Adding Video to Your Design Toolkit

You’re a designer. You work in tools like Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. But Premiere? Well, that might feel like an entirely different world. Maybe you opened it before, saw all those panels, and thought, I’m not a video editor, why do I need to learn this? But you don’t need to master Premiere. If you give it a chance, Premiere can become a useful part of your design toolkit. So where should you start? Which parts of Premiere are worth learning? And how can you use it without feeling like you need to master the entire application? That’s what Mike Rankin is talking about today with designer and educator and CreativePro contributor, Myra Ferguson. Hey, design friends. Welcome to the CreativePro podcast. CreativePro helps designers like you stay current and make your work easier. I’m Theresa Jackson. I’m happy you’re here today. If you’re new, subscribe so you don’t miss an episode. As a podcast listener, you can save $15 on one year of CreativePro membership with the discount code PODCAST. The same code saves you $100 on any CreativePro event, including our two upcoming online events. First is the Design + Accessibility Summit, October 20th through the 23rd. And after that is the InDesign Conference on December 1st through the 4th. Our guests today, Mike Rankin and Myra Ferguson, will both be speaking at the InDesign Conference. But for now, let’s find out what Premiere looks like when you approach it as a designer. Whether it’s completely new to you, or you’ve opened it before and then quickly closed it again, this conversation is a great place to start. Here’s Mike and Myra. Hi, Myra. Welcome to the podcast. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. Hey, it’s great to see you. And I’m so excited to talk with you today about all the stuff that we’ve been doing, all the content that you’ve been creating for CreativePro on Premiere. You have been quite a busy person on this stuff, have you not? Yes, it’s been a lot of content, but it’s been good. It’s been good. So I want to just backtrack a little bit and just talk about how I got to know you and some of the other stuff that you’re doing, because it’s pertinent. It leads to why I asked you to do all this stuff. So you’re so multi-talented. I know that you know all. Is there any Adobe app that you don’t actually know? Is that just a rumor? There’s some I don’t use as much. There’s a handful, but yeah. Yeah. But your favorites would be… Yeah. Well, desktop for sure. Any of the ones that are on tablet and phone, they’re kind of secondary, but some of the main ones, and I’ve been using them for a long time. And actually, when anything comes out new, I’m interested to see what it does. You’re curious still. I’m very curious. It’s like the next shiny thing. It’s like, I want to play with it. And what does it do? And how can I incorporate it into my stuff? Hands-on experience, like using and teaching these things in the context of your lecturer at university. Yes. At CU Boulder, yeah. In Boulder, Colorado. You’ve been part of the Adobe professionals for a very long time, making content for them. First time I think that I got to work a lot with you was in the context for LinkedIn when we worked on the body of knowledge and some of the other assessment tools, making exams to go along with the courses that LinkedIn did. And at that time, I was so impressed by the questions you were asking and the content that you were making for them. I was like, oh, we need to work together. We need to do some stuff. But your multi-talentedness, if that’s the word, is really pertinent here because I know you know InDesign. I know you know Photoshop and all these other things. But I also know a lot of other folks who know those apps. I don’t know a lot of other folks who know the video and animation tools as well as you do. So in a way, I feel like you’re like a walking argument for learning Premiere, right? Right. Yes. You got this gig and I asked you to do all these videos and all these articles because you have this relatively unique skillset that you can apply and use. So I think it’s a great fit. How has that experience been, making all this stuff for CreativePro? Have you enjoyed the process? I do enjoy it. And I think what I like most about it is when I’ve seen videos in the past that other people have done for Premiere or video or in general, they’ll sometimes relate it to other video applications. So, you know, when you use this, it’s like that’s not going to be the frame of reference for CreativePro users. It’s going to be these other apps that are familiar to them. Photoshop, InDesign, you know, they’re going to understand it from that perspective. And so if I can relate it to something that is familiar to them, I think they’re going to be able to incorporate it in their workflow a little easier. Yeah, you absolutely do that. I noticed in your videos, like you’ll point out, oh, this panel is like the links panel in InDesign, just to give people that little breadcrumb, that little security blanket, I guess. Right. Yeah. Build on what they know. Yeah. Perfect. Yeah. You’re an experienced lecturer. We can tell. So along with your history, I wanted, in getting ready for this podcast, I had to poke around a little Wikipedia and some other places to learn a little of Premiere’s backstory that I did not know. So tell me if you knew this. Premiere did not start out as an Adobe product. It started way back in 1991, was made by a different developer. So it’s almost 35 years old, the Mac version of Premiere. Yeah. Did you know it went