Repurpose videos into audio & text content with Premiere Pro

If you’re a video creator who uses the latest version of Adobe Premiere Pro, you can do a great deal more than just create videos. In fact. Premiere Pro can help you fast-track a variety of content from a single video.

You can use Premiere Pro to export the audio in your videos to become a podcast or audiobook. But you can go further and use Premiere Pro to automatically transcribe the audio. Once you have a transcript of your video you can repurpose it into a related blog post, eBook, and even a printed book.

Why you should repurpose your video content

The main reason for repurposing your video content is that it will your audience and therefore your earning potential. Although you might have a growing audience on YouTube, there are plenty of people who either don’t watch on YouTube or can’t consume video content at certain times of the day.

Although the pandemic made working from home a thing, many people have gone back to the office. That means a daily commute for many, time that is increasingly being filled with listening to podcasts and audiobooks. Clearly, if you can convert your video into audio, your content can be consumed even when the audience cannot watch.

The popularity of text for conveying thoughts and ideas has a long history. Today we think of books, magazines, newspapers, and websites as ways of using text to communicate. But before any of those became commonplace, leaflets would be printed and passed from person to person. You could argue that ancient graffiti was a form of content creation. Graffiti had the power to convey ideas in one or two sentences. Therefore, transcribing video content, and repurposing it into a written form, has the potential to widen your audience.

But you don’t need to transform video into audio or text to repurpose it. If you make videos primarily for YouTube, repurposing might mean changing the format to make full use of screen space when uploading to vertical video platforms like TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook.

What content can you repurpose in Premiere Pro

In terms of repurposing content, video offers the maximum potential for creating new content with little extra effort. Video can easily be repurposed into other videos, audio, and text content.

Audio comes next in terms of repurposing potential. It can be easily repurposed into other audio and text content.

Finally, we have text. It can only be repurposed into other text formats, which obviously cannot be done in Premiere Pro.

Although this article is about repurposing your content from video to audio or text, with minimal effort. You could use Premiere Pro to go in the reverse direction, although it will involve extra time and effort.

For instance, if you have an audio podcast, you could relatively easily add graphics, stock photos, and video to create a good video. With a little more effort, you could take a blog post or article and record it as a video, and then repurpose the audio as a podcast or audiobook.

So whether you create YouTube videos, podcasts, or blog posts, you have the potential to create a lot more content from the original content. And as you already know, more content means a larger potential audience, and therefore, more revenue.

Repurposing Video

So video is the preferred type of content to start with. This is especially true if you don’t use a written script. Many YouTubers just have a running order of sub-topics to keep them right. It might be a written list, or they might have just worked it out in their heads.

Although some YouTubers just look you in the eye throughout their monologue, it is common to use b-roll footage and/or images and graphics to help illustrate the points they are making. So, when you repurpose your video, you potentially have four or five elements you can export.

• Audio
• Transcript
• Images/stills
• Animated gifs
• Video clips

You can instantly see from this list that video is a media-rich format, and if you’re working with your original projects, it’s relatively easy to pick those media elements apart. Without much effort, you’ll have almost all you need to create an audio podcast or blog post.

If your original video was long-form, or you have two or three videos on the same topic, you probably have enough content to create an audiobook, eBook, or printed book.

Later in this article, I’ll go into detail about exporting all those media elements from an Adobe Premiere Pro video project. If you don’t have the original project, you can still do a lot by importing a finished video into a Premiere Pro sequence.

Repurposing Audio

You might wonder why I’m mentioning audio when using Premiere Pro. The thing is, you can use Premiere Pro to work with audio, even if your project does not include any video.

I can remember in the mid-1990s reading about a couple of guys who used Adobe Premiere to record and edit a weekly radio show for their church. In 2003 Adobe Premiere was replaced by Adobe Premiere Pro, but Adobe’s main video editor has always been good for working with audio.

Now, I’m not recommending Premiere Pro as your primary audio editor, but what I think you’ll find useful is the auto-transcription feature in the app. Even if your original project is a radio interview, podcast, recording of a seminar, or audiobook, you can import the audio file into Adobe Premiere Pro, just like any other media asset. You can then let Premiere Pro transcribe the dialogue, something it does well.

The transcription can be exported and edited in any word processor. What you repurpose the text into is up to you, but it could just be a blog post, an eBook, or a printed book.

Exporting your media elements

You can now appreciate that your video project can be the source of many media elements for other related content. I’ll explain how to export each one from within Premiere Pro. Since it is obviously a visual app, it seems logical to start with the visual elements you can reuse, namely, video clips, animated GIFS, and images. I’ll then move on to exporting audio and transcribing the dialogue.

Exporting and Repurposing video clips

Why would you want to repurpose your video as another video? One example is that you want to create a YouTube short. These are up to 60sec long and typically in the vertical video format. So how do you repurpose your video as a YouTube short?

Another reason for exporting a video clip from your original video sequence might be to create a video background for a website. In this case, you’ll need to check any size requirements and ensure the audio is not exported by turning it off on the export screen.

Exporting Animated GIFS in Adobe Premiere Pro

An animated GIF can be useful, not only to illustrate a process in a blog post but also to apparently include video in your marketing emails.

Normally, videos cannot be embedded in emails, it’s just the way the technology works. However, you can include images in emails, and GIFs are images, even the animated kind.

To create and export an animated GIF from your original video create a new sequence, at this stage do not worry about making it an animated GIF sequence or changing the frame rate. For the time being keep all the sequence settings the same as your original video sequence.

