Lynda - Premiere Pro 2020 Essential | Training

The actual filming was a ballet of chaos and precision. Ashlyn had a dual-monitor setup: one for her presentation, one for the teleprompter. A producer, a camera operator, and a sound engineer squeezed into the booth.

On February 15, 2020, the course went live. It was 7 hours and 12 minutes long, divided into 86 individual videos. The thumbnail was the standard Lynda.com template: a clean blue background, a screenshot of the Premiere Pro purple-and-pink gradient logo, and Ashlyn’s confident headshot.

Then, March 2020 arrived. The COVID-19 pandemic locked down the world. Suddenly, every company, church, and school needed to produce video content. Premiere Pro usage skyrocketed. The Lynda.com (now LinkedIn Learning) servers buckled under the traffic. Lynda - Premiere Pro 2020 Essential Training

By December 2020, the course had surpassed 2.5 million views. Ashlyn received a platinum plaque from LinkedIn Learning. But she didn't hang it on her wall. She kept it in a drawer next to a letter from a young filmmaker in Kenya who wrote:

The crew burst into laughter. That raw moment made it into the final cut. It became the most replayed segment of the entire course, a testament to the shared trauma of all video editors. The actual filming was a ballet of chaos and precision

The production process was not glamorous. For three weeks, Ashlyn lived in a windowless greenroom adjacent to the studio. She wrote the script not as a list of features, but as a narrative arc. "Every cut is a sentence," she muttered into her microphone during a dry run. "Every transition is a punctuation mark."

In the autumn of 2019, in a sun-drenched editing suite in Carpinteria, California, a seasoned film editor named Ashlyn Vance was staring at a timeline that looked less like a narrative and more like a plate of tangled spaghetti. She had just been contracted by LinkedIn Learning (which had acquired Lynda.com in 2015) to produce the flagship Premiere Pro 2020 Essential Training course. The stakes were high. Adobe was about to release its most significant update to Premiere Pro in years—version 14.0—with new features like the Auto Reframe, improved proxy workflows, and a redesigned audio track mixer. On February 15, 2020, the course went live

Ashlyn’s Essential Training became a lifeline. Journalists stranded at home learned to cut raw footage. Teachers learned to sync audio from terrible laptop mics. Musicians learned to splice together quarantine band covers. The "Essential Graphics" chapter, which she thought was boring, became the secret weapon for thousands of hastily-made Zoom webinar intros.