Lessons

Lesson Info

Organizing Media and Folders

Okay. Now, we're ready to edit. Now, our focus in this section is on bringing our media in, organizing it, and starting to figure out what our story is going to be, shaping that story based on what we were able to get from our interview. Now, since this is our focus, we're not going to really talk a lot about the technical part of Premiere Pro. If you need to review some of those editing specifics, you can check out my "Adobe Premiere Pro CC Video Editing: The Complete Guide" lessons, and that'll bring you up to speed with everything you'll need to know to start working with this footage. As soon as I'm done shooting or actually on any break, I transfer all of my cards, all of my media, to, in this case, an external hard drive. And then I immediately copy everything on that external hard drive to a backup hard drive, so now I have redundancy, because I don't want to accidentally destroy any of my precious media. So that's what I've done, we're going to edit together on the fly. I haven...

't looked at a lot of this media, I have an idea of what I got. So the first step would be once I've copied these cards onto the hard drive, and as you see, I put them into a folder for CreativeLive and the shoot and today's date. I've labeled each of the folders by the name of the camera, and I've copied everything in that folder over so that I have all the extra data. You'll see in a lot of cards, there's additional folders and files. You might need that because you would need the metadata. So I just copy the cards or I clone the cards onto the hard drive. I have some additional media that I was given. Blair actually emailed me some still images of her work, some JPEGs, as well as a copy of the cover of her book that I may be using as cutaways. I also grabbed a piece of music that I might want to put in just to help me with the pacing. This could be my final music, but sometimes I even put music in just to develop a rhythm or a sense of the flow. I'll probably use this at the beginning of the show just to get us into it and set the mood. There are some additional clips I was given actually by the crew, I had them pick up some B-roll of the table. I would normally have shot this, but they were all set up and I was running around trying to get my things done. So I have a folder called Table B Roll, which probably has the table and some other stuff in it that I'm going to use when developing this. Now, once these folders are in, I could open them up and look at my individual clips, so I could open up the A7. And you'll notice that when I look at some of these folders, I have a variety of styles or types of film or types of movies. I have MPEG-4s, I have something called MTS files, I might have AVCHD. These are all the different formats that all these cameras recorded. Some are a lot easier to open up at the operating system level. In some cases, they best are opened up within Premiere. But if I can open them up beforehand, I may do a quick look-through and say, "I don't really even want to bring this into the Premiere program because it's just going to clutter things." So I'm on a Mac, I can hit the Spacebar and quickly look at some of these. I know I'm not going to use that, so I might start cleaning house so things are not confusing. I'm going to create a new folder, and I'm going to just put it at the bottom of this list. I'm going to start it with the letter X, that way, I know it's at the bottom, I can always find it, and this is just going to be labeled Junk. Now, I don't delete things, I just relocate them because you never know if you need to go back and maybe in what you thought was trash, there might be a frame you can grab that you need a still of or maybe there was a piece of audio you could use. So never throw anything away until you're done with the program because inside that trash may be a little treasure that you could use. So I'm going to go ahead and I'm going to grab this, so when I import it, it's not going to be one of the clips that I'm going to look through. And I could step through most of these, as a matter fact, I remember during the shoot that we had a lot of false starts when we were rolling, and I probably wouldn't use any of these. So I can see she's talking, this is probably my good take. But this one I can move out and I'm going to go ahead and throw it into my junk folder. So I could go through and organize each of the folders that way, but for the sake of time, you can see what I would be doing. I'm going to go ahead and bring everything else inside of Premiere and do some reorganization once we're inside the application. Now, as a rule of thumb, I always like to bring my media in through the media browser. I don't use import because it doesn't recognize some of the file types that cameras record. And I don't necessarily always like dragging and dropping, because if you drag and drop clips from the operating system on a Mac from the finder level into your project bin, it will see all these XML folders then gives you all these warnings that I can't use these folders or use these files. Media browser is the best way to do that. I'll go down into the lower left-hand corner of the screen, open up the media browser, bring that full-screen. And we're going to open up CreativeLive and there's our shoot, and I could go ahead and bring all this in. If I go ahead and import all of this, it will keep the folder structure that I have already created, it's bringing in all of those clips. Now, remember, when you import media in Premiere Pro, it doesn't move that media, it just creates pointer to your original media. So don't go ahead and think you have it inside your program and then go ahead