back that far? So I didn’t use Premiere in those days, but in the in the 90s, I did use After Effects, which was a separate, it was actually owned by a different company, and it was Cosa After Effects. And so then Adobe purchased, like acquired it and incorporated it. So I was using maybe more of that than Premiere at that time. But yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that was a super fun little trivia bit. It actually turned out it was the same company, their name escapes me right now, but they’re the ones who made the Mac clones back in the 90s. Oh yeah. Like the pre, before Steve Jobs came back and sort of rescued. It was I can’t recall, but they did it and then Adobe bought it. And then I think actually there’s, there’s sort of a reset. I think in the early 2000s, they, they kind of remade everything fresh and that became Premiere Pro, which it was pro for many years. Right. And now it’s not pro anymore. It’s right. So since January of this year, they dropped the pro. So that was sort of to make it like in line with some of their other products and make it also sort of the ecosystem. So there’s a mobile version of Premiere that you can use. It used to be, there was a mobile version that was a totally separate product that was Rush. And then that has that’s been discontinued. Actually the final like support is like in October. And so that’s just completely gone, but this replaces it. You can, if you still had, if you did rush stuff, you can still open up a project in Premiere and then work on it, but that product’s no longer available, but you can still do stuff between the phone and, and the desktop. So, you know, it makes it a really nice workflow too. Cool. Excellent. Excellent. I do want to spend a second talking about like who this stuff is all for. You sort of alluded to it when you were saying like you reference drop references to Photoshop panels and InDesign UI stuff. The conception of this is, you know, our creator pro audience is mostly graphic designers who have a long history in print or web interactive documents, that kind of stuff, but maybe not a lot of experience doing video and animation and might be a little bit intimidated by that. Like, because as we know, when you first fire up that interface, you download the app and open it up, it can be a little overwhelming, right? Yeah. There’s a lot. There are a lot of panels, but the idea I think isn’t so much that creative pro users need to become video editors. That’s, that’s not really where I think they should use it. I think it becomes another tool that they can use with what they’re doing. So my love is actually interactive. I love putting things together from different places, making it so that a user can interact with the content and in ways that make it enjoyable and memorable. And I think creative pro users can do that too. So especially through a tool like InDesign where InDesign doesn’t have to just be a print tool. It can be a place where you can make interactive content and then you can bring things in from Premiere or other apps and make it so that you can have the user interact with that content in various ways. It doesn’t even have to be just video. It can be something that they click on and, and see, you know, different parts of it, or you can make it part of the layout. So just be creative with it. It’s just like, it’s just another tool. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I love that point that you don’t have to, you know, plan to ditch your day job and go to Hollywood and become a video editor to get something out of this content. Like designers are being asked to do all sorts of things now, you know, produce video for social media and, and other type of projects. So it can, it can fit in well with the rest of the stuff that you’re doing. And some of the videos specifically are, are about that. I think maybe my favorite one that you’ve done, that’s a YouTube video that’s free for anyone to watch is how to, how to make Photoshop and, and Premiere play together, how to animate a Photoshop layers. Yeah. Animating layers. It’s, it’s just really easy, you know, and that was one of the things I wanted to show in the video is how do you quickly get from the layers that you have in Photoshop to something that looks amazing without having to spend a lot of time on it and learn a ton of stuff. Yeah. I have a theory that that is going to be the most popular of your, of your videos. It’s right up there in terms of like the most, most views and likes and stuff like that. So I think when people, as soon as people see it and the example is so cool too, that that’s, that’s really going to catch on. But I also want to dig into a little bit more about why Premiere can seem so scary because I’ll admit too, like when, when I first downloaded and installed it and it just, you know, takes over your screen. Yeah. That you can be a little bit like, okay, here we go. Kind of thing. I also have a theory. You can tell me if you think that this is, this is wacky, but I think when you first install it, the interface is set to like super dark or like the darkest dark and it’s literally scary. It’s so dark that I’m like, I want to actually dial that up a little bit and make it just a little bit brighter. I know that maybe not the best practice for editing video, but yeah. And I also just work off my laptop most of the time, which is a pretty small screen, which can make the UI like so small that it’s really hard to kind of like, wait, did I click on the wrong thing there? What is that? Yeah. So I wanted to ask you, like, do you have like, what