetri scopes in plain words, white balance and exposure, matching phone and camera shots, adjustment layers and a colour checklist.
• Titles, captions and effects: titles and lower thirds, Motion Graphics templates, captions from Speech to Text checked line by line, effects and transitions used with care, and keyframes.
• Vertical video and export: 9:16 versions with Auto Reframe and safe zones, Export mode, H.264 and masters, Media Encoder, caption files and delivering to a brief.
• Collaboration and your final project: sharing projects, archiving with the Project Manager, a whole film from start to finish, and a short film and vertical version of your own.

Who it's for

Beginners who use Premiere at work or college and want to edit with confidence: communications and marketing staff, charity and small business teams, apprentices and students. You don't need any editing experience, just a computer that can run Premiere and access to it through a Creative Cloud plan or your workplace or college. The course is about using Premiere; for story, filming and editing theory, Video Editing for Beginners goes further. It gives general information, not legal advice. Rootlet isn't connected to Adobe. The people and organisations in the course are fictional.

What will I learn?

• Install Premiere safely, find your way round its workspace and make a first edit from import to export
• Set up a tidy project folder, import and organise media in bins, make proxies and relink offline media
• Build sequences with the right settings and edit with insert, overwrite and three-point editing
• Trim with the ripple, rolling, slip and slide tools, change clip speed and make smooth slow motion
• Shape an interview into a story with J and L cuts, cutaways, transcripts and a two-camera multicam edit
• Set clear speech levels, clean up noisy dialogue and duck music under speech with a loudness check
• Read the Lumetri scopes, correct and match shots, and apply one consistent look across a film
• Add readable titles and lower thirds, accurate captions, sensible transitions and simple keyframed movement
• Make vertical versions for social media and export the right files with Export mode and Media Encoder
• Share and archive projects safely, and plan, edit and deliver a short film of your own to a brief

Frequently asked questions