In this lesson from David Bode’s free Adobe Premiere Pro Tutorial you will how to make a shorter clip from one longer one. This is called creating subclips.
How to Create a Subclip in Premiere Pro
Sometimes you have a really long clip from which you want to extract several small clips. To do so, you could mark in and out points and add the clips to your sequence but there is a better way to create smaller clips that’ll speed up your workflow and that is to create a subclip.
There are two ways to create subclips and they both have their pros and cons.
Option 1
1. Go to the beginning of the clip you want to make into a sub-clip and set an in point. Next go to the area you want the clip to end and set and out point.
2. Hold down Control and drag the clip down into your Project Panel. That’s going to bring up a Make Subclip window.
3. Rename your subclip however you care to. For good practice, you could leave the main part of the clip’s name the same and change the end to something that makes sense to you.
4. Uncheck the box for Restrict Trims To Subclip Boundaries and then click OK. The clip will be listed in the Project Panel with a different icon that the other clips. You can now drag this clip into your sequence.The benefit of creating a subclip this way is that you can still expand the clip if you want to or need to.
Option 2
1. As you did in the first step above, set your in and out points.
2. Go to the Menu > Clip > Make Subclip. Alternately you can can use the keyboard shortcut Control-U.
3. This will bring up the Make Subclip window. Rename your subclip as you did before in Option 1. And this time check the box Restrict Trims to Subclip Boundaries, then click OK. The clip will be listed in the Project Panel with a different icon that the other clips. You can now drag this subclip into your sequence.The pro or con—depending on how you look at it—of creating a subclip this way is that you can no longer extend the length of the subclip in the timeline if you want to or need to.
Main Advantage to Creating Subclips
If you need to reuse your subclips throughout your project, they will be saved in your Project Panel where you can search for them and reuse them, as opposed to going back to your footage and trimming out little parts that you want to use each time.
As you can imagine, if you have a much, much longer clip, say several minutes or even an hour, it would be much more convenient to make several sub-clips from that, instead of scrubbing through the entire thing every time you wanted to find a little element, or a little bit of action that you wanted to use for your sequence.
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