This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
The Project panel
Anything you import into your Adobe Premiere Pro CC project will appear in the Project panel. As well as giving you excellent tools for browsing your clips and working with their metadata, the Project panel has special folders, called bins, that you can use to organize everything.
No matter how you import your clips, everything that appears in a sequence must appear in the Project panel. If you delete a clip in the Project panel that is already used in a sequence, the clip will automatically be removed from the sequence. Don’t worry, though, because Adobe Premiere Pro will warn you if you do this.
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As well as acting as the repository for all of your clips, the Project panel gives you important options for interpreting media. All of your footage will have a frame rate and pixel aspect ratio, for example, and you may want to change these settings for creative reasons. You could, for example, interpret 60fps video as 30fps to achieve a slow-motion effect. You might also receive a video file that has the wrong pixel aspect ratio setting.
Adobe Premiere Pro uses metadata associated with footage to know how to play it back. If you want to change the clip metadata, you can do so in the Project panel.
Customizing the Project panel
It’s quite likely that you will want to resize the Project panel from time to time. You’ll be alternating between looking at your clips as a list or as thumbnails, and sometimes it’s quicker to resize the panel than scroll over to see more information.
The default Editing workspace is designed to keep the interface as clean as possible so you can focus on your creative work rather than the buttons. Part of the Project panel that’s hidden from view, called the Preview Area, gives additional information about your clips.
Let’s take a look at it:
- Click the panel menu for the Project panel.
Choose Preview Area.
The Preview Area shows you several kinds of useful information about a clip when you select it in the Project panel, including the frame size, pixel aspect ratio, and duration.
If it is not already selected, click the List View button
at the bottom-left corner of the Project panel. In this view, a lot of information is available about each clip in the Project panel, but you need to scroll horizontally to see it.The Preview Area gives you a mix of information about clips when you need it.
- Click the panel menu for the Project panel.
- Choose Preview Area to hide it.
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Finding assets in the Project panel
Working with clips is a little like working with pieces of paper at your desk. If you have just one or two clips, it’s easy. Once you have one or two hundred, you need a system!
One way you can help make things smoother during the edit is to take a little time to organize your clips at the very beginning. If you can name your clips during capture or after importing them, it can help enormously. Even if you don’t give each individual clip its own name during capture from tape, you can give a name to each type of shot and let Adobe Premiere Pro add 01, 02, 03, and so on (see Lesson 3, “Importing Media”).
Click the Name heading at the top of the Project panel. The items in the Project panel are displayed in alphabetical order or reverse alphabetical order when you click the Name heading again.
Scroll to the right until you can see the Media Duration heading in the Project panel. This shows the total duration of each clip’s media file.
Click the Media Duration heading. Adobe Premiere Pro displays the clips in order of media duration. Notice the direction arrow on the Media Duration heading. When you click the heading, the direction arrow toggles between showing clips in duration order or reverse duration order.
If you’re looking for lots of clips with particular features—such as a duration or a frame size—it can be helpful to change the order in which the headings are displayed.
Drag the Media Duration heading to the left until you see a blue divider between the Label heading and the Name heading. When you release the mouse button, the Media Duration heading will be repositioned right next to the Name heading.
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Filter bin content
Adobe Premiere Pro has built-in search tools to help you find your media. Even if you are using the rather non-descriptive original clip names taken from a file-based camera, you can search for things like a frame size or a file type.
At the top of the Project panel, you can type in the Filter Bin Content box to display only clips that match the text you enter. This is a very quick and easy way of locating a clip if you remember what it is called. Clips that don’t match the text you enter are hidden and clips that do are revealed, even if they are inside a bin.
Click in the Filter Bin Content box, and type the letters joh.
Adobe Premiere Pro displays only the clips with the letters “joh” in the name or in the metadata. Notice that the name of the project is displayed above the text entry box, along with “(filtered).”
- Click the X on the right of the Filter Bin Content box to clear your filter.
- Type the letters psd in the box.
Adobe Premiere Pro displays only clips that have the letters “psd” in their name or metadata, along with all the project bins. In this case, it’s the Theft Unexpected title you imported earlier as both a flattened and a layered image. Using the Filter Bin Content box in this way, you can look for particular types of files.
To the left of the text entry box, there’s a button menu that displays a list of recent entries, along with the number of clips that match the search criteria.
To the right of the Filter Bin Content box, there’s an In menu where you can specify whether Adobe Premiere Pro should search for clips based on all of the available metadata, just the metadata displayed currently (see “Working with bins” later in this lesson), or words taken from scripts (see “Organizing media with content analysis” later in this lesson).
Usually, it isn’t necessary to choose anything in this menu, because the filtering works when using the All option if you type selections carefully. Be sure to click the X on the right of the Filter Bin Content box to clear your filter.
Find
Adobe Premiere Pro also has an advanced Find option. To learn about it, let’s import a couple of extra clips.
Using any of the methods described in Lesson 3, import these items:
- Seattle_Skyline.mov from the Assets/Video and Audio Files/General Views folder.
- Under Basket.MOV from the Assets/Video and Audio Files/Basketball folder.
At the bottom of the Project panel, click the Find button
. Adobe Premiere Pro displays the Find panel, which has more advanced options for locating your clips.
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There are two sets of searches you can perform at the same time with the Adobe Premiere Pro Find panel. You can choose to display clips that match both search criteria or either search criterion. For example, you could do either of the following:
- Search for a clip with the words dog AND boat in its name.
- Search for a clip with the word dog OR boat in its name.
Then choose from the following options:
- Column: Selects from the available headings in the Project panel. When you click Find, Adobe Premiere Pro will search using only the heading you select.
- Operator: Gives you a set of standard search options. Use this menu to choose whether you want to find a clip that contains, matches exactly, begins with, or ends with whatever you search for.
- Match: Choose All to find a clip with both your first and second search text. Choose Any to find a clip with either your first or your second search text.
- Case Sensitive: Tells Adobe Premiere Pro whether you want your search to exactly match the upper- and lowercase letters you enter.
- Find What: Type your search text here. You can add up to two sets of search text.
When you click Find, Adobe Premiere Pro highlights a clip that matches your search criteria. Click Find again, and Adobe Premiere Pro highlights the next clip that matches your search criteria. Click Done to exit the Find dialog box.