Chapter 1: Organization & File Management: “Edit from Chaos”
Set yourself up for success by building good habits early on, expecting to eventually work with a team or on much more complex projects.
File structure + organization is crucial. Store and backup media where you can find it using a system that makes sense to you. You will be shown different ways that work under certain conditions, but this is the way that works best for me. Copy it, or do it your own way, but make sure you are at the very least organized.
Open the most updated Premiere Pro. If this is your first time, using your Finder, locate the Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app, or sign in via the website.
When first opening Premiere, you have the following choices to begin with a personal, teams or rush project:
- Create New Project – Open a brand new personal project
- Open Project – Open an existing personal project
- Create New Team Project – Work with others in the same project and give/receive feedback
- Open Team Project – Open existing Teams project
- Open Premiere Rush Project – User-friendly video editor alternative designed for content creators and vloggers to edit-on-the-go.
Under Templates, you will be redirected to use free templates provided by Adobe Express, if you would like to explore that option. But once you chose a template, you will edit in Express.
There is also the option to learn the latest new tool (e.g. The new AI Object Mask tool) or navigate out of Premiere to training videos provided by Adobe: in getting started, organizing your workspace, timeline basics, editing tools and techniques, audio editing, advanced project management, editing techniques, media intelligence and effects and social media and final export, etc.
Once in the opening window, select the blue button ‘New Project.’
- *Fill in ‘Project Name’ + set ‘Location’ to save Premiere Project to specific place, safely on your external hard drive. *Do not save to a default folder in your computer. Premiere will take up storage to run; potentially slowing down your computer + making it difficult to export your final videos.
*VIDEO TUTORIAL COMING SOON.
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Chapter 2: Importing + Saving
Let’s explore the Import window, where you have the option to transfer + organize media early on, if you so choose. Or ‘Skip’ this step to move on to the Edit Window.
In the Edit window, import media in the lower left Project panel. Create bins to MIRROR the file organizational structure of media folders on your external hard drive. *Once media is imported into Premiere, DO NOT rename or move original media on your external drive or a red ‘Media Offline’ error message will come up due to Premiere being unable to link to media. Think of Premiere as only borrowing media from your external hard drive. Don’t break that link by moving or renaming files. Rename or organize within Premiere bins instead.
Now, set your Auto Save and Scratch Discs (File > Preferences) at the top menu.
- Set Auto Save to 5 mins but be sure to manually ‘Command-S’ (Save) often!
- Set Scratch Discs to ‘Scratch’ folder.
*VIDEO TUTORIAL COMING SOON.