and delete or move these files. Once again, if you need clarification on how to best use Premiere Pro, check out my "Adobe Premiere Pro CC Video Editing: The Complete Guide," it'll really bring you up to speed in preparation for this type of editing project. So we've gone ahead, we've brought it in. And you see, there are some files that are not recognized, some XML files, just go ahead and hit OK. And now, let's take a look at our project bin. And you can see, all of the folders that I created have been brought in exactly as they should be. And if I open any of these up, I can see the content. I can very easily double-click on any of the clips and see exactly what they are. Now, at this stage, if I wanted to do more organization, I could go ahead and rename these clips. If I rename anything, it doesn't rename the original file, and it doesn't lose its connection to the original file, it just creates a reference to that. So I can change all of my names, the original files are okay. It can always find them because it knows the original files' names. And when I manage this at the end, I have the option when I media-manage everything to actually create new clips with the names I assigned them. Because that may be easier for me if I need to come back six months or a year later and find a specific shot, it doesn't have the camera ID, it actually has what I called it. So in this case, I'm going to change this to Table B Roll. And even though the folder said Table B Roll, that's okay because when I see the clip in the sequence, I want to know what that clip is. So I can go through and I'll open up each one of my cameras and I'll determine if I need it, because, again, I'm refining, I'm looking for trash or garbage, and possibly reorganizing things. Because a lot of times within the same camera, I might've shot both the interview and B-roll or something completely different that I want to move out of the way. So it's a good rule to open these up and play them. So this is the A7 camera, what I'm ultimately going to do is probably create a multicam clip because I did roll multiple cameras. But I could go ahead and label this such as Camera 2 Wide Shot. So again, it now has a name that I can recognize versus a confusing camera identifier. So we'll call this Camera 2 and this would be Wide Shot. And then, I'm going to go down here, this is Blair media, this is the footage and the pictures she gave me, so I can leave it the way they are. There's some Canon footage. This is the reverse angle of me, so I'm going to go ahead and type in Abba Reverse. H4N. That should have my audio in it. So this is her audio, and I'm going to call this Blair Clean Audio. And then, we'll go down to this next camera, the HVX90. And the nice thing is, no matter what flavor that was recorded, these just play back as video clips, it's very easy to go through them. Go through, I see there's a lot of waiting, and it's very possible that we have nothing on this clip. So this is the clip that I really don't need. So I'm going to go ahead and I will probably move this into a folder. Let me bring this full-screen so we can create a new bin, CMD+B is the way to create a new bin. And we'll call this Junk. Once again, I have another junk folder, I want it to be at the end, I'm going to put an X there, score. Now, if it should alphabetize by name, my junk's at the bottom. And I can start grabbing things that I know that I won't need as I go down. So some of these MTS shots, I can go ahead and toss that in, that's junk. And I'm going to go through and I'm going to progressively go through and find out what is useful. This is another over-the-shoulder. And though it has the camera set up, this is a nice reverse angle that I might use as an establish shot, so it's not junk, I'm going to label it Reverse Angle Wide Shot. And we learned earlier that this would be very useful if I needed to do an edit. I've established that there's an interviewer asking questions and I could just be there nodding, or maybe this is me asking the question, so that's the advantage of it. If you've never established the interviewer and you suddenly go to a cutaway, that could be disconcerting. So remember, if you're going to use this for cover, get a cover shot at the beginning that establishes both you as the interview, and your talent are in the shot. So we'll go through and we would rename all these. I know for a fact that there's three basic cameras that I'm going to be working with, so I'm not going to have you go through and watch me label everything. So let's take the assumption that I've labeled everything, organized it into folders, and now I'm ready to start reviewing my interview. So let's bring it full-screen. And I'm going to take all of my interview clips and put them in a separate folder to work with. So let me make that new folder, CMD+B, and we'll call this Main Interview. And I want that to be a separate folder, I put it inside of another one. There we go, Main Interview. And that's something I want to get to frequently, so I want to put that at the beginning, I'll just put an underscore there. Now, when I alphabetize it, my main interview's right at the top. So I know that my A7 camera, that was the wide shot, I can bring that and put that in there. Now, if you want to put things into multiple folders, you can. If I drag it, it's going to move it from one folder in the project to another one, the original media stays the same. But if I want two instances of it, maybe for my multicam and maybe as a separate one, I can go ahead and I can duplicate that. And once I have the duplicate, I can go ahead and bring one of those versions in. So I'll go in and I'll bring in the duplicates all into my main interview. So