Lessons

Lesson Info

Tour The Interface: Digital Video Workflow

Today is meeting Premiere Pro, and what I wanna talk about is in general the digital work flow. How you can put all these pieces together, what are the elements? We introduced some of that yesterday, and we're gonna kind of really go through this pretty quickly today because I do wanna try to cut an entire one minute piece. And you say "A one minute piece? "That should be easy in an hour." But not necessarily. Figure you need a lot of time to edit because you need a lot of time to think. So what we'll do is we'll launch Premiere. We're going to tour the interface very quickly. We're gonna bring some media in that is both already on our hard drive as well as some media I have on a thumb drive. I was given some photographs right before we started to air this session. We'll look at the different elements, such as the Project Panel which is where we'll bring things in. We're gonna talk about choosing your shot, ways that you do it, marking ins and out points. And start throwing some things...

into the timeline. Both some video, some voice over that Kenna did for us because it was an event that she hosted, as well as bringing in a few still images and then we're going to export it all out so you have a good sense of what Premiere is all about. We kind of touched on it yesterday, you got to see the interface a little bit. But we really didn't do any editing. We answered some of the global questions about video and whatnot. So today's a little different. Today's actually getting exposed to the software, and preparing us for the next 18 lessons where we actually spend hour chunks looking at each of the sections that I'm going to fly through today. So with that let's go ahead and start Premiere Pro, and as we go along if there are questions, we'll be good to go. Well while you're doing that Abba, I would love to make sure everybody knows that there is a Facebook group for this bootcamp. If you haven't joined it already, there are already hundreds of people in there from all over the world, which is really exciting to see. So all you have to do is search for Abba Shapiro Creative Live group and I will put the link in the chat rooms as well for you to go and join the group. And of course throughout the day today, like Abba said you can join us because we're live with questions. And you can do that by clicking on the on-air tab beneath the video you're watching and using that ask box and also join in the chat rooms if you have questions for us about how things at Creative Live here work. Alright thanks. Thank you. So we're gonna go ahead and we're gonna start by just launching the application. So I'm assuming you've already installed it. We're not doing a class on installing any kind of an application such as Premiere. But I did throw it into the dock. We're working on a Mac here, I wanna emphasize again, Premiere works both on Macs and Windows machines and it looks and feels exactly the same. So whichever kind of hardware you have, we talked a little bit about hardware yesterday, Premiere works it's cross platform compatible. You can even move project files and media between Macs and PCs. So I'm gonna go ahead and launch this, and literally start from scratch. Throughout the course we do have some downloadable files if you buy the class. And there will be project files and media associated with. So some of those are kind of pre-built. But with what we're doing today, there won't be any files to download, you're just gonna be watching. We're gonna go ahead and I'm going to quit Premiere, I had it already launched cause I want you to see the start-up screen. So let's go ahead and launch this. So when you first launch Premiere, it loads all the elements that you need to use to edit it. If you have third-party plugins it will actually load those. And then you will see this startup screen. By the way if you don't see this, you may be using an earlier version of Premiere. We're using the latest release of Adobe Premiere Creative Cloud. And this is the startup screen, it actually says the lesson that I last worked on. But in our case we're just gonna go ahead, we're gonna start with a new project and I do wanna re-emphasize, this will be fast and furious. We go deeper throughout the remainder of the course. But this is an opportunity just to get a feel of it. So I'm gonna create a new project, it's gonna ask me what I wanna call this project and where I wanna store it. We're gonna just call this day two and that will be the art prints, because that's the event. And I need to say where is this gonna go. You should put this maybe in your movies folder, or maybe a dedicated folder where all your projects are. If you need to figure out or replace the default location, just go in and say browse, pick your location. Works the same on a Mac or a PC. I have it here in lesson two, I'm gonna go ahead and throw it on my desktop. By the way don't do as I do, do as I say. I'm putting it on the desktop so it's very easy for us to access it. You should put it in a dedicated folder inside your hard drive, or you can even store it on an external hard drive because video does take up a lot of space. So I'll put it on the desktop, I'm gonna make a new folder. We'll call it lesson two art. And that way I can find all of my materials. I'm gonna go with all the default settings here, and as a matter of fact you probably are fine with the default settings. We'll explain a lot of these settings later