kind of monitor do you use or what size? So I actually have two machines. I have a Mac that’s a Mac book pro, um, and, um, attached to it. I have a 32 inch monitor and then on my windows machine, I have a windows 11 machine. Um, and I have two 27 inch monitors. I want a lot of real estate. So yeah, when I, when I have my students in class, um, some of them, they’re not as familiar with their operating system. And so when they’re trying to drag and drop files, they have their application frame, like, um, not maximized. So they’re just only like using part of their, their screen on their laptop, which is tiny and dragging and dropping. So they want to have access to their desktop. And so one of the first things I show them is maximizing their application frame and using command tab on Mac iOS or alt tab on windows to navigate between the different, uh, applications that are open. And that’s like, yeah, it’s, it opens up more real estate for them. I’m like, give yourself as much space as you can have, you know, it’s very limited on a, on a little, uh, laptop. That’s yeah. That’s a great tip. And I also appreciate like in watching your videos, how you’ll just keep peppering in the keyboard shortcuts. Um, I used to, like when I was first learning InDesign and Photoshop and stuff, I would actually like have sticky notes, like arranged around my monitor to try to learn the keyboard shortcuts because it really changes the experience. Right. Um, it just becomes this muscle memory. Uh, exactly. Yes. So you’re just always on your keyboard. Well, and I think that’s probably why I prefer desktop to working on like tablet or phones for, for various things. Um, just because I think I’ve gotten so used to keyboard shortcuts and, and I want my screen real estate that, um, the desktop experience pretty much trumps the others for me. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the other thing, as I was thinking about this stuff, like bit of advice I would give someone that that’s just getting started or thinking about, um, checking out all this content is to give it time, like everything feels so, so rushed, you know, like, Oh, you got to learn everything yesterday. You didn’t learn Photoshop in a week or illustrator in a week. It’s going to be a process, right. Of trial and error. And, and, you know, we still need patience in 2026. Yeah. Well, the nice thing is Adobe has really done a lot of work on premiere to make it more approachable. So it used to be, I thought the interface before it used to be a lot more difficult to navigate. And now they’ve done things like the different modes, um, that kind of step you through the idea of the process. Even if you don’t use it, you can do everything from the edit mode, but if you aren’t familiar with it, you’re like, Oh yeah, I’m going to import everything. Then I’m going to edit it. Then I’m going to export it. And here’s where all those things are within these separate modes. But if you don’t like moving between them, you still can do it and edit. Yeah. Yeah. So, so overall I, cause I took the count, we we’ve published, um, more than 20 pieces of content by you on premiere this year. Wow. Just in, just in 2026. So, um, handful of articles in creative pro magazine that are available to members, a members only video. That’s about, I want to say 23 minutes long and probably I would think the best place to start. Would you agree if somebody is just getting started? I would have them as someone who wants to start, have them start with the video and the article because, um, even though they’re both getting started with premiere, they actually have some different content in it. So they compliment each other. Um, yeah. And so, uh, um, yeah, that’d be a good way to kind of see what the, the navigation is like and what the workflow is. Um, the video steps, the user through really the whole process, start to finish, um, with video and some music in there with some features they can use to, to make, you know, some changes pretty easily. Yeah. And people will learn differently. Some people learn better, but by reading and at that pace and other people, and especially for a thing like video, it, it, it helps to actually see things moving around on, on screen. And actually the members only video is the one that we’ve received the most positive feedback. The most number of comments there, there, um, comments and emails from people who are, as you would expect, uh, longtime graphic designers who have just tried premiere in the past and gotten so far and just sort of muddled through or gave up. And the, the content that you made gave them the inspiration to just push through and keep going. So, so yeah, that’s a, that’s a big win. Um, I have to tell you, one of my other favorite things was an article that you did in the magazine called the premiere. It’s not just for video. Um, do you want to talk about that a little Yeah. So that was really from the perspective of like how I use, uh, premiere. So, um, I’m thinking of it as a separate tool that, um, I can use for different things to create either image sequences that I can use an interactive content or for layout purposes to make it look like a film reel. Um, so it could be just static content, um, or, um, something else like animated gifts. So, um, something, if you want to add it to, um, you know, um, something like for publish online through InDesign, um, or making, you know, videos that you could embed in something else, you know, it doesn’t have to be a long form video for, like you said, like for Hollywood, it doesn’t have to be, um, it doesn’t have to be