More Quick Tips to Ease Your Jump to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
- Tip 1: Set Up a Sequence, Ignore Codecs, and Render Less Than Ever
- Tip 2: Demystifying Timeline Colors, Dropped Frames, and Playback
- Tip 3: Optimize Your System with the Mercury Playback Engine
- Tip 4: Work Smarter on the Timeline
- Tip 5: Adjusting Audio
- Tip 6: Quickly Adding and Adjusting Effects
- Need More?
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Jumping into a new tool is like learning a dialect of a language—it's similar enough to be familiar, but different enough to be frustrating sometimes!
In part 1 of this series, "Six Tips Before You Jump to Adobe Premiere Pro CS6," I provided a half-dozen tips to make your transition into Adobe Premiere Pro easier. Here are six more. These tips focus more on sequences, audio, and effects. All of these tips (and more) can be found in An Editor's Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro, Second Edition.
Tip 1: Set Up a Sequence, Ignore Codecs, and Render Less Than Ever
For many editors, one of the hardest things to accept is that the sequence codec is irrelevant in Adobe Premiere Pro. But it doesn't have to be irrelevant. You could configure a custom sequence setting to render in any specific codec of your choice, and choose to use those previews when exporting.
Skip Picking a Sequence Type
When you start a project, you'll be asked what kind of default sequence you'd like your project to have. Feel free to skip this step—just press Escape when you start a project. No harm, no foul.
Pick any video clip and choose File > New > Sequence from Clip (see Figure 1). Adobe Premiere Pro will build a sequence ideal for playback of that type of footage.
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Figure 1 Select the option that best represents what you want to output.
Get the Highest Quality When Exporting
Why doesn't the sequence codec matter? Because Adobe Premiere Pro only uses renders for previewing during playback. In fact, Premiere Pro calls it a preview rather than a render—even though they're the same thing, conceptually. There are none of the problems or confusion of mixing different media in a sequence. Any media that hits the sequence will be conformed for playback.
Won't this approach cause a loss of quality? Nope. When you export your media (File > Export > Media), the default setting is to ignore any render files. Take a look at Figure 2. Did you notice that Use Previews is off? That's because any previews (renders) will be ignored, forcing the original format/footage to be used direct to the output codec. Exporting is handled under the hood by Adobe Media Encoder, which goes back to the original footage to provide the highest-quality output of your sequence.
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Figure 2 Notice in the Export media box that Use Previews is turned off by default!