Hello, I'm Imani Muleyaar, the media production specialist at the Media
Production Center here at the School of Communication at American University.
Today I'm going to be talking about file management for Premiere Pro and just to
let you know these tips also work with other non-linear editing software
systems on any platform whether it's PC or Mac. and any version older news these
are just good habits has started right now
habit number one most important getting external hard drive I use this thing
almost every day yeah the external hard drive is
important not only as a place to store stuff but you need a good hard drive
that can communicate these video files to the computer into the software video
files are huge in the data that moves them is also pretty intense so you need
a strong hard drive to actually communicate that data to the
computer. So things like a thumb drive and SD card just don't work. And
sometimes even a hard drive in your computer won't work because you're running so many
different apps at once. So get yourself a nice fast external hard drive. And what I
mean by fast is Revolutions Per Minute. Sometimes you listen to your hard
drive, you can hear it's spinning, that's because there's a disk in there. So you
want it to spin as fast as possible. So the revolutions per minute you're
looking for is 7200, 7200 RPMs. And if you look
in the description of the hard drive you'll see it whether you buy it online
or in the store sometimes you can see it on the box and it's a 7200 RPMs.
They have slower hard drives but we'll get to that later. Also
they have solid-state hard drives, this is the newest thing right now, where
nothing's moving. It sends the data directly to the computer and it's quiet
because there's no moving parts. The only downside, it's a little bit more expensive
but that's the wave of the future and it's definitely a good investment. So I
was talking about the other hard drives the ones that may not be so fast, and I
have one right here this is my backup drive. It's not 7200 RPMs
which makes it a little bit cheaper. But I can copy my project to that drive
either when I'm done or while I'm working on it so I have a backup in case
my work drive crashes, which it will. Just like a car, eventually gonna
stop working. But I have everything backed up so when I get a new work
drive I can just copy it over and work off on my work drive. I don't like
working off my backup drive because it's not made for that. So let's see a few
other things you need to know about. It's a connection, this is probably everybody
knows this but I like using USB-USB3 - that's the speed that you want. That
usually comes with the faster hard drives.
Either that or a Thunderbolt cable, Thunderbar drive, and they also
have network drives, but I like USB because it's been around forever and
it's probably gonna be around for a while too.
And you have your backup drive and also the size of the drive. The drive is
the size is not too crucial but you should allot enough space for the
projects that you're working on. Because especially dealing with 4k now we're
getting the files that are in the tens of hundreds of thousands of gigabytes. So
you want high size hard drives and the terabytes if you can. So I'll let you be
the judge of that and then as you grow in your career, you're gonna get bigger
and bigger drives that have more and more storage depending on what you're working
on. So now we have all those drives, let's go to our computer and I have my drive
plugged up and you can see it, it's called my drive. I named it that, you can
name it whatever you want just keep the name whatever you keep it as. And I have
my SD card. I have the SD card for my camera, I use the Sony's
Z-150 since most people are using that on campus, so I took some footage, I put
on the card and put it in a computer. So now I have my drive and SD card, great. So
I want to get the contents from the SD card to my drive, first, before I open Premiere.
If I do an after I open Premiere, it's gonna be a headache. So I'm gonna
get the video footage off of the card onto the drive before I do that. I want
to create some type of structure, first in my head and then I'll try to map it
out on the hard drive. Let's open up the drive. I'll bring it over here. So this is
my drive. I already have some folders in here but here are my project folders. So
for this project I'm gonna make a new folder. Let's call it...let's see..
"New Project." No, I'm not going to that, that's a bad one. Let's call it
Imani's project. Yeah that's my project. And that's my project folder. So this is
great because in there I can create a structure. Everything's gonna go in Imani's
Project Folder. But how do I organize? Well, even though there are several
different ways to come up with something good for you, I'm gonna tell you a real
simple way to do it. First I'm gonna make a folder called "Video." That's where I'm
going to put all my video. So, new folder.
That's great, but I'm thinking ahead I know I'm gonna have music I know I'm
gonna have sound effects I may do some voiceovers too, so I'm going to need an audio
folder too, so let me do that right now. Like I said, we're creating a structure. "Audio."
And, I'm gonna have some cool graphics. I'm gonna have names flying around. Guess
what? I'm gonna make a graphics folder.
And that's all I need for now. You can get as deep as complicated as you want.
