This tutorial teaches you how to add a clip to the start or beginning of a timeline in Premiere Pro. You’re going to be using an Insert Edit to edit your clip (video, audio, image, etc.) into your sequence. Here’s how:
Using an Insert Edit to Add Clip to Timeline in Premiere Pro
Premiere Pro has a number of different types of edit tools to add clips into your sequence, whether that’s at the start of your timeline or anywhere in between. We will be using an Insert Edit to add a clip to the start of our Premiere Pro timeline in this tutorial.
There are a variety of ways to do this. I’m going to show you three methods.
Preparing Clip and Timeline
First, let’s go over to our Timeline panel. Make sure your playhead is at the start timeline. You can do this easily by tapping the Home key on your keyboard.
Now find the clip that you want to add to the beginning of your timeline and load it into the Source Monitor by double-clicking it in the Project panel or dragging and dropping it into the Source Monitor. Set your in and out points using the “i” and “o” keys.
Circle back to the timeline and insure that your tracks are patched correctly. Watch this quick video if you don’t understand that last sentence.
Doing the Actual Insert Edit in PPro
And now you are prepared to do your Insert Edit which will move everything down the timeline and put your clip at the start of it. Like I mentioned, there’s a few ways to do this.
In the Source Monitor you can click the Insert Edit icon.
Are you need to video editing? If so, get some of my free video editing guides!
You can also use the keyboard shortcut — the comma (,) key.
Lastly, if you hold down the Command (Cmd) key if you’re on a Mac or Control (Ctrl) key if you’re on a Windows computer, you can click and drag the clip over from the Project panel to the Timeline panel. You’ll see these little sideways triangles which I think look like those old school cartoon teeth. Then let go of your mouse and your clip has been added to the your sequence.
If you’ve now gone through this tutorial and you still need help, please leave a comment and I’ll do what I can to help troubleshoot it. But if you can add a clip to the start of a timeline in Premiere Pro, I hope you stick around and check out some of the other Premiere Pro tutorials on my website or consider signing up to get notified about new blog posts and happenings around EVF.
– Josh
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