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Introduction and Definitions

Hi. One of things that I want to concentrate on is how to get started because one things that intimidates a lot of people is is the whole concept of here's the application, but how do I get it to work? So my goal today is to go through the following steps I want to show you I want to define some key terms, so you understand the language that I'm using? I want to show you how to configure your system for video because configuring for video is different that configuring for still images I want to talk about where you store media, I want to talk about work flow that works to save time and increase the professional output that you create. And then at the end of this first segment all introduced the software. Now you'll notice that I haven't actually jumped out of the computer to start working with the software because that's a mistake just the same way as you go on a photo shoot, you don't grab a camera, dash out the door and say, I'm going to shoot anything that moves because what you end...

up with us making snapshots, not making pictures, you want to share with somebody else, so we're going to spend a little time pride about an hour this morning planning. I get about three hundred e mails a day from people all around the world and the two issues they have the most problems with are getting their system organized because they generally have a disorganized and suddenly stuff stops working or media management where do I store media howto I organize media and these two elements between system, organization and media management caused more confusion and cause more projects to break than anything else so we're going to concentrate a lot on exactly that issue let's see where am I so as I said, these are what I'm going to be doing in this first session and let's define a few terms we're going to talk about work flow codex media projects sequences and scratched discs these air terms that we use a lot throughout today ah workflow is real simple it's a process that allows you to get stuff done this is different from just doing something because like with a hobby when you're working with a hobby, you don't really care if you finish or not you're in love with process finishing his nice it's like editing home movies, mohr home movies start being edited and very few home movies finish being edited of workflow enables you to start continue and finish a project if your goal in life is simply to play with video, then you don't need toe have any kind of training and even need to have a workflow but if your goal is to get paid for your work, the only way that you're going to get paid for your work is to finish then we're going to spell it with a time with a white board and low tech illegible handwriting to talk about how workflow could be applied to your system media are the audio clips the video clips, the video clips that include audio and the still images that you use to combine into telling a story with pictures there's four elements to media but the most important element it's what's called a co deck and codex scare a lot of people ah co deck is a mathematical equation that translates the light that are I see in the sound that our ears here into numbers that could be stored on a computer and it translates the numbers that are stored onto a computer into images that we see codex include things like tv on abc h d j peg asarco decked if is a co deck a f and wave our audio codex all of these are our mathematics the computer uses to be able to store stuff that our brain perceives naturally and log light an analog sound into something that is reducible to numbers and this conversion process using a kodak has a dramatic impact on the quality of what you have to work with some codex like j peg throw information away other codex liked if our high resolution some codex, like a f and wave, are extremely high quality but very large, whereas mp three or mp four files are tiny but tend to throw audio quality away. Same thing with video formats like progreso, our abc enter our high resolution formats, but formats like abc hd or h dot to sixty four throw a lot of data away to make files small enough to yield a download on the web. You're going to find that codex turn around and bite you all time if you don't understand what they are the same way that trying to understand the difference we have tiffin, p and g and j peg makes a difference in the quality of your imaging that you're creating well when we have media media is stored in a project a project as a giant container it's like a psd file, it contains all of the media and contains all the instructions on how that media gets modified. But unlike a psd and a huge difference that you need to understand is that in a project media is referenced, it's never included. If I take a psd file, I don't care if I've got one way or seventy five hundred players, every single element than ever single layer is contained inside that psd filed, but not true in a premier project in a premier project we have what's called a link a pointer that points from the project file over to where that file is stored on your hard disk media is never included in a project file it's just linked which means that if you move a project file you need to be aware of where the project file is in relationship to its media or they become disconnected for this reason you want to organize your media first then bring it into premiere inside a project in addition to the media files we also have what are called sequences a sequence is a serious of instructions on how stuff gets edited we can have an unlimited number of sequences inside a project but we can only have one project open at a time and the last term which also confuses a lot of people's called a scratch disk a scratch disk is a location where premier stores technical files, waveform data render files thumbnail views all that sort of stuff scratch disk is important because premier creates lots and lots of technical files that it uses during the process of editing which though invisible to you are still essential to the process of editing and we set the scratched discs when we create a project and I'll show you how that works in just a couple minutes the next big issue that we have to deal with is configuring the system photo shop is easy compared to video video is the hardest possible thing we can do with with a computer a personal computer ah workstation computers video requires flawlessly operating operating system flawless hard disk storage that is unbelievably huge unbelievably fast we need tons of ram we need tons of graphics card every single element on your system from the speakers you use of the headsets you use to storage and everything in between has got to be working perfectly for video toe work. Video is really, really taxing your computer system you can't get away with some low end computer you need at least eighty gigabytes of ram even for simple projects adobe recommend sixteen gigabytes of ram we can work with a single hard disk but you're never going to be successful with it. You always want to have a second hard disk for reasons I'll explain in a minute and you want to you need to have stories that's not only deep that is to say