Lessons

Lesson Info

Tour The Interface: Project Panel

I'm gonna jump back to this area here called the project and you'll notice it looks similar in layout to the media browser, but this is all the footage I have now to work with and I can view this a couple of different ways. I can view this as a list, which we see here, and I can look inside of my folders and I can see the elements. Or, if I wanted to, I can view this as icons. So, at the bottom left corner of this panel, List View or Icon View. The beauty of Icon View is I can go up here and I can actually see and scrub through my clips. My folders still exist and I want this organizational structure because I don't wanna have to look through 4000 clips in a big list because I can't figure out what things are, so I organize them into groups. A music folder, the art print folder, the raw clip folder. The term you will hear is bins. I'm calling them folders, the technical term is bins. They look like folders, they taste like folder. You ask me why do I know they taste like folders? I'm n...

ot gonna go there. But, they look like folders and they're called bins and that's just something you remember when you create a new one. But, the nice thing is you can actually organize things once the media's in place. I pre-organized it and it maintained that structure. But, if I wanted to, I could go here and simply right-click on the interface and say, "I'm gonna make a new bin". It makes a new folder, I'm gonna call this voiceover because maybe I'm gonna get some more soundbites. And I can simply drag this audio clip into that folder and start maintaining my organizational structure. And that is one of the keys, your organizational structure. Now, what I wanna do is I'm gonna zoom back out again. And remember, we had hit the tilde key to make this full screen. Now, I'm hitting it again and it brings us back to the interface. Okay, so I zoomed in so you could see things, but that tilde key is great. I need real estate, I hit it. Whatever window I'm hovering over, these are all blank, gets bigger. And by the way, there's a little slider at the bottom if I wanna make things bigger here. So, I wanna be able to dig deeper into these folders to actually look at my content within Premiere Pro. And to do that, I can double-click on any of the folders, or bins, and they'll open up. If you generally just double-click on any of these, and I'm sure many of you who played with Premiere have done this, you get the folder opening up, but it's this ugly floating window that just clutters your workspace. There are times when this is very beneficial, but if you hold down modifier keys and, depending on your operating system, that can be command or control. Command on a Mac, control on Windows. Or, option on a Mac and alt on Windows. Different things will happen. So, I'm gonna go ahead and close this. If I hold down the command key when I click on this, and I'm gonna zoom in so you can see what happens. We're now in day 2 Art prints project. I wanna actually look at my raw clips. I'm gonna hold down the command or the control key. When I double-click, I step into that folder. In other words, I can go back up, but I step into that folder, so I don't have this clutter on top. So, that's how you can dig in and keep your desktop nice and clean. If I wanna go back, there's simply that up arrow inside of the folder icon and that would take me back to the upper level. So, you wanna be able to keep things clean. So, I can do that, I can go command and then step into my music and I can see all my audio clips. And if you notice, there's a different icon for different types of media. This is audio-only, so you see a wave form. I'm gonna step back up again. If I go into the folder for my raw clips, these are video clips with audio. And I can see that 'cause it is a video clip, but I see a little icon here and that indicates there is sound associated with this. So, there's a lot of pieces of information within the interface that plugs you into what's happening. And then, if I go over to he still images. And then, once again, I'm gonna step up. And we look at the art prints. I'm holding down the command key again. If I hold down the command key, you notice I step inside. It's a way to keep organized. But, there might be an instance where it would be great to have both my main panel open with all this and maybe I wanna see another panel that just shows me my art prints. And that's where holding down the option key, or the alt key on a pc, will actually instead of opening it up inside, it creates a new tab, which I'm gonna slide right over here. And I can look at my art or I can look at my big folder structure. And as a matter of fact, I really like to look at my main folder, or my main panel, as a list. So, I'm gonna go back to the bottom. Click on that, so now I have a list view to find things, but if I wanna look at those art prints, they're right there. And you'll notice when I zoom in, you don't see that little audio element because it's a still image. There is no audio. So, I can look at my pictures. I can choose what I want and that's the great thing is this icon view is I can see before I bring it in. So, that's the basics of bringing things in and some organization. Let's go ahead and actually start editing with some of this material. So, the first thing I wanna do is create a brand new sequence, okay? And once I create the sequence, I'll actually explain the interface a little bit more. But, I need to have a place to build my show and that's called a sequence. And what you do is you have your blank page, as if you're writing, and you're gonna throw your video and your audio in and build it from beginning to end. So, this would be the beginning and the end. So, you have your first shots, second shot, you're gonna put some music in. So, we need to create that. Now, we talked a little bit about video formats yesterday. And codecs and 1080p and 720. You