throughout the course in both the class for lesson three as well as the special Ingest class. So with this set, I have it named I know the location. I'm simply going to say okay and it's going to launch Premiere and I get to the Premiere interface. Let me go ahead and zoom back out so you can see everything and make this full screen. So for a lot of folks, and if you were listening in yesterday, watching yesterday, you know we did discuss this briefly. It can be confusing. And so it will get less confusing over the 20 classes, and that's the idea of a boot camp. It's hard to digest everything in one day, two days or in our case an hour. So if I don't cover everything just be patient, that's what the other 18 lessons following this lesson are all about. Four basic windows that we'll be dealing with. They're all empty now. The lower left hand corner is where we're going to bring in the footage that we have that we're going to work with. And then as I bring this in, I'll explain these other windows. There's a timeline, a preview monitor, a program monitor. Right now we just wanna import our media. And I have the media in two different locations right now. I have a folder on my desktop where I have this video footage and voice over, all organized so I can bring it in. And then as I indicated earlier, I have a thumb drive with five actual JPEG files of some of the photography that I wanna work with also. So let's go ahead and bring this media in. The best way to ingest media in Premiere, is not to use the import option. As a matter of fact let me scroll over here a little bit to the left. Gonna move this over. These little tabs are very flexible, you can position them anywhere you want. So it says import media here, we're actually gonna use something called the media browser and we do detail that in the next lesson. But this allows me to find the media and import it. And when I say import it all we're doing at this stage is pointing to where the media lives on your hard drive. It doesn't physically relocate the media. Which is a good thing because video is huge. I mean we're talking hundreds of megabytes, sometimes gigabytes. Even with some of the broadcast formats you could get a terabyte file. So not something you wanna put inside of your project. So we use the media browser and we can dig down to where I have this stored. I did store it on my desktop so it would be easy to find. So it's in one of these three folders and I can click on that. And I'm gonna go ahead and zoom out so you can see the entire interface. One of the great things about Premiere Pro is that, you know right now this is a little bit hard to see. You have a lot of information, a lot of real estate. So they have this great shortcut, the tilde key, which is in the upper left hand corner of your keyboard it's right below the escape key. Some people call it the accent grave. And when I hover my mouse over that area and I press that, this section goes full screen. This is kind of fun, this is something we'll be working with later. Gave away one of my surprises. I don't know which one you think is better, we'll have a, b, c. We'll just kind of keep moving on there. So I shouldn't have opened day one because it embarrassed me. So here we are on our desktop, and I have lesson two art, that's a project. And here we go, lesson two and I have all my media. Now the nice thing about opening things up in this media browser, no matter whether you're on a PC or a Mac, is I can actually see the footage that I'm gonna be working with and I can hover my mouse over it, I'm not even clicking. And look at that footage. I'm gonna step into the clips folder, raw clips. And in a moment this is gonna populate. It takes a minute to populate because it's actually creating these lower-resolution video clips or icons. And now we can actually see exactly what footage is on my hard drive, and choose what I wanna bring in. And you have the ability to actually, what's called hover scrubbing over this. And I'm just moving my mouse back and forth and it's scrubbing over the clips so I can determine is this footage I want. So this is the first step in the work flow. What do I need to bring in? Should I bring in everything? The answer is no because that's just confusing. You should actually refine your footage throughout the process. When you're shooting you'll make mental notes about what's really good so you remember yeah I need to find that shot, or where you messed up. And the first thing you need to do, and I've already done it here, is I took all the footage from my camera and copied it to my hard drive. You don't want to leave the footage on your SD card or your Cf card because when you import, and remember I said you point to the media on that location, as soon as you eject that camera card your footage goes offline. Which is why I copied everything to my desktop. And then I went through and I looked at the footage at the Finder level, at the operating system level. I'm gonna go ahead and hide this, it's in this folder right here. Or it's in this folder right here. That's me again, I keep hiding from myself. I'm gonna have to hide that. Here we go. See that's why I use the media browser, because I get lost otherwise, it was my first one. So what I did, is once I brought the footage into my computer, I actually kind of pre-organized it. I took the music that I was thinking about using and I put it in the folder. And I took the raw clips that I was gonna use, put that in the folder. My