Lessons

Lesson Info

Building a Rough Cut: Selecting Media

So the first thing we're gonna do is we're gonna launch Premiere. And I have it down in the dock, and hopefully you've already installed Premiere, we're not gonna go into how to install it. You've got the Creative Cloud you've installed Premiere and now we're just gonna launch it and we're gonna import some media and we're gonna start a rough cut. So I'm gonna actually quit this and start it again so you can see this opening. So when you first launch Premiere you're gonna get a startup screen. It's something you can turn off, so if you suddenly do not see your startup screen you might have accidentally said don't show this to me anymore. But this is the basic screen that we see and if we look at that a little more closely, what it will show you, it will show you any recent projects you've been working on. So I was actually, there was a, we tested the software, then I kinda did a rough cut of the interview, says when it was open, so this will show you the most recent files that, if you ...

wanna get to it. If you wanna just start with a fresh new project which is what we're gonna do, it's there, if you wanna open a project that maybe came from another computer or that is so long ago that it's no longer in the list, you can get it there, very, very useful. If you've gotten to the cloud, you can actually sync a lot of your stuff to the cloud, I'll talk about that in a little more detail in a later course, but basically you can save elements to the cloud, and if you're on another computer, you can access those elements, everything from your preferences, to even your media, now. Okay, so that's your startup screen that's what you're gonna work with. We're gonna go ahead and we're gonna create a brand new project. And when you create a brand new project, you're gonna get this dialogue box, and again, you don't need to know a lot about all these little choices. Initially all you really need to do is make sure you give it a good name, so we're gonna call this Creative Live, Rough. Some people, like, when they create a show, they sometimes like to put the date in it so if they, like every day they might save a version of it, so this would be like Creative Live Rough and I could put today's date in, but for now, Creative Live Rough, and then you have to say where you want to save it, and this is what people forget to do sometimes, like okay, I've named it, I'm gonna hit OK. So, it will remember the last place you saved something, but if it doesn't, you wanna have some sort of an organizational structure, maybe you want it all to be in your movie folder so you can find it or your documents folder, maybe you make a dedicated folder for just projects. So I'm gonna put this in my movies folder, I'm gonna simply make a new folder, now as I said, works on both Mac and PC, the steps may be a little bit different for the interface, the way it would look, once you're inside the application, everything is the same, okay? And where there are, I say never say never, everything's the same, except for like, a dozen things which I'll point out. But for the most part, the interface is the same, most of the keyboard shortcuts are the same. We're gonna call this projects, then I'm gonna go create, we're gonna choose that folder, and so now we know where we're saving it, and then we have all these crazy things that we need to look at, and the truth is, you really don't have to worry about that. Depending on your machine, you will have three choices here, okay? And it may vary over time, if new video cards come out there might be something different, but there's software-only, and then you'll see Mercury Playback GPU Acceleration OPENCL, you may also see something that says CUDA, C, U, D, A, okay? This is based upon the language that the computer talk to the video card. Guess what, you don't need to know that language. What you need to know is if you see these, software means it's just using CPU in the computer, the processor of the computer, but if you see one of these choices, it's gonna leverage the power of these video cards, which are more powerful, to do a lot of the calculations, which means when you start layering stuff on top of each other, it'll just play back smoothly. Okay, so generally you wanna choose one of these, and you'd be good to go. If for some reason, you're getting glitches, maybe you don't have the latest software installed, you can always go back to software-only. This is something you can change later, but don't be freaked out by this, okay? That's all that is is saying Mercury Playback Engine, which sounds pretty, pretty exciting, huh? Mercury Play, complex. You know what Mercury Playback Engine is? Marketing, okay, the guys at Adobe said hey, we're gonna leverage the power of your computer, how much RAM you have, how fast it is, and your video card to get the best performance possible for Premiere and that's the Mercury Playback Engine. It's everything you already have. So no sweat on that, it's not something you have to install, it's not something you have to download, it's just the name of that. So, that's really, now all this stuff, timecode, and audio samples, leave this as at the default. It really won't matter to you. Even capture, this is for the old days when we had DV video, and you would plug that camera in nobody's using that anymore. If you happen to come across a DV camera from 20 years ago, and you can hook it into your computer still, I would just recommending doing a web search on that, but don't worry about this, don't overcomplicate things, okay. We're gonna talk about some more of the Ingest stuff later, just as a point of note, Scratch Desk, that's where everything is stored by default, it likes to store it all together in one folder, and that way if you need to migrate it or move it, it's all together, and that's really nice. In some situations, you may not want it all together, this is like if you're a broadcast network