that it doesn’t have to be, um, so huge that, you know, it’s just not attainable little projects, little things that you can think of like, Oh, I can add this little part in here just to elevate this content a little bit. Yeah. I love that. I love that idea of just very specific projects. You can, you can dip in, get, get your feet wet in it. Um, in that particular article, one thing, and I really wish I had, I had had enough time to do this. You talked about, actually grabbing the frames from a video and making a physical flip book. Yeah. Which I just thought that was such a fun thing. I was, I wanted to like surprise you and actually have of course I couldn’t get my act together and do that, but I’m going to do that someday. They’re fun. I mean, especially if you’re in the print world, you have the opportunity to, to include a flip book as part of what you’re doing. So if you put, uh, a frame on each page of like, you know, just the margin of your, your content, then somebody could flip through that and have a totally different experience than if they’re just, you know, looking at the static page. Not that that’s bad. It’s just, it’s just one more thing. The more that you can get people to interact with your content, the more it’s going to stick with them. It might bring, you know, some sort of joy that, you know, it’s, it’s that’s when it’s not passive, um, consumption, it’s, uh, it’s something that, um, I think sticks with people a little bit more. Oh, a hundred percent. And who doesn’t need more joy in their, in their projects and their work. So, um, that was great. And another one that I thought was a really practical thing for, for our audience was you had talked about, um, picking a frame out of, out of a video to use as a still image in a project. I think that’s something a lot of people will find a use for. Yeah. I mean, it’s, it’s a feature on phones where it, when, when you take a picture, there’s the motion capture, it takes a few frames before and a few frames after, and then you get to pick which one. So why not use that for the content that you actually have? If you’re covering something that you’ve already recorded as video, just look through it and find the best frame. Yep. Yep. And if people want to, want to find the entire list, just head to the, you know, well, you’re already there probably if you’re watching this podcast, but, um, on the creative pro YouTube channel, there’s, there’s a playlist for, for video content. And so if people just check that out, they’ll see all of the videos that, that you’ve made, um, on premiere for us so far. Um, so that, that makes it easy. Uh, let me see what other, I had some other questions. I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget to ask you about, Oh, let’s talk about the article. So there’s an article that’s coming out in the October issue of creative pro magazine. You want to talk about that one? So the captions. Yeah. So captions are great because, um, there’s different ways you can use them. So, um, captions, you can have closed captions, um, which are like a file that is, um, part of your video that you can hide if you don’t want to see it. There’s open captions. Uh, open captions are like a permanent part. Like they’re, they’re burned into the pixel. So you can control what it looks like. So think about social media. If you, you know, want to make sure that you’re positioning your content, your, your text, the, the caption, um, in a way that doesn’t cover up certain content, um, and you want it to look a certain way, you can make it an open caption or if you need to localize content. So say you’re doing social media and it’s going to maybe different countries and you know, um, you want to have, um, uh, localization so you can, you can make it so that, um, you can change the, the, the language. Um, and, uh, so there’s just different types of things that you can do with it. Um, you can also, um, take a video, get the transcript from it. So, um, Premiere will, um, actually capture the text for you and then you can convert that into your, your captions. But when you’re using that transcript, you can use that to actually do text based editing, which, um, for a lot of people who aren’t familiar with, um, editing, maybe they, they don’t want to like go through the process of, you know, trying to find all the places that they need to make the cuts. They can do it a lot quicker by just looking at what the transcript is, searching for where they want to take parts out. They can take out like filler words. Um, it’s, it’s another way to edit that makes it a lot simpler and approachable for people. Yeah, I’m sure we’ll, we’ll dive into that, dig into that more in, in, in future, um, content. And I just, I did also want to mention, you’ve done stuff also on like troubleshooting. So when, uh, media goes missing and, and other glitches that, that I think is really important too. Yeah. It’s not as, um, you know, cool looking, but it’s one of those things that when you come across a warning message that’s in this, there’s two different ones. There’s like a yellow one and a red one. When you see these warnings and you’re like, where did my content go? Um, you, you kind of want to figure this out. Um, and it’s one of those things that can, um, like my students, uh, react when they’re like, my content is gone. Um, and sometimes it’s not gone. It could just be floating. Um, you know, as long as they haven’t deleted it, um, you know, it, it may just be that the link is broken, but knowing where, um, they can find it or what they can do to avoid these sort of issues, um, can