need to make a decision on the size of your sequence, depending on what you're gonna deliver. So, right now, the standard for high definition television is 1920 by 1080, it's called 1080p. And even if you're delivering a smaller version to say the web or to phones, build it in the proper size or the largest size you need. Just like you would with a photograph. And then you can always scale it down afterwards. You don't have to make it small and then oh, I'm gonna have to enlarge it because you're gonna get a softer image. You're gonna lose some quality. So, we want to, by default, create that sequence. You would do that under File New. And one of the things I like to remind folks in Premiere, and you'll hear me say it throughout the course, is the good thing about Premiere Pro is that there's four or five ways to do everything. The bad thing about Premiere Pro is there's four or five ways to do everything and that can be a little confusing. One of the things a lot of folks said yesterday is that Premiere is very intimidating and it is because there's all these options. You don't have to use all these options to get started. Okay, so I'm gonna make a new sequence with the dropdown menu. There's a keyboard shortcut that I can learn, which is the standard one for even making a new Word document or any new document. Command N, control N on Windows. So, I could use a keyboard shortcut. And there's other buttons throughout that let me make a new anything. A new sequence or, you can see below that, a new bin, which we now know is a folder, excellent. Interaction, I like that. You're like, "But we can't get a word in edgewise. "He's talking so fast." I often have asides with myself. Just enjoy it or shake your head and do the face palm. So, new sequence, this is really confusing to new users and I've talked to the engineers and they go, "Yes, we know, but we have to offer all of this." It's like, "What do I pick?" What's this ARRI, this AVC-Intra? A lot of these are broadcast or legacy, old video formats. For most people watching, especially if you're coming from photography background, you can go to the Digital SLR folder and under 1080p, you can choose a preset for your sequence. And basically, this presets defines what's the frame size. In this case, 1920 by 1080. What's the aspect ratio? 16 by 9 and if you're using square pixels or not. You don't have to even worry about this stuff at this stage. You're either gonna pick 1080p30, some people may use 24. There actually was a question on the Facebook page yesterday about that. Which is better? And I wanna clarify that if you watched yesterday. I don't think one's necessarily better than the other. There is an ease of going from 24 up to because then you're actually creating some frames or duplicating some frames, and there's some fancy math to do that, as opposed to going from 30 to 24. The only way to really do it is to remove frames. So, it's a little fancier than that. It's a little more magical that that. It's an easy way to say, "I'm not gonna explain the math". But, whatever you end up shooting, you should try to pick that format. And guess what? If you mix stuff, Premiere will figure out the math and make it work. But, the idea is you wanna choose a setting that's primarily based upon how you have your camera set up for when you record. With all that said, we're gonna go ahead, we're gonna make a new sequence. The important thing to do when you pick that is we should've named our sequence first. I was a little bit quick on that. I'm gonna show you that again 'cause I was so zoomed in. You have the option to name it down here. This one is now Sequence 02. If you don't name it, you'll end up with lots of sequences named sequence and you won't have any idea what you're editing. So, I'm gonna do this as Art edit, there we go. And we actually have these sequences appear inside of our bins. Now, this is an interesting thing. Where did they go? I didn't pay attention. I wanna make mistakes, so you, when you make the same mistake, go, "Oh, well Abba does it. "I can do it, it's okay." But, this will happen. If everything's perfect, you won't learn anything. So, where did it put this? I'm gonna go ahead and bring this full screen with that tilde key. It put it in the folder that I had active and because I was looking inside of the bin that was for art prints, it put my new blank sequences in there. But, the beauty is I don't have to delete it and start all over again. I can drag things around from folder to folder. And this is why I like that ability to have actually a couple of my tabs be my different panels, such as my project file. If I click over there, there's my list, there's my Art Print. There are my new sequences and a matter of fact, I know it's a sequence because you'll see that the icon is different. You'll see it looks like a sequence when we actually open up the timeline. And if I wanna move that, all I have to do is drag it. I'm gonna drag it to the top level. So, I'm dragging it out of that folder. And the Sequence 01 that I have, don't need it. I'm gonna hit delete, goes away. And now, what I might wanna do is if I'm gonna be creating multiple sequences, 'cause maybe you want to have multiple versions of your show as you're developing it. Or, maybe you wanna do your show in chunks and you have three or four different sequences and each one might be an act. You can then put all of those into a master sequence. So, I'm gonna make a folder just called sequences. I'm right-clicking, I'm gonna say New Bin. I'm gonna say Sequences, S-E-C. And now, I'm gonna go ahead and throw that sequence into that folder and we're good to go. We've maintained our organizational structure. Let me go ahead and hit the tilde key and zoom back out and you can see because we've created a sequence, we have something new over here in the bottom right hand corner. That is where we are building our show. A graphical representation of the show.