Start a New Project and Understand the Premiere Pro Workspace

Instructor: Let's go ahead and open Premiere Pro. When you open Premiere Pro, you'll see a screen like this. Now I have a bunch of projects that I've worked on already, so you can see here the names of the projects that I've been working on. You won't have that if you're opening up Premiere Pro for the very first time. To start a new project, we're going to click this New Project button; but know that if you've recently worked on a project, or you want to open a project that you have in your files or on an external hard drive, you can click this Open Project button and then find it from your list of files. You could even just double-click that project file from your documents or finder. I'm gonna click New Project. That's going to open up the New Project panel. At the top we're going to name this project. We'll call this Premiere Pro Course, and then you choose where you want to save it. There's a dropdown menu for some popular locations, or you can click browse and save it wherever you want. I'm going to save it into the Class folder for Adobe Premiere Pro; I'll select Choose for that folder. Then we have some other options to take care of. Depending on how fast your computer is, choose that GPU acceleration option if you have it. If not, it's okay; you might just have a little bit of issues if you're trying to edit big, large 4K footage. For Video Display Format, I choose Timecode. You might wanna use Feet or Frames if you're editing an actual film that was shot on film; but for most digital projects, Timecode is good. Display Format, Audio Samples is good. Capture Format, we're not going to be capturing anything via Adobe Premiere Pro. This is if you had a camera or a deck plugged into your computer and you wanted to capture footage from a tape. For Scratch Discs this is important though. So, for me, I typically save all of this Same as Project. What this means is the video, the renders, the previews; these are files that Adobe Premiere Pro creates when you start a project, when you add effects, when you make changes, when you autosave your project. I like all of those files saving to where my actual project is. I don't want it on some back library of the computer. I want it easily accessible, so I always choose Same as Project for these. When you're happy with your settings with the name and with the location, just click Okay; and then Adobe Premiere Pro will open up. Now this is probably confusing if you've never opened up Adobe Premiere Pro; so in the rest of this lesson we're going to learn what these main windows, or panels, are. We're going to learn how to customise the view so that yours looks like this if your window doesn't look like this, which it might not. One quick way to get your window, or your programme, to look like mine is to go up to Window, Workspaces, Editing. That's the workspace we're going to start out with; then we're going to learn how to customise it. To understand what all these panels are, I'm going to open up the project we'll be working on for this course, which is this Anthony Carbajal short documentary. I'm actually going to start in the bottom left with our Project panel. So all of these windows have panels. Some of them have tabs with other panels behind them. So see here we have Project in the front? Behind that is the Effects; and if we click on the Effects, the Effects panel pops up. The Project panel is basically your documents. It's your organisation panel. It's where you import files. It's where you create new files like titles or graphics, and it's where you keep everything organised. Behind it we saw, this is the Effects tab; and this is where we have all of our video effects, audio effects, and transitions. Right to the right of the Project and the Effects panel is this tool bar. This includes all the tools that you have available for editing your footage on the Timeline, which is over here to the right. This is the Timeline. This might seem very confusing to you, and I wouldn't be surprised; so don't get too worried. You will learn how to do all of this. Just know that on the top of the Timeline, starting from V1, V2, V3, V4; you might not have these many layers when you open up Premiere Pro. These are all video tracks. Below, on the bottom half, A1, A2, these are audio tracks. You can adjust the size of the track and really any panel by hovering over the line on the edge of the panel or the track and clicking and dragging. You can seem me doing that right here with this panel. So all of these things I can make smaller so you can see all the three audio tracks, and there's actually nine video tracks that we're using. It's a lot, and it goes from zero seconds to one minute; and you can see the seconds and the milliseconds right here. Over on the right are our audio monitor, so if I play through this; I'm just gonna turn the audio off, but if I play through it, you can see the audio levels bouncing up. So this is a good audio monitor to use. This also brings us to the programme monitor up here. As I play through this, this is the final product, or at least the product we're working on down here. So everything we add to, as you can see Anthony being funny right here for the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge, threw on a bikini, he's a really out there, extroverted guy, thought it would be funny; and we're gonna learn more about his story and what this project is all about throughout these lessons. So I don't wanna give everything away yet, but just know he's a very extroverted, funny