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.
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. Lynda - Premiere Pro 2020 Essential Training
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. Ashlyn’s Essential Training became a lifeline
Take 14 was the infamous "Crash." Midway through explaining the difference between Render In to Out and Preview Render , Ashlyn’s brand-new 2020 iMac Pro froze. The spinning beach ball of death spun for thirty agonizing seconds. The producer shouted, "Cut!" But Ashlyn held up a finger. She didn't stop. She looked at the camera, smiled wearily, and said, "And that, students, is the first real lesson of Premiere Pro 2020. Save early. Save often. And always turn on Auto-Save." Musicians learned to splice together quarantine band covers
That was the real story of Lynda - Premiere Pro 2020 Essential Training . It wasn't about the Auto Reframe feature or the new audio ducking algorithms. It was about a woman in California who organized chaos into chapters, and millions of strangers who turned those chapters into their own beginnings. The software updated to 2021, then 2022, then 2023. But for that one strange, locked-down year, Ashlyn’s blue-and-white course was the quiet engine of a billion stories.
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.
"I have no formal school. I have a cracked phone and a borrowed laptop. But I watched your lesson 47 (Multi-camera editing) forty times. Today, I edited a wedding for money. I bought rice for my family. Thank you for being my teacher."