Don't get too deep so you have so many folders that is hard to find your
own stuff. But that's a basic structure. We're going to use the structure and
we're gonna stick to it. Since I don't have audio or graphics I have a video
folder and I have videos on my SD card. Let's go into the SD card and see what that
looks like. So here's my SD card. It's called "Untitled." Depending on what camera
you use is going to name it differently. But inside is the important part. You'll
see a folder called "Private' and then - like I said this is different for every
camera - but if you go inside you'll start seeing folders, you'll start seeing more
folders, and you'll start seeing more folders and more folders and more files
and it gets complicated. The video files are in here but if you don't know what
you're looking at yet don't get bogged down,
don't start digging. The files are in there we're gonna let Premiere do all the
work for us. Since we know the files are in there we're just going to copy
everything. That's it simple as that. I'll close it and open it back up so you see
we're starting at the beginning. The only thing in there is "Private." Sometimes you
see other stuff in there depending on the camera you're using. I grab everything. I
want to get everything in there and I'm gonna put it in my video folder because
that's where the videos go. And let it copy. So now that videos are going into
video folder, just a tip if you have more than one let's say card, you may want to
make a new folder called Card number One and Card Number Two and drop
private folder, whatever is in there, in there. Or if you have multiple cameras
camera number one, camera number two that keeps them separate so you don't have a
whole bunch of private, private, private, or whatever is in there. So it looks
organized and you can import them nice and clean. But since I only have one
camera, one card, I'm just going to put everything into the video folder. So
that's great we have our videos now we're almost there let's fire Premiere up.
And Premiere Pro has an interesting way of opening up files and then saving them.
So we're going to do that first, we're going to save everything where it needs
to be. So here's the first menu. The first window you're going to see, and that pops
up for you to create a new project, and that's what we want to do. So let's create a
new project. Here's the important part. In the location we created a folder let's
use it. In the location I'm gonna hit the Browse button and I'm going to find my
location and it's called - it's in my drive, that's name of my drive, and my
folders called "Imani's Project." Click on that. I can make a new folder like a
Projects file folder, but I don't have to do this, it's not that complex for this
project. So I'm just going to click on a Imani's project and I'm going to put the
project inside of there. So choose, yup, and you can see location, Imani's Project,
and the name of it is a Imani's project. That's the name of my project.
And okay, now we're opened up, so what exactly happened, let's go back to finder.
Oh there we go, Imani's project. I still have my audio
folder and my graphics folder and my video folder, but it created our project
file inside of the folder. Everything's in one place which is great, which is
what I want. Cool let's keep it moving. So now let's get the footage into Premiere.
There are a couple ways. You can do it the traditional way with any software,
you click file and import and you can import that way. Premiere has a nice
option, there's a Media Browser where you can click on that and you can actually find
the files. And last but not least you can stay in this project panel right here and
you can drag and drop. I like that it's really easy for me. So what I'm going to
do, I'm gonna close out of SD card. Everything's on the hard drive so I'm
going to dump the SD card. I'm working off of the hard drive and hard drive only. I have my
videos right here, and there we go, and they have all these folder structures.
Once again I let Premiere do the work for me. So I'm just gonna grab the whole
video folder and grab it, drag it, and drop it right into Premiere.
And let it work. Aha, what happened? Let's check this out. We
have an error message popped up. And this is important. Because I dragged
everything in there, but Premiere can't handle everything. Like we saw in the
folder structure a bunch of different files. A lot of the stuff Premeire
doesn't need and Premiere doesn't want. Some other software may need it, let's
say like a Final Cut or something like that. But Premiere itself is like "No, I'm
done with this." So okay what do you need? Oh you know what you need? You don't need
this okay, you don't need this. Let's see what you brought in then.
Okay so Premiere is telling us, okay this is what I wanted. So we got rid of
stuff we don't need and we have the stuff that we want. I'm going to change
some stuff in this panel, I'm going to change this view because I don't like
these big icons, and make them small. That's a lot better for me. So let's see
what we got. Welcome to video, we're still getting some of these folders, and I've
opened up Clip, eventually I'll find the video. It's trying to follow the
structure on your hard drive but eventually the only thing that's going
to pop up are the video files. And let's double check, you know their videos
because there's a nice icon on the left, the green and the purple symbolizing audio
and video. But double click on that, then BAM! There I go, there's my footage. I'm
down in the equipment room, Tom's drinking coffee, so that's good. So
I have my footage, success, everything's in there and now what do we do with it?
We want to create a sequence. There's a couple ways to create a sequence, but
there's a couple ways to mess one up too. Because you may not know the settings
you need depending on the footage you have or what you want to export to. The
safe is been is to take the file itself and use it as a template for the
sequence. And the way to do that is to go down here to this little new item button
it looks like a piece of paper down here, by the trashcan, a new item button is
like a new sequence, you can create other new stuff like texts and shapes but
we're creating a new sequence. And a shortcut to do it is to grab your video
drag and drop it onto the new item button and voila, it makes a new sequence.