guy. So this, you can see, we've added all kinds of things. We've added graphics, we've added transitions, we've added motion to photos; we've added, you can't tell, but we've added colour correction, adjustment layers, titles, so many things to this track, and that's what all these different blocks are. Video tracks, graphics, titles, colour correction layers; don't worry, we'll learn all of it. And up here in the programme monitor, that's where you see what's happening on your Timeline. There's these buttons down here that allow you to control playing the video track. Pressing space bar allows you to play or stop, or you can press these buttons too. And realise that I'm just skimming over a lot of these buttons. There's so many buttons that I'm not explaining right now, and I had taught a Premiere Pro course before where I tried to explain every button as I went through everything. That doesn't work that well. There is just too much going on; and so with this class, we're going to learn as we actually create and as we go on. If you have any questions about any of the content in this course, head over to the Q&A tab. First, search and see if anyone else has asked that same question; or, if they haven't, ask a new question by clicking the Ask New Question button, typing in your question title, and then describing what issue or what you're trying to figure out. If it's something very specific about what you're trying to do with your project, it always help if you post a screenshot of your Premiere Pro screen, so I can see what's going on. Anyway, so this is the project programme monitor up here; and up here on the left, we have our Source, Effects Controls, and Audio Track Mixer. And you might not have Audio Track Mixer, but I'll show you how to open those panels and close panels in just a sec. The Source monitor is where you preview your clips. So down here we have our folders of videos. If I open up our interview folder, I double-click our first clip, and then it opens up into our Source monitor. If I open up our music folder and open up a music clip, our music waveform clip pops up open up here so we can check it out. Effects Controls, this is where we actually change how effects look or the settings of an effect. So, for example, I'm gonna click this adjustment layer which, or really, any of these layers. So we have a video layer; and you can see when I click on that, you see a Motion, Opacity, Time Remapping, all these tabs open up. Some of these come included with every layer that you put on your Timeline. Something like the Lumetri Colour Effect, that's something that I added afterwards. That's an effect, down here, in the Effects panel, that we added. We'll learn how to do that in this course. And then the last one is the Audio Track Mixer. You might not have this open; and if you don't have it open, let me show you how to do that. But first let me close it, and you can close any of these panels by right-clicking and choosing Close Panel. So if you don't have the Audio Track Mixer open, go up to Window and click the Audio Track Mixer right here. And that pops open Audio Track Mixer. Now it might not have opened it up right here in this Source monitor panel up here in the top left. So to customise your space, let's go back to our other project. So here we're in our other project. It still has the Audio Track Mixer open. Say we want to move this Audio Track Mixer down below our Project panel, or in this panel behind Effects; we can click any of these panels, drag it around, and move it. And you can see, as I move it, different panels get highlighted. If I wanna just add it right into this panel, just drag it into the middle and let go. You can see that it drags it into this panel. If I want, I can actually add it to the top and add a completely new panel or the right or the bottom or the left. So see what happens when I click and I unclick over here when it's highlighted in the right? A new panel pops open. Or if I want it on the left up here, it opens up a new panel on the left. If you're following along, it's probably a lot easier to just play around with this and understand how to do it. You can resize, as I mentioned before. You can drag the tabs to the left or right to adjust the order of the tabs. Say I want Audio Track Mixer before the Effects Controls, I can just drag it into the middle of those two panels. The goal with this lesson, and moving into the next lesson, is to set up your project to look like my setup right now. So you want your Project panel with the Effects. You want your Timeline down in the bottom right, the Programme up in the top right, and then the Source, Audio Track Mixer, not the Audio Clip Mixer, the Audio Track Mixer, in the Effects Controls up in the top left. To save this workspace so that if it ever gets messed up or if you ever add new panels or open new panels but want to revert to this setup, go to Window, Workspaces, Save as New Workspace. Click that, and then name your workspace and click Okay. I already have one that's set up like this. It's called Phil's Single Monitor. It's basically the same setup. Effects Controls is in the middle rather than over to the right; but now, whenever I want to go back to that Phil's Single Monitor setup, I can just click that Phil's Single Monitor. And you can see that I have Sam, Will; these are friends who have used my computer or I've opened projects on their computers, and it saves those workspaces as well. Thank you so much for watching. In the next lesson, we're going to learn how to import and organise our footage.