Overview
This article will cover the basics of Adobe Premiere. Premiere is available in all of our labs in the DFL (6th Floor Ansin) and DPL (8th Floor Ansin), so come on by to get some hands on experience with the program.
We recommend learning Premiere if you aren't familiar with any editing programs. It is far more user-friendly than Avid, and Premiere is increasingly able to hold it's own against other programs. As with any editing program, Premiere will take time to learn and even more time to master. Our advice? Practice. Learn Premiere when you actually have a project that needs to be cut. Doing so will force you to become familiar with the program and make future editing projects seem less intimidating.
Getting Started
Creating a Project
- Open Adobe Premiere Pro and create a New Project, then give it a name.
- Under "Location," use the "Browse" button to navigate to the folder on your external hard drive where you want to save your project. It should be a completely separate one from where you saved your media files.
- Under the "Scratch Disks" tab, make sure all of the drop-down menus are set to "Same as Project." This will save the various files listed to the folder you selected above.
File Management
One of the nicest features of Premiere is that it keeps file management nice and simple. Your entire project will be saved in a .prproj file on your external hard drive. Keep in mind that this file does not contain any media, making it easy to transfer from place to place, but also making it easy to be disconnected from your media should you separate the two. We recommend always keeping your Premiere project file on the same hard drive as your media, and it's also highly recommended to back up that hard drive to at least one other location. Back up early and back up often.
One disadvantage of the way Premiere saves is that it's easy to continuously save over your previous project file. Good file management dictates that you keep old project files in case of major failures later on or even if there's simply something you liked better the way you had it earlier. To achieve this in Premiere, simply save your project with a dated filename (i.e."ProjectName_01-23-16") each time you open it to work on. Now, anytime you save while editing, you're only overwriting your day's progress.