With all the proper settings if you look you can see all the audios right there,
all the videos there, and all the settings are matched to your video file,
which is great so you don't have to do any type of changes in your sequences
unless you're requested to do so. But this is where we're starting at. And I have
my video, so that's good. And if you look over here
in the project panel you'll see it says the name of the file was "Clip 0001" So the
file that I'm a basing the entire sequence on
the sequence took the same name. So as "Clip 0001", that's name of the
sequence. So we have everything where we want it, the sequence the files, and we
can see it and everything's still in the hard drive nothing's changed.
That's great, but what if I do want to make changes? What if I don't like these
names, what if I want to name it sequence 1, what if I want to name it clip 1?
Things like that or "Clip Tom". You can do that but in Premiere only, don't do that
in your file on your hard drive. The way this works is Premiere has everything
locked down. It knows where everything is now. You can start changing stuff in
Premiere, everything's in place as long as you don't move anything off your hard
drive you can start changing things in Premiere. So let's do that I'm gonna move
some stuff around. Let's see, I don't like all this other stuff, so I'm just gonna
grab my video files and I'm just gonna drag them out of here. Okay I don't want
all these other stuff, let me get rid of this, and this and this...you're like oh no
what are you doing you changing some stuff up! It's fine trust me it'll be
fine. So I got rid of that. Let me change this to sequence 1-1. Let me change this
to - what clip is this? - yeah that's Tom, coffee, Tom is drinking coffee...so there
you go, I changed some stuff in there. So you're thinking maybe I change it in the
hard drive right? Nope that's not how it works. Let's go back to the
hard drive, everything is still the same. Video is still there, the file structure
is still there. Even if I know where I'm looking now I may be even even be able
to find the original clips, the clips are still here. Yeah and none of the names
have changed, that's the way Premiere works. You can change things in Premiere
but not in your hard drive which is important because we're going to leave
everything in the hard drive. Now it's time to back it up let's go back to
Premiere and save. Save always, save often, save every chance you get.
And whe3n it's time to back of the project I'm going to minimize this I
want to copy my entire folder emani's project wherever it is whether it's my
backup hard drive whether it's uh yeah you can root you can save your backup on
to your computer because you're not working off of it so it's not blocking
down not getting bogged down by the apps you can save it on in the media
production Center we have media drive so you can save it on just be careful
because other students have access to the media drive and you may not always
gain access to the same room every time but at least you have a backup somewhere
back it up online that way you have two copies but copy everything as is all the
names all the folders everything because once you start changing things I'll show
you what happens when you start changing things so let's say um humanities
project I'm going to copy to a drive but I'm going to call it something else
let's call it e money's project version 2 ok so I just copied it somewhere or
even on my own hard drive you know I want to change the name so let's go in
from here and see what happens ok premier just change it I hope you
change it to O know what's going on I know some people have seen the screen
what happened is the files were somewhere and now premieres like what
happened what happened I don't see the files anymore because if you look here
it's looking for the files in e Monty's project it's looking for all the files
of the Mannings project where this go where that go where that go your monies
project where's your monies project it's gone because I changed the name to
Maddie's project v2 so now it doesn't know where to look and say oh no now
we've got to find everything or have to rename everything we're after really
important after re-edited so that's when it becomes a problem that's when you
have to almost start from scratch so that's why it's important to name
everything first create a file structure first and stick to it when you move
between system and system hard drive the hard drive and keep it that way
and you may also see this if you have files on your you imported from the SD
card from the desktop from a different hard drive and then you make the project
and then you take us somewhere else and everything's gone that's because
everything's not in one folder so do that first put everything in one folder
first and then start editing and then when you're done make your copies but
just keep all the names the same okay i'ma close this cuz it's making me mad
oh so that's done I'm actually going to rename this name it the way it was and
see if that fix the problem please please please be pleased so it's opening
back up everything's still the same I changed everything back the way it was
it's opening project and there you go everything's still there so that's just
a basic introduction on file management it gets a lot deeper when you deal with
different file formats different cameras but the idea is to when you create a
project make a folder structure first then start your project and then edit
save and then backup and when you backup make sure everything stays the same
alright thanks for joining me on this file management for Adobe for any
nonlinear editing software for real my name is Emmanuel our media production
specialists at the School of Communication at American University see
you next time
No comments:
Post a Comment