Tutorial: How to Improve Your Editing Efficiency With Premiere Pro’s Rate Stretch Tool

Welcome to this quick tutorial on using the Rate Stretch tool in Adobe Premiere Pro CC 2015. For those of you who have watched my other tutorials, you know that I'm all about finding simple solutions to improve your projects in video editing workflow. This tutorial will demonstrate how to use the Rate Stretch tool, which has drastically increased my editing efficiency.

Extending Clip Length With the Rate Stretch Tool

Here's how the tool works. I've got some footage loaded into a Premiere Pro project and placed on my timeline (Figure 1, below). On Layer 1 I've got an interview with audio, and on Layer 2 I have some supporting B-roll footage.

Figure 1. Our sample project. Click the image to see it at full size.

Now I can guarantee you that we've all been in a situation where the B-roll footage we had wasn't quite long enough to cover our interview or jump cut. As you can see in Figure 2 (below), the tail end of the original B-roll footage is just short of being usable to hide this camera shake.

Figure 2. We need a few more frames of B-roll to cover up this camera shake.

We’ll fix this with the Rate Stretch tool. You can find the tool by navigating over to the Tool panel and choosing it (Figure 3, below).

Figure 3. Choosing the Rate Stretch tool

Essentially the tool works just like it sounds. It allows for you to stretch the timing of your footage over a period. Of course you can do this by right-clicking and adjusting the timing under duration, but the Rate Stretch tool does the guesswork for you by simply clicking and dragging in the timeline. Dragging out will slow down your footage over time. You can zoom in on your clip and see that this action slowed down the speed of your video at a percentage (Figure 4, below).

Figure 4. Thanks to the Rate Stretch tool, this clip, which was at 58.62% before, is now at 53.12%.