For instance, create a new sequence with the keyboard shortcut of Ctrl + N, and choose the Digital SLR 1080p preset. Now click OK to create your new video sequence. Copy and paste the part of the original video you want to repurpose into the new video sequence. Make any necessary cuts and, if necessary, add text annotations (remember, animated GIFs do not contain sound). I recommend keeping the duration of the animated GIF to less than 10-15sec.

When you are ready, go to the Export screen. Give the new video a name and choose the location where you wish the file to be saved. Choose the Format to be an Animated GIF. Then open the Video section to make some changes to the Basic Video Settings.

Uncheck Frame Size and click the down arrow of the Frame Size bar. In the drop-down menu click on Custom. This will let you change the Width and Horizontal frame sizes. Unless you are happy with large file sizes, reduce the frame size. One-quarter of the original HD size (480 x 270px) seems to work well, but you can change the frame size to whatever you require.

Next uncheck the Frame Rate box, and from the drop-down menu choose the frame rate of your animated GIF. It can be as low as 1fps, but 5 or 10fps normally results in smooth enough motion, while keeping the overall file size to a minimum.

If you wish to reduce the file size further, you can open the animated GIF in Photoshop and reexport it after changing the settings, however, the visual quality will suffer.

In this example, I’ve exported a 480 x 270px animated GIF that runs at 10fps. It’s 10sec long and is from my YouTube video How to connect a Blue Yeti USB Mic to a Samsung Android Phone. You can see how it can help a reader of my blog more easily understand what I am writing about.

Exporting Images from your Video Content

You can export stills from your video sequence in a variety of formats from the Export screen in Adobe Premiere Pro. These include BMP, DPX, GIF, JPEG, OpenEXR, PNG, Targa, and TIF. However, if you do this from the Export screen you will get an image sequence, or each frame of the video in your sequence work area saved as separate images. Sometimes this can be useful, but it’s not what you want if you want a single still from the video to help illustrate what you are saying in a blog post.

Exporting Audio from your Video in Premiere Pro

In principle, exporting audio from your Premiere Pro video sequence is easy. But before you start, consider whether the audio would work on its own and be completely understood by a listener. If you have used a visual element to make or clarify a point, you might need to record and insert a short voiceover to make the same point.

If the audio will work without the need for any additional audio, go ahead and export the soundtrack as is.

However, if you need to add a few sections of voiceover, consider exporting just the dialogue from your video. Having the audio without background music and sound effects will make editing your new audio much easier to do and not have it sound poorly edited. Once you have edited the dialogue and voiceover together, add the music and sound effects back in for a seamless mix.

So how do you export the dialogue from your video?

Exporting the Transcript of your Video in Premiere Pro

I assume you have already created a transcript or captions for your video. If you haven’t, I recommend that you read my article,  How to Transcribe Audio in Adobe Premiere Pro, before proceeding.

If you are in the Captions and Graphics workspace, click on the Text tab to open the Text panel. Otherwise, click in Window in the man menu bar and then click Text in the menu. This will open the Text panel as a floating panel.

Choosing Which File Format to Use When Exporting the Video Transcript

The two file formats that you will find useful when repurposing your video content are Text file or CSV file.

Each file type has its advantages, depending on what you want to do next.

If you export to a text file, then open the file in Word, the text will be split into paragraph sections, each equivalent to about 30-40sec of speech. Each section starts with a timecode stamp, then who is speaking is shown, and finally, we have the paragraph of text.

Here is a typical section from one of my videos.  

If you export to a CSV file, you’re exporting to a spreadsheet file that is organized a little differently to the text file we’ve just talked about. The data is separated by commas, hence the name, comma-separated values, or CSV file.

The data on each line of the CSV is separated by commas and then each line is separated by multiple commas. In the case of Premiere Pro’s transcript CSV files, the data format is as follows:

The group of three commas effectively represents a blank line or new line for the data.

Here is the same section of the transcript that I previously showed, but copied from a CSV file opened with a text editor. I have made each data field a different color for clarity, looks like this:

So, which of these two file types should you choose to export? Basically, it is up to you because of what you need to do next with the transcript. But here’s a clue. If you export a text (.txt) file, when you open it in Word, you will have to go through the transcript deleting the timestamp and speaker info that is saved just before each paragraph. That can be a time-consuming process. However, if the video included multiple speakers, knowing who is speaking will probably be useful as you edit the transcript.

But I’m guessing that if you are a typical content creator, only you will be speaking in the video. If that’s the case, export the transcript to a CSV file, especially if your video is about ten minutes or longer.

Initially, this might seem an odd thing to do, after all, no one writes or edits articles or posts in Microsoft Excel (or Google Sheets). However, Excel handles blocks of data in a better way than MS Word. In Excel, you can manipulate all the data in one column (or row). That is useful because the Speaker, Start, End, and Transcript data are all in separate columns. So, we can copy just the text of the transcript without any of the timecode or speaker information.

So, here’s how to speed up the editing of your transcript.   

Open the CSV file in Excel. Now only highlight and copy the column that contains the transcript. Then paste the transcript as plain text (not formatted text) into a blank Word document.

In just a few seconds you have avoided the tedious task of going through the transcript and deleting the unnecessary information that you would have had to do if you had exported the transcript to a text file.

Summary

As you can see, Adobe Premiere Pro isn’t just a video creation tool, it can also be used to help you repurpose your existing video and audio content. If you start with your existing video projects, you can quickly export audio and text that can be crafted into fresh content for a wider audience. That’s important, since not everyone can watch a video, but they might be in a position where they can listen or read. If you’re not offering your content in more than one form, you are potentially leaving money on the table, since each type of content can be monetized.