it holds a lot, but you also have to have stores it's very fast because the speed of data transfer called the transfer rate or the bend with between the hard disk and the and the computer determines whether that you're going to play video successfully, especially as you get into higher resolution formats or into multi camera editing let's see what else? Oh we have to have a hard disk, a second hard disk ah hard disk, which is not the boot disk to your computer, and the reason we have to have a hard disk is because video files are so big, for instance, here the reason that we want tohave a second hard disk is that the boot disk is too busy meeting the needs of the operating system and meeting the needs of the application while we can store media to a second drive. Sorry, while we can store media to our boot disk, you're never going to be successful with because the number one priority of the boot disk is to be able to serve the needs of the operating system. Second priority the boot discuss to serve the needs of all active applications. The third priority of the boot disk is to be able to serve the needs of all background applications, and the fourth use of the boot disk with a priority down near dirt is being able to play media megabyte after megabytes second after second, minute after minute without dropping a single frame, and we have twenty four, twenty five, fifty, sixty frames a second. This is putting way too much of a burden on your boot disk, and yes, we can put an ssd drive in, but that doesn't change the priorities with which the ssdi dr works so the key rule that you need to understand about media is that you must store your media to a second location and that second location could be an internal drive if you have like a windows system or an old mac pro or an external drive and the bigger your video formats the fashion that dr needs to be sometimes a single hard drive is is just not enough for instance here let's take a look at the second key rule number two key rule number two says that we want to consider the format of the video that we're working with for instance to store one hour of media off kodiak called abc hd takes eleven gigabytes to store devi which is a standard of format takes thirteen gigabytes extra cam hd takes twenty eight gigabytes progress for twenty two takes sixty six gigabytes and there are high resolution formats which could take over five hundred gigabytes to store in our now when do we have to deal with hundreds of gigabytes in a photo shop environment the answer is never but video I can shoot a terabyte of media in a day and totally philip a hard drive you're going to discover we found I see this all the time people obsess about the computer they want to use should I get on my mac wish I get a mac pro shouldn't have sixteen gigs of ram or should have thirty two gigs of ram what should I put on it? Have the computers your relevant whether you're editing hd footage or esti footage or to care for kate any computer shipping today any normal macintosh with the possible exception the mac mini and any windows machine that's got any kind of specs to it connected even the highest resolution footage the computer is not significant. What is significant is the storage and the speed of your storage and these huge data files are transmitting data at three megabytes a second six megabytes a second eighteen megabytes a second thirty eight megabytes a second sixty five megabytes a second issues that we've never had to deal with in a still environment a single hard disk is perfectly fine for photo shop it rarely rarely this fine when you're working I was talking with jim before the day started I said jim, how am I supposed to cram three days of training into a single day? And I realized that we need to focus on the basics we need to focus on the kind of system you want any current macintosh most current windows machines eight to sixteen gigabytes of ram a second hard drive if you're editing lower resolution footage is like h dot to sixty for abc camera abc hdtvs are all codex ah raid which is a large collection of hard drives that are very fast and store a lot of media if you're doing multi my town work editing multiple cameras at the same time or working with very high resolution footage is like pro rez or abc entra or red raw footage is raw footage, but the key is to always have your media stored to a second drive. Do you ever move files? Just individual project files to your your your boot hard drive and work there? Or are you always working from that secondary drive? Almost always working from the second drive? Okay, there's an argument to be made that if you've got a boot drive that's an ssd drive, a necessary drive is plenty fast enough to support media playback, which is a true statement. However, sst drives are still desperately expensive and sst drives don't hold as much as a second drive does. If I've got, say, a shoot, I did a twenty I did a thirteen part series of a podcast, each podcast round ten minutes, and I shot two terabytes of data. I can't put the two terabytes of data on an sst drive when most sst drives one hundred twenty eight gig or two hundred fifty six gig the on a macintosh system and, by the way, premier runs on both windows and macintosh is and the keyboard shortcuts and the operation the software is identical. Between the two windows and mac will be doubling on a mac today but everything that I show you that runs on a mac works the same on windows with the exception of changing to keyboard shortcuts to control in the command kia reversed between windows and back but they work exactly the same the the the operating system and all applications is less than fifty gigabytes to store which means we have about one hundred gigabytes of free space operating systems like lots and lots of free space because they're always writing temporary files so in point of fact on one hundred twenty eight gig sst dry if you've only got maybe fifty gigabytes free which is about forty five minutes of media on most formats it's just not enough to work with so while you can do very short things short commercials can easily be done with an ss do you drive your still far better off getting a second hard dry right and the other thing I don't know you know this because you are a technical wizard but a single hard drive goes to one hundred megabytes of second hundred megabytes a second if I have two hard drives in a raid I could go two hundred megabytes a second if I have four hard drives in a raid I could go up to four hundred megabytes of seconds so the more hard drives that you combined into a single unit the faster they go. The reason this is important is that there's a lot of video formats that air requiring between twenty and fifty megabytes a second for playback. And if you get too many of those playing at the same time, you are requiring doubt of faster than a single hard drive that support this. Why everything keeps coming back to storage it's, not the computer. I could add it to k video on your mac book air perfectly, with no problem. But I can't do it with the sst dr. I'd have to plug in some other high speed storage that allows me to get access to the media that I need in a format fast enough to be able to support real time playback.