I have my A7 camera, and I still have that over there and organized. I have my Abba Reverse, I don't need that for my multicam. As we step down, I know I'm going to be wanting to work with my audio, so there's the Blair Clean Audio. Once again, I can duplicate that, and now I have the clean audio. Because what I'm doing is just collecting everything for the first round of the interview so that I can create my multicam clip. And we do cover multicam editing in the "Premiere Pro CC Video Editing: The Complete Guide." I don't need the music. The shogun was another camera that we recorded, and it's slightly different. It's a 4K, so it's in ultra-high definition. And sometimes, if you don't want to go ahead and open everything up, you can look at the duration of how long you recorded. We actually have two here, one of these is going to be huge and long. So there she is talking, that's the one that I want, so let's go ahead. And once again, we'll bring that full-screen. I can duplicate that. And I'm going to bring that into my main interview. So as you see, I have two cameras. I have the shogun, that's going to be my primary camera. And maybe I'll even label that as Camera 1. I have my secondary camera, I'll label that as Camera 2. And let's see if I have a third camera. I'm trying to remember if we shot a third camera. Let me look at the HVX. And I think, one of these cameras, I ran for part of the time and it actually stopped, but that's okay because I can still use that. So let's go ahead, label that one. Bring it in, I believe it's this shot right here. So here, we have the third camera. Once again, I will duplicate that. Probably want to label this, I'll label this as Number 3, and this will be pocket camera. And drag that into my folder that's right at the top. Let's step into that folder. We have our main clips, if I bring that full-screen and I can change my view to just a poster frame view and zoom in, it let's me, once again, do a little more of a check. And I can quickly scrub through here, and verify, "Yeah, those are the three angles that I want." So let me go ahead and select these, going to hold down the CMD key on a Mac, and select them in the order that I want. We'll go one, two, three, and our audio, right-click on that, create a multi-camera source sequence. I'm going to go ahead and label this as my Master Interview Multi so I know it's multicam. And a couple of things we learned in the previous class, settings were 1920x1080, the best default is DSLR 1080p 30, so you can make your settings for that. And then, I just simply want the sequence settings from camera one because we're not going to be switching audio, and then I'll press OK. This is going to create a new multicam clip that's going to do exactly what we want. By magic, they use the audio from all of these, that's the key thing to remember, even though I ran three cameras, I made sure that I had relatively okay audio because that's what Premiere uses to sync up all of your clips. As a matter of fact, you can even start and stop some cameras and still have them sync up as long as you have clean audio. So I have my master, then I go ahead, double-click it, load it in, there. I have all of my angles and I have my audio, I'm ready to bring it into my sequence. So I'm going to go ahead and grab that and just make a sequence from this. And I can right-click on that and I can say, "New sequence from clip." Now, it's going to name it after the multicam clip, so if you do want to change that, you can right-click on it, you can reveal this sequence in your project. It's one way of renaming this, and I'll call this Interview Master. And now we're good to go. And if I go ahead, I'm going to bring this full-screen and let me zoom in here. And you'll notice that I have actually more audio angles than I needed. And that's basically because one of the cameras had a lot of audio channels, that shogun. So I don't want this to confuse me, I'm going to go ahead and hold down the Option key, select those extra tracks, and simply hit Delete. It doesn't hurt my original clips, but now I can really focus on what I want to do. So my next step when I'm starting to figure out how I want to create my story, is to go through and listen to this clip and mark things. I can see, from the very beginning, that I'm not going to use any of this, I can easily cut this out. I'm going to hit the backslash key, this makes it fit to window, and there was a lot of prep going on here. And you'll notice that I have a really bad shot. I want to explain to you that it's really not a bad shot, this specific angle was a 4K and so it got blown up. So if I wanted to, I could shrink this back down. If I double-click on it, I can see all of my angles. If I want to step inside, I can right-click on this, I can disable multicam for just a moment. So I'm going to go to Multi Camera, uncheck Enable. Now, when I double-click, I actually now have all of my individual camera angles and still my original one. So I can go back here and reenable it. With that said and done, it's easy to go back-and-forth. And you'll notice that my primary camera, which is the Number One, if I go in and look at that... And let's go ahead and turn the one off right above, just click on the little eyeball. I can see that that's really big, I'll right-click on that and I'll simply say, "Set to Frame Size." Now, we see here, the nice thing about this, because I shot 4K, is I can zoom in without losing any resolution. So if she moved in or out of frame, it gave me a lot of latitude to work with. You'll notice that since I shrunk it on the inside, when I step back over to the main camera and I look at this, you'll see that everything should ultimately fit.