and everybody's sharing the same footage of the sports event, and everybody needs access to it, you might store it somewhere else. For most people, working by yourself, this is a great environment. Okay, so really all we did was, we gave it a name, we told it where to put it, we did not change anything else, okay, it will default to usually the fastest playback anyway for your Mercury Playback Engine, and then we hit OK, and this will pop us into the interface. Now I'm gonna zoom out, and we've seen this before, we saw this both on day one and day two, but I wanna step you through this, I wanna re-familiarize you with this interface. I'm gonna do a general one and then we're gonna populate it with this footage and you can actually see it in more detail. So there's four basic windows that you're working with. Okay, does this look a little bit complex to you? Have no idea what's going on? Well, guess what, you will have an idea what's going on. In the lower left-hand corner is something called the project pane, okay? And this is where, and if you look closely, and it says import media to start. So this is where you're going to bring in all the elements that we talked about earlier, okay? All the footage, all the music, all the sound effects, all the photos, all the graphics, you organize them in this location, okay? And we'll be ingesting this media. Now, here's the trick, video files are huge. So, how many folks here work in Photoshop? Even a little, pretty much, you know, if you're at Creative Live, you've probably heard the word Photoshop, (chuckles) so when you're working with photos, a lot of times, you bring in an image, it's embedded in the project file. Okay, it's part of, and you move that over, and you still have all the materials. For some of the more advanced Photoshop people, there is an option to use it as a, an image as a reference so you don't technically bring it in. Most of the time, we bring it in as an embedded piece of information. Video doesn't work like that. Video is huge. 10 minutes of video could be a gigabyte. And if you start working with all this video, you'd get this huge project file that you couldn't even work with, so what it really does is that you have a project file, which is what we just created, okay, and you have this folder of all your media, which technically can be everywhere, all over your computer. Don't do that, keep organized, but this is where you have the gigabytes and gigabytes of stuff and then you have the project file, and think of it this way. You're building a house. The project file is the floor plan for your house. If you have this floor plan, the blueprint, and you have the media, you can build this house anywhere. And that's how you have to think about it, so this is the building materials, the video files are like your lumber, and then your audio files are like your roofing, and your, you know, your waterworks, guess that's called plumbing, and together, you can create the show. This is the most valuable thing your blueprint, your project file. Without that, you have no idea what you're going to build. This is what you need to back up. This is not gonna get that big, you know, it's maybe gonna get, it'll be less than a gigabyte, it might even be less than 100 megabytes, okay? So that's what we're doing, we're working with stuff in here, but it's just pointing to media, aliases, shortcuts, references, whatever you want to call them, but this is where you're gonna start finding and looking at your stuff and organizing your stuff in the lower left-hand corner. You have a source clip window, and that's where you're gonna actually make decisions and look at it in a big picture, okay, and we're gonna bring this in really quickly so you can see it, you have a timeline, this is a graphical view of your show from beginning to end. Left to right is beginning to end, top and bottom is all your layers, okay, so if you stack something like B-roll, that cutaway stuff, you'll put it on top of somebody's interview, and it's like you're looking down from a large building, it's like oh, I see the cutaway, I don't see their face, because that's covering, just like in Photoshop, it's a layer. You look down from the top, okay. And then this program is what the viewer sees. Okay, let's bring some stuff in and actually look at this interface and start cutting in this sense. So, what's your knee-jerk reaction of when you wanna import something, what are you gonna do? You're going to probably go, not a trick question, I will not ask any trick questions. You're gonna do something that rhymes with wart. You're going to, import. Import. Right, that's your gut reaction, right, Command + I, Control + I, you're gonna import something, it says right here, import to start. Guess what, they're tricking you. Import works, it's ugly, and I wanna show you how this works. So first of all, if I click import media or Command + I, I get my dialogue box, I have to find what I'm looking for, I left everything on my desktop, and it's this list thing here, and I can't always see what I'm working with, or hear what I'm working with. You know, this is very kludgy. And as a matter of fact, some camera formats aren't even recognized by import dialogue box. So yes, you can do it, but there's two other ways that are probably better and easier, if you've already organized stuff. