Quick Tip! Get Audio or Video Only in a Premiere Pro Timeline

Save time in post, by learning how to bring just the audio or video elements from a group of clips into the Premiere Pro timeline.

Video editors sometimes need to take just the audio or just the video to the timeline from a selection of shots. Targeting Premiere Pro tracks and working from your project panel can make this a quick and painless process.

Just the video dropped to my timeline from the project panel

So, let’s say your video has arrived and it is a series of establishing shots that have the director talking over them. You may want to use the video but not the audio. Or, maybe you need some ambiance under a shot to make it sound like it was taken in the same environment as all the other shots in your production.

What you don’t want to do is double up your workload by having to go back to your Premiere Pro timeline and deleting the parts of the clips you don’t want!  That said, if it is only one clip then just importing the clip and selecting the bit to delete while holding the Alt key on a PC or the Option key on a Mac is probably quickest – but if you want to use multiple clips here’s what to do…

Start by hover scrubbing in the project panel and selecting an in point and an out point on each of the clips (check out our earlier post for more info on using hover scrubbing in Premiere Pro CS6). In the timeline, go to the header and deselect the header for the part you don’t want to import – video or audio. To deselect it, simply click on it until it is no longer highlighted.

The video header is selected & the audio header is unselected

Then go back to the Premiere Pro project panel (shift + 1) and use your arrow keys to navigate to the clips you want to put on your timeline.  Do either an insert edit (,) or an overwrite edit (.).  Only the part of the clip that matches the selected header will come into the timeline.

You can get clips from the source monitor to a Premiere Pro timeline with a slightly different workflow, but it isn’t the fastest way to get lots of clips moved quickly. To do this most quickly, use the workflow above and see how it will make your Premiere Pro video editing more efficient!