Automator Plus 1.3.6— Your Personal AI for Adobe’s Premiere Pro
Have you ever wished that you could speed up repetitive tasks within Adobe’s Premiere Pro? Ever wished you could go and get a coffee while somebody else listens through a song and adds the beat markers for you? Ever wished you could copy across an effect from one video clip to all the other clips on the timeline with one keyboard shortcut?
Well, we at the Automator Plus have thought about it! A lot!
And rather than waste our time doing these laborious, boring, repetitive tasks we’ve taken a year or so to build and release an extension for Premiere Pro that alleviates the pains mentioned above, to name a few.
In this post, we’ll touch on some of the main features that the Automator Plus 1.3.6 ships with. For a visual summary check out the promo video here, or, for a full list of automations included with the Automator Plus, head over to Envato here.
At the Automator Plus we are very enthusiastic about putting the power of automation in your hands and teaching you how to create your own automations and AI for video editing — check out our YouTube channel for more.
The motivation
When it comes to video editing, speed and efficiency is everything. Having a streamlined workflow where you can cut a few seconds off a basic action that you perform countless times during a project can save you an hour or two per project. These hours compound and at the end of a month, saving an hour or two a day can result in full days saved. What would you do with an extra day or two in your month?
Any hardcore gamer, programmer or video editor will tell you:
“You waste the most time when you have to switch between your mouse and keyboard to perform various actions.”
Adobe’s After Effects and Photoshop has been able to assign automations to shortcuts keys for ages, but Premiere Pro has always been lacking this crucial feature. Enter the Automator Plus, which has been designed to execute automations based on keyboard shortcuts that you assign.
Once installed the Automator Plus is just another panel within your Premiere Pro workspace. The panel listens to keyboard shortcuts and executes the automation you’ve assigned within the active group. Being able to group and switch between your automations allows you to reuse shortcut keys by assigning it to an automation in another group, so you can always use your favourite shortcut keys.
Although the Automator Plus can’t take raw clips and produce a finished product for you — yet. It can assist you by improving your shot scene selection, beat-detection and editing workflows and saving you hours per project.
The main features
We’ve identified a few initial tasks and workflows within Premier Pro and automated them. The most noteworthy of these automations are:
Shot Selection
One of the first steps in any video editing workflow is to select the best shots from your footage, a.k.a. shot selection.
With the Automator Plus, this process becomes a breeze as you can see in the Shot Selection GIF.
The Automator Plus comes with various automations that allow you to move the player back and forth and make cuts in your timeline. These automations aren’t super useful on their own but used in conjunction with the Shot Selectionautomation, you can cut, move and colour clips using keyboard shortcuts cultivating a slick shot selection process.
Auto Beat-Detection
Editing clips on the beat of the music provides a more immersive experience for your viewer and is common practice for most video editors. Have you ever sat through a song hitting “m” on the timeline on every beat to create markers to use later in your editing workflow?
No más! Let the Automator Plus take care of this dull endeavour for you and spend less time working out edit points, and more time focussing on creativity.
Auto Editing On Beat
Now that you’ve added your beat markers to your timeline, you need to insert each clip between your beats.
Ever wished you could generate a few random timelines and pick and choose the best cuts? Now you can!
The Automator Plus contains an algorithm to assist you with what we call Auto Edits. The automation generates a new timeline using the available clips, randomly choosing large, medium and small clips to insert at each beat marker. Having writer’s block? This automation is a great way to get some inspiration by auto-generating a few edits and letting you take it from there.
Auto Effects
How many hours have you spent adding, altering and removing keyframes to get that perfect Kenburn or shock motion effect?
Spend no more!
The Automator Plus comes with what we call auto-effect automations. Auto effects are automations that add keyframes to your clips in a certain way that yields a certain effect, like a Kenburn or shock motion effect.
Export Screenshots
Such a basic functionality that Premier Pro lacks… The Automator Plus allows you to export screenshots, in either PNG or JPEG, for the clip at the playhead, or clips you’ve marked with our screenshot marker or all the visible clips on the timeline.
Strapped for time on a project? This is a great automation to buy you some time with a client by quickly exporting a screenshot of each of the clips to let them know you’re working on it.
Sync Video Effects
Every applied some gnarly effects to a clip and wished you could easily copy it across to a selection of clips?
Your wish is the Automator Plus’ command.
With the sync video effects automation, you can copy across all the effects applied to a source clip (one of: at the selected clip, at the saved position or at the player) to a destination clip (one of: at effect markers, at the player, at a saved position or all visible).
Condense Clips
If you’ve ever done multi-cam editing within Premiere Pro you will be akin to the “video ladders” that are created for you for every clip you have on each of your cameras.
Collapsing these clips to have each track represent a sperate camera is a very tedious process and requires you to select a bunch of clips with the mouse and bring them down one track at a time. With the Automator Plus, you can hit the condense clips — muti-cam automation and let the AI do this for you
Custom Extendscript
We know each editor is unique and by extension, each editors’ workflow will be unique. To ensure that you can extend the Automator Plus to suit your workflow and it’s needed, we’ve added an automation that allows you to add your own ExtendScript (Adobe’s scripting language)
What does this mean? If you are somebody who’s been tinkering with ExtendScript and you’ve got a few scripts lying around that you use often, now you can import those into the Automator Plus and execute them right there and then in Premiere Pro. No more executing them from Adobe’s ExtendScript Toolkit or from VS Code.
Teaching you how to write your own ExtendScript to speed up your Adobe workflows is something we are very passionate about at the Automator Plus and on our YouTube channel, we’re constantly releasing tutorials to guide you on your automation journey. If you have any trouble writing ExtendScript, be sure to log an issue on our GitHub page if you’d like us to make a video about a problem you might be facing.
More information?
Be sure to check out our website, or reach out to us on YouTube or Github with any questions you might have regarding ExtendScript or the Automator Plus extension. If you like what you are seeing and want to start automating the boring you can purchase the Automator Plus on Envato here.