voice-over, just an audio file. And then I was given a time-lapse that I might add to the show. This project we're working on, I haven't cut this yet. I didn't wanna like have everything pre-baked and everything work perfectly. Because you know something? You'll watch and you'll go "Oh look how smooth it is." So if throughout the hour, as you can see I do something wrong or crash and burn, I want you to experience exactly what you'll be experiencing. So we're kind of learning together on the fly. And I am speaking really quick, I don't speak this fast normally during the rest of the course, I just wanna cover so much and I'm very excited about this. So if I'm talking too fast, just wave your hand. The old floor director was slow down, I never get speed up, you know? I get wrap and the hook a lot, but it's always slow down so I will try to do that. So I put my music in a folder, I put my video clips in a folder. If I had still images which actually I do, I'm gonna copy them into this folder. So everything is already pre-organized. And then I can bring it in. The other thing that I would do in my prep, and I did this a little bit, is I look at all the clips that I had brought in, and if I knew something wasn't gonna be used, you know I had the camera was shooting the floor, things were out of focus, it was a test shot. I didn't even put them in the folder. Because I don't want to have to sort them later I already knew that these were not the best shots. And I will continue to refine as I go through the editorial process. So I probably narrowed this down from 120 clips to 60. I'm guessing I probably could have cut this down to 40. But throughout the process, when you are looking at your footage in the operating system, you're starting to take mental notes of what you have and you're starting to develop the idea of what story can I tell with this footage. And one of the questions that I was asked actually earlier today by one of the class members before we started rolling was how do you tell the story when you've kind of already pre-defined the story? Well with a situation like an event, you have an idea of what the story should be. But you should never lock yourself into that idea, and not be like immobile at that point. The story's gonna develop based on what you see and hear in the footage. So be open, be open to okay it doesn't have to be this fixed structure. Maybe I have this other great idea because somebody had this great soundbite. Or I got this amazing shot that would be a great hook to capture my viewer. So keep that in mind, being flexible is one of the best things you can do as a video editor. And the beauty of these programs is you can have the flexibility, you don't have to build from beginning to end. You can go back and say "Oh you know something? "Found a great shot over here, "I'm gonna move it to the beginning of my show." It's word processing for video. You can move things around, you can delete things, you can add things. Think of it that way and it's a lot less scary. So that's how I've organized this. And let's go ahead and we're gonna do two things. I'm gonna copy the stuff off of this thumbdrive. So on this thumb drive I had a bunch of photographs that were given to me, art prints. And I'm simply gonna copy those into my art project. And I'm gonna put those into that same folder for lesson two where I have the other media so it's all organized. And this is important because if I did not copy this, if I left it on this thumb drive which I'm not sure you can see it's rather small but it's bright purple to match the Adobe purple of Premiere that was good planning or dumb luck. We'll go with good planning. So I'm gonna copy that over but if I actually ingested that from the thumb drive, as soon as I ejected that thumb drive the media would be offline. So first rule and everybody's gonna make this mistake, I still make this mistake. Always copy it over so you have it on your hard drive. It's also a good thing to do, is back it up to a second drive. Photographers all know about backing up, you have 47 versions of every single raw file you ever shot. Because you're so worried about losing it. So it's copied, it's pretty quick. I'm gonna go ahead and eject this, because I don't wanna accidentally point to it and think oh I pointed to the wrong media. So if it'll let me eject it, I might have to close all my windows. Boom. Eject my drive. We'll see if that'll let me do it. There we go, life is good. Let's jump back into Premiere. So we're in this media browser, and as a matter of fact I stepped in here and I showed you the video clips, this that says art print wasn't there before because the folder wasn't there. But now the folder is there and it updates very quickly. So we're gonna click here, we're gonna step up a little bit to lesson two where I can see my folders. And I'm gonna just select everything by lassoing them, and right click on them and go import. So by doing this I haven't moved any files, and by the way this is completely non-destructive. So if I make an edit I'm never affecting my original media. Which is a great thing, you don't wanna do that. So don't worry about breaking your footage because you're not doing it. So what it's doing is it's preparing the import, it's looking at the files, it's creating those little picture icons so you can see what things are. And it's bringing the audio waveforms and as soon as it's done, there's a lot of media here, we'll switch over. There we go we're all set.