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and shrink this down just a little bit. I can drag and drop, if I have something in a folder, I can go ahead and I can grab it, and let me just grab something that is not very critical. I'm gonna go ahead and grab the music. I could just drag it there, and it now has made a shortcut or an alias, and it's kept it inside the folder so my organizational, or my hierarchical structure is preserved. So I could organize everything and just drag it all in. Sometimes that's great. Other times you have so much stuff, you wanna actually be able to look and choose what you wanna bring in. And that's where the real trick comes into play, and that's to use something called the Media Browser. So, if we look closely here, there's something called the Media Browser, and this is like a search box. It's similar to Bridge, if you've ever used Bridge, but it's really designed for video, so if I go to Media Browser, I can again look for what I want, I have my local drives, I should be able to have a shortcut to my home folder. There we go, I just used that drop-down to go to my Home Directory. And what I'm gonna do here is I'm gonna zoom out so you can see the whole screen and I'm gonna teach you one of my favorite shortcuts. There's a couple keyboard shortcuts that I will recommend that you remember, and this one is the Tilda key or the grave key, okay, in the upper left-hand corner of your computer, you guys see that squiggly line, or the French accent grave. It's a great little tool, because whatever window you're hovering over in Premiere, and if I hit that key, it brings it full-frame, so it takes that small panel and makes it big. So this is great, 'cause I can see things better. And hopefully you can see things better. I have a little slider down here, if I wanna see these bigger. So now I can start digging for what I want, I wanna dig for what's on my desktop. So my desktop, (mumbles) and on my desktop, there we go, there's all my interview stuff, if I click into this folder, I'm seeing all my folders, once I get inside a folder, okay, once I get inside a folder just say, my interview. I now can see all of my interview pieces. And I can choose what I wanna bring in. Now, what's really nice about using the Media Browser is I can scrub through this really easily, so if it's footage that I don't know what's on it, so let me step back just one step, and I'll go to the actual B-roll that I was gonna bring in of the video, I'm gonna go ahead, I'm gonna go to the bottom, I can make this bigger, there's keyboard shortcuts for all of these to make things bigger and smaller if you're a keyboard shortcut person. So I can just hover my mouse over this and I can see very quickly what's on that clip and this says oh, do I wanna bring that in or do I not wanna bring that in? So it's a very quick way, instead of bringing in all this junk, you can be very selective. Now, you'll bring in the entire clip that you shot from the moment you turned on the camera to the moment you turned off the camera. That's just the way these work. There are ways to bring in just a little slice, but usually you bring the whole thing in, and then you sub-clip it or you pick out elements from the big clip. But it allows you to see what you want. Another great thing is if I'm working with photographs, so once again, I'll step back and I'll look at the photographic images, So now, instead of like remembering the name, or let's say, you're shooting an event, a wedding or a conference, and they give you a thumb drive with 100 photos and say, oh yeah, find the one of the CEO or the bride, you know, doing this, and instead of having to open each one and figuring out which one it is to import it, I can see right here all my photographs, okay? So this is a beautiful thing. So let's look at how I would bring this in. I'm gonna want to keep the organizational structure. I'm stepping back here, to a higher level, I can either use these buttons here, or I can just go up to a higher level, and if I want to bring any of these in, I can simply select what I want, we don't want projects, let's go ahead and bring in, we brought in the B-roll already by dragging it, I wanna bring in my interviews. Click import, and this will bring in the whole folder. If I wanted to, if I wanted to just bring in an element, I can click on any one of these images. Okay, and I want to point something out. If I don't click on it, you see there's no blue line here? You see there is a blue line here, okay? So if I clicked on it, if I move my mouse left and right, it doesn't scrub. It's only if it's not selected. If it is selected, you get the blue bar, then I can play it by scrubbing through with the blue bar or hitting the Space key. The Space is your play bar. Plays and stops okay? So, it's just I don't want you to get frustrated that oh, why is it not working in some cases, and why is it working in other, if it's selected. Okay, so that's just one thing to keep in mind. Let's say I really wanna look at this much larger, but I'm not sure if I wanna import it yet. We saw that we could import by dragging or right-clicking, Control-clicking if you don't have a right-click mouse. There's also something called Open in Source Monitor, and this is great. What this does is it brings it into our interface, okay? It brings it into Premiere and you can look at it and hear it, and you have a lot more control, but it doesn't bring it into your project area, yet, because maybe you don't want to use it. Maybe you just wanna look at it. And that's really nice, and if you choose to use it, you can then bring it in, or you can automatically bring it in. So if I want to look at this, and if I wanted to look at this big, does anybody remember that keyboard shortcut? Tilda. Tilda, right, so I just hover my mouse over it, hit the Tilda key, now full-frame. And I can look at that. So, it allows me to view my footage. So far so good? Or does it feel like a fire hose is hitting you? Good, good. For those people at home, they said the fire hose is not hitting them. Hopefully it's not hitting the folks at home, either. So, let's talk about making sure everything's brought in, I'm gonna go ahead and I'm gonna hit the Tilda key again, brings it back to the regular interface, gonna go down here, try to remember what I organized, so this is the Media Browser, and this is another point of confusion for some folks when they first start using it. They might be in the Media Browser and they see all their folders or they see all their media, but they have to switch back, or you have to switch