EDITING WORKFLOW SERIES: Ep. 03 - Premiere Pro Workspaces & Bins
Hey, I'm Ben Gill with Oxenfree Film and Motion. And welcome back to our Editing Workflow series.
In the last episode, we covered how we ingest our footage through Hedge, an offloaded software that could create multiple backups of your media quickly and easily. In this episode, we'll be showing you how our Workspaces and Bins are set up in Premiere Pro.
Our premiere project files are organized in a way that mimics the folder structures we talked about in episode one. Since we have all our footage safely copied over onto our hard drive, we can create a new Premiere Pro project file.
In our case, we usually have a premade template that we create ahead of time either through a post case, or a zip folder that we keep on our cloud drives.
So this is our folder structure. And if you go to the project files folder, and then the premier folder, you'll see that the project file template is already in here.
If you double click it, it will open and prompt you to rename it. So in our case, we're going to call it the year followed by the month, the day, the client which is ourselves, and the name of this specific project.
As soon as the project file opens, you'll see our ideal layout for our premiere. The biggest thing you'll notice is the program and source monitor are combined rather than side by side. We just noticed that you never really are needing to see both at the same time, and it auto switches depending on what you're doing.
So if you were to double click on a piece of media here, it would open in the source, and then if you went down here, it would immediately go back to the program monitor.
And then the other thing we did was we maximized these vertical panels, the default always keeps the project pane, but in a small quadrant. That's not really practical for how much you need to be scrolling up and down, and for the sizing of these different panels. That's just not the way that these panes are laid out, they're laid out very vertically.
This allows you to just be able to see everything that you need to see, and you can keep it as thin as you need. But if you look at like a panel like metric, for example, this just makes it so much easier because if it was like this, you really just can't see anything. So this just embraces vertical panels in the way that they were designed.
So, in the bottom here, we have our master clock, the duration of our sequence, and the IN-to-OUT duration. You can resize this to whatever. So you'll see this is changing to match this timecode here.
The two monitor setup is pretty similar to the one monitor setup, but we have just a little more screen real estate to move things around. You'll see that we still have the combined source and program monitor, but now they're much bigger, we have the project pane as the far left side, because ideally, you don't need to keep coming back to this.
And then we have the effect controls and Lumetri. We felt like these were the two panels that were needed to be seen separate from the Project panel as often as possible, and we don't really want to cover up the Project panel. Since the screens are set up left and right, this just keeps the visuals of the edit right next to the timeline. So it's really easy to see back and forth.
And so the beauty of keeping all of this stuff on this page, is that you have all this space for a timeline. So you can get real on the weeds here and have multiple things stacked on top of each other, and especially comes in handy for our Pancake Timeline, which we'll cover in the next episode coming soon.
This is just our preferred workspace. But you can of course customize the layout however you want to by moving windows around and adjusting the sizes of each window.
If you want to start with our layout and modify it from there, you can also just download the zip folder with our folder structure and open up this project to modify as you see fit.
You'll notice in the project pane, we have bins that more or less correspond to our hard drive folder structure with a couple of changes just to match how we work in Premiere.
Just going through these real quick, we have our graphics set up at the top, followed by our media which can be further separated into days. This one already has a day one. Then we have scenes, which already has some setup for us so that we can move very quickly. And even has a selects timeline set up for scene one, which is already set to 1080p and 23.976fps, which is typically the media that we're working with or resizing too.
Anyway, we have a color files folder, file for our sound mixes from a sound designer from Audition. Sound effects folder for sound effects ADR and Foley and music folder. And our bottom one is the sequences.
So the beauty of using a project file that already has these bins pre-created is you can just start editing, you don't have to worry about organizing at the front end. Because a lot of times when you sit down at the computer, you need to get going as soon as possible.
A lot of times, this is where corners are cut, you're like, "well, I don't need to organize things, I can just throw everything into the product panel and figure it out later." Whereas in this structure, everything has a place to go.
Now that our Premiere Pro is set up the way we like it, we can start importing media.
Click on the media browser pane and look at your media on the hard drive. Make sure in the project window that you click on the destination banner where do you want your files to import.
In this case, it will be under Media Day01, then you can select multiple folders or cards at a time in the media browser, then right-click and begin importing them.
You can do this for your audio as well. This is the safest way to import your media into Premiere, rather than dragging and dropping from finder into the project window. It just makes sure that all the files that you want are actually carried over and have the correct settings.
For some reason like Red files or 3D files, If you drag them from Finder, Premiere doesn't really recognize them correctly, but if you do it through media browser it does.
So now we have all of these folders in here and we can further divide these now by making it like a video bin, put all our video in there and put our audio cues in here, clean that up. Now you'll see that it retained the folder structure, but it got rid of all the folders that we don't need. So now that everything is imported correctly, we can start renaming our files.
When you have slated clips, it's really easy to rename in Premiere. If you click the "icon" view and hit tilde, we can make them as big as possible. And then you can see just from the first frame of the slate, the DP did us a solid and made sure the first frame was slate, we can quickly rename them.
If you click a clip and hit tab, it will give you the renaming. You can just keep hitting tab and fill these in superfast just by going off of the slate.
And then for audio, unfortunately, you're going to have to listen to them for the most part if you want to rename them before you start synching, and this way you'll be able to know what clip goes with which clip.
So you could do the same thing here where you double click the bin, the tabbing only works in the icon view, but you can easily just tab through all these listening to them, double-clicking them, and then moving on to the next one.
And then once you have them ready to go, you can grab the two files that you want to sync, merge clips, and then we have a timecode slate so we can sync with timecode. You could even remove the audio from the AV clip if you're very confident. I'm going to keep it unchecked because sometimes the timecode it syncs is not perfect.
If you didn't have time code and you wanted to sync something, you might be able to merge just by the audio, and choosing the track or just the mix down and hit OK, that might do the job, it's a little hit and miss.
Another way you could do it is by the endpoints, so if we just scrub through, if you have audio while scrubbing on, this is actually much easier 'cause you can hear it as you're scrubbing. But so we just want to find the exact frame where the slate comes down. So if we shuttle that frame there. And boom. So we'll put our endpoint there and if I hit OK, you'll see it'll create a new instance of the clips sync together here.
And you can quickly double-check to make sure that your sync is correct by just playing your merged clip. And so you can do this with all the clips in your media, and then once you're done, you can twirl these down and then start taking your time with the media for the different scenes and put them in their appropriate scene folder.
So here's the finished project file or this hotel project that we were synching earlier. And I can just show you where all the media ended up, you can kind of see all the media for each scene, it's kind of separated out, so it's really easy to find.
And then in our sequences, we kinda have just an archive folder with our old sequences. And just so we only see the two that are most recent and important. So this is our current cut and this is our selects timeline.
So again, the benefit of having all these individual folders ahead of time is that, you don't need to waste any time organizing your premiere before you start cutting. And this way, someone else could jump into your project as well, and very quickly find the same media because it's very straightforward. And that's about it for episode three.
In the next episode, we'll begin actually editing and cover how we edit our Premiere Pro projects implementing a technique that David Fincher's team uses called the Pancake Timeline, which is a stack sequence in Premiere.
Now we want to hear from you. How do you set up your workspace? Do you have any feedback on how we set up ours? Is there anything that we're missing that would help us move faster, we're always looking for ways to innovate on our processes and workflow.
If you liked this video, we have two more episodes coming out very soon. So, please consider subscribing if you like this content.
And again, I'm Ben Gill with Oxenfree Film and Motion and we'll see you next time. Thanks for watching.