really, you know, I think help and then, you know, calm some nerves and make you feel a little more, you know, like I’m confident I know what I’m doing. Yeah. Yeah. And you know, stuff goes wrong in every app that we use. It’s not anything unique to, to video stuff. Miss we have missing links and in design files and all that kind of stuff. And it’s the kind of thing that you just have to have to deal with. Um, I also wanted to ask you, of course, like with all the Adobe apps, they’re looking to integrate more AI into premiere, right? Right. With, with some new features. Have you had a chance to play with any of that stuff or do you have any thoughts on how useful or not any of it might be? Yeah. I think the most useful part, um, is the generative extend. So what that does is, um, if you have a clip and it ends maybe a little too abruptly, you wish you had just a little bit more, maybe if you’re trying to make a transition, um, because you need a few frames from the end of a clip to, to transition to the next one, generally, um, uh, you can extend it up to two seconds. So that can kind of help. Like if you’re, if it’s got a camera move or something, um, where like, if you, if you do a transition between something and you don’t have enough frames, it’ll just repeat that last frame and that can make it look like not quite right. So that generative extend is really helpful. And what it’s doing is it’s not really, um, creating so much new content. It’s really building off of what you’ve already got there, which is, I think maybe my preferred way to use generative AI. So, I mean, sometimes it’s fun to create a whole new thing, but sometimes it introduces some weird stuff. Um, and so I think building off of what you already have is probably the, you know, a really good way to go, but then sometimes you do need something like, um, you know, that’s totally created. Maybe you’re doing, you know, some kind of monster sort of something and you don’t actually have footage of whatever that is generating it is, is great too. So there is a new tool for generating media, um, and within Premiere. And then, um, I mean, you could of course always go to Firefly and create something, um, have access to all the different models. Um, they all do a little something different. Um, you know, I’ve gotten some fun results and by fun, I mean, not usable, but they were laughable. Um, but, uh, um, you know, it’s always getting better. And so, um, I think, I think that’s, it’s, it’s fun to play with and look forward to what you can make with it. Absolutely. And we’ll, we’ll always stay curious and keep poking at these things and seeing what we can, what we can do with them. I especially love the, the, the practical stuff that you’re talking about. If the clip is just not quite filling the space that you need, like that’s a, that’s a great win, easy win, um, to be able to extend it like that. So, well, one thing’s for sure. We will not run out of topics to cover on, on, uh, video and animation. So I intend to keep you busy for a very long time. Are you, are you in, are you in, I’m in, I’m in actually, there’s some new stuff that’s coming out. It’s in the public beta. So, so I can talk about it. Um, so there are two new things, um, that people might want to check out. Um, one is there’s a brand new color mode. So the modes I was talking about earlier, import, edit and export, they’ve added color. So it makes color doing color for your video so much easier. Um, and, um, you, when you make your adjustments, you can just kind of move your mouse to, um, you know, up and down or left and right, um, and make these changes. Um, and when you do it, you, it’s creating like a preset for you that then you can apply to other clips. So people who are familiar with Lightroom will have sort of this, it’s a similar type of concept where you can now take those, um, those color changes that you make and apply them to your other clips pretty quickly. Wow. That sounds pretty amazing. So that’s one, the other one. Okay. This is my favorite of the new stuff. Um, okay. So, you know, in the video that you, you like the, um, the Photoshop layers, animated Photoshop layers with premiere. Okay. So those used, um, the effects that I was using, um, where the film impact effects. And one of the cool things about the film impact effects is there’s that dashboard and the dashboard gives you a preview of what those effects do. Well, they’ve taken that preview and they’ve now incorporated it into the effects panel. So non film impact effects can also be previewed. So that’s so good. You can see what’s going to do. You can kind of have, um, an idea of like, Oh yeah, that’s what this effect does, especially for new users for premiere who aren’t familiar with what, what these effects are going to look like. Now they’ve got this hover preview that’s hover or hover script and it’s going to, yeah, I think it’s going to make it a lot easier for them to envision what they can do. I love it. I love it. Making it more just user-friendly and more, you know, exciting and maybe even inspiring to create, um, great stuff. So Myra, anything else we should talk about or do you think we covered? Yeah, I think, um, yeah, I think that’s a good note to fun stuff to look forward to. Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for coming on and talking about this content and thank you for the content. It’s, um, it’s a category that I’ve wanted to fill out for many years for CreativePro and now we’re, we’re doing it, we’re doing it right. And it’s, it’s thanks to you. So thank you very much. Thanks. Thanks so much.