back to your project to see what you've actually Ingested, so that's, Media Browser is where you go and you get stuff, it looks very similar. Project is stuff that you have brought in to work with, that you've already collected. You can always go back to the Media Browser and bring it in, but that's where a lot of folks get confused. So let's go back to the Media Browser, I'm gonna simply go here and select the clips that I want, I can actually do it in the sidebar, we brought the B-roll in, gonna bring in the interview, his photos, and I can hold down, it doesn't let me do that there, so, I'm going to go this way, zoom back out, and grab the ones that I want. So we're gonna do, we don't need the graphics for this yet, interview clips, I'll select that, his photos, the music that I grabbed, and projects is where we're storing our projects, and what's down here, not sure what that is 'cause I don't remember and I can't see, it's probably sound effects, gonna right-click, I'm gonna say import. And then I'm gonna jump back over to my project window and we should see this populate. Now, I did something wrong here, and this is a good thing. Every time I make a mistake, it's an opportunity for you to learn something. And I make mistakes all the time (students chuckle). So you guys are gonna be brilliant. Okay, so what I did is, when I imported it, I had this folder selected, and guess what, it put it inside that folder. So we're gonna look a little bit about cleaning things up and organizing things and once you have them in, and a little bit of navigation here. Understanding organization is gonna make your life a whole lot easier when you finally start to edit. So, I can look, and I'm gonna make this small so you can again see where it is, it's this bottom window, I'm just hitting the Tilda so it's full-screen. I can look at this in an icon view or in a list view, and to toggle that, I can use these little buttons here, okay, so if I switch to the list view, I see this as a folder, and then I can open up the folder and see the contents of the folder. I can also make this bigger with the slider down here, and as you see, inside the music folder, not only do I have my music, I have all the other folders. All I have to do is grab them, drag them out to the higher level, and now we have our folders there, if you go in you can see, they're all named, and in this view, I can scroll down and should be able to see my contents. There's my photos, there's those interview clips, and I brought an extra folder here that's empty, I'm gonna simply delete that, this is useful, but not really useful, because remember in the Media Browser, I could see these really nice? So in the list view, unless you do some real kind of gyrations with the software, you really don't see the images, and that's where stepping into a folder and switching to the icon view gives you that ability to see your images or to see your footage. Can you please explain the difference between importing and Ingesting? Yes, so the question was, for everybody here, what's the difference between importing and Ingesting, and a lot of times we use those terms very cavalierly. Technically, Ingesting is getting it off the card or another drive onto your system, into the program. Importing, and people will switch these back and forth, and I do, I'm guilty of this, is pointing to where the media is and basically creating the shortcuts or the aliases with inside the project file. So, we'll use the term import to bring it into the program, but people will also use the term Ingest. Technically, some people use Ingest when you're really getting it off the card and bringing it in, and it's a good question, because we'll discuss this later in the import, Ingest section, but Premiere by default does not move any of your files, and by the way, it's completely non-destructive. When you're editing, you don't mess with, you don't hurt the integrity of your original media files. It's just creating pointers to parts of the files. So here's the gotcha, if you take a camera card, you put it in, and you click import and you bring it into the project, and then you eject the card, guess what, your media will go offline because it's looking at the card. And so that's one thing you have to keep in mind, it's a good rule of thumb, is that you copy your card onto your hard drive and then you import. There are programs, we won't get deep into them, one comes with Creative Cloud, it's called Prelude which does allow you to refine what you bring in, and also in the latest release of Premiere, there is an option that when you Ingest, it does copy, and even sometimes, if you want, converts it to a different file format that may be easier for your computer to use. That, calms down that question, oh there's a follow-up, yes? So I think I saw a little check-box I think maybe in the Media Browser that said Ingest, so that means that if you check that, then the media would be copied? It'll give you a dialogue box that we'll look at in the Ingest part that gives you choices of copying the media. Copying it where you want it copied, if you want it converted, it allows you to not worry about the fact that you can just edit right off the card. The advantage of editing off the card, and what their original thoughts were, is that if you're in a news environment, sometimes, here's the footage, you just wanna plug it in, you don't wanna wait for it to move over, you just wanna be able to tell the story, you print, which is basically putting out your video, and you're done, and they don't wanna waste the time. So there are instances where it is beneficial, but for the most part, especially for the average person who's creating a story, photographers, storytellers, documentarians, we do wanna protect our media, and that's a redundancy, redundancy, the same rules that when we follow with photography, make copies and copies and then realize you have a million copies of the same thing. But that will work.