3.2 Organize

Organizing your files outside of Premiere is smart, but keeping things organized inside of Premiere is critical. In this lesson you will learn how to organize your files inside of Premiere. So organizing your assets and your files inside of Premiere is pretty simple, and you can choose how much organization you want to use depending on the complexity of your project. If you have a project that only has three or four assets, you may not need to make a whole bunch of folders and change label colors and rename your clips. But as your projects become more complicated, it's going to really help to keep things organized. One of the easiest ways to keep your project organized is to use bins. Now bins are basically video editing jargon for folders, you see they even look like a folder icon. And this is going to be very similar to how you keep your folders organized, or how I hope you keep your folders organized outside of Premiere. You can see that when I imported these files right here, Premiere preserved the folder structure for me, and these files are organized exactly like I had them organized outside of Premiere, which is very handy. When you're importing things from the media browser that doesn't always happen if you have to go in and grab those MTS files, like we talked about, they are not going to come in, In that folder structure. They're just going to be imported into the project panel as files. Now, if you have a particular folder selected, if I create a new folder here and I call this C 100 and I go to the media browser, and I select a folder that has some footage from my Canon c 100. So I go in here, C 100 there's that private folder, but double click on that I can see some MTS files. So if I just import one, because I had the C 100 folder selected, it's gonna put this MTS file in that C 100 folder. Otherwise, if I had nothing selected, and I went and imported that file, it's not gonna put that MTS file in a folder. Now this can get very confusing when you have multiple shots from multiple cameras and you have the same exact file names. So if I was shooting with two Canon C100, they would both have the first files listed as 00000.MTS. And that could get very confusing. So making folders and putting those files into folders is a very easy way to keep your projects organized. I'm just gonna undo that last import, because I don't need two versions of that file in there. Often times, if I have more than one folder with video assets in them, I will create another folder called something like footage. And then, I'll take these folders and put them inside the footage folder. In that way when I collapse everything down, it's much neater and it's much tidier. And everything is nice and organized. I also like to create folders for other types of media. So another way you can create a folder is to just drag the files right onto the new bin button. So I might call this still or stills. And then because this is a graphic element, I may drag this into another bin here and call this graphics In that way, if I were to say grab a few photos, I can import these and when I do, I'm going to drop them right into the stills folder. And then I can take these and select them. Drag those to a new bin, and I'll call this photos. So now I'm really starting to get things organized really nicely in my project. If I have any audio assets I like to put those in their own folder, so I'll make an audio folder. If I have any titles, I usually create a folder for all the titles. If I have more than one sequence, I will create a sequence. I'll usually create another folder called Mattes. And inside the Mattes folder I will put color Mattes and inside the Mattes folder I usually will put some different color Mattes. So if I right click over here I can choose new item and then choose colour mat which is almost off the screen here. I can also do it up here, File, New, Color Map. And I can select my settings here. I'm just gonna click okay. And then maybe I'll just make a white Matt. So I'll label this, map. And I'll put that white matt in my Mattes folder. If for me using these bins really helps to keep my projects organized. Now another way you can keep your project organized is by renaming your assets. If I look in my footage folder, and I go down in the Cheryl cookie instructional assets, you'll see that all of these clips here are already named. And that's because these are not the original files from the camera. So to make the files a little bit easier to work with what I did is, I took the raw camera files, and then I edited some shorter clips from them so that we would have something to work with in this course. When I exported those files, I went ahead and name them appropriately so that we could keep track of what files we were using. Normally you're going to be working with raw camera files and they're not gonna have these nice names. They're gonna have the strange manufacturer names like 00000.MTS or MVI_1957.MOV. Just like you find with this file right here. But the problem is when you get a bunch of these files, it can be hard to know which of the files contain what footage. So, one of the ways that you can make that a little bit easier, is just to rename the items or the assets in your project. I'm gonna double click on this clip, and I can see that this file here is a shot of a table with some photos stuff on it. So, if I wanna keep this organized, what I would do is click on the clip and then click over here on the name and now I can rename this. So I may rename this clip Table with Photo Stuff_00000.MTS. Alternatively, I could just name this table with photo stuff, and that's fine too. That's not going to affect the actual file. In fact, if I wanted to find where this file was located, what I could do is right click on it. And right up here, there's an option to reveal in Explorer. And when I do, it's going to pull that file up. And I see it's right here. So renaming the clips and renaming the assets in your project is a great way to keep things organized. This also helps with photos as well. You can see I have three photos that I imported here that are named 7D photo_IMG_4946. jpg not super helpful. So, I could rename this to something like, Men's shoes, gray background. I could say this is men's shoes, blue background and finally I can say that this is men shoe profile. And this will make it much easier to navigate my project. Especially when it comes to searching for files. Now you see there is a search box up here. So if I wanted to find some of the footage that has eggs in it because I named those clips, I can just type Eggs right up here. And now I can see these two clips are labeled adding the eggs. If I wanna find some of the shoes, just type in shoe. And now I can find those files. So very easy to find files, and it works especially well if you go ahead and rename your clips. Another way you can help keep your project organized is to change the color of the labels. So you can see if I go back into this footage folder here, and I open up these two folders. You can see I have a bunch of clips that are under the wide band here and a bunch of clips that are under the cutaway bend. And over here, all of these are labelled blue. Well, when I'm editing, to make it easier for my eye, I can select these files. And I can right click over here and change the label color to something like violet. Now when these appear on the timeline, they will be violet and they'll be easier to distinguish with the cutaway shots. So using bins, renaming your clips so you can find them easily and search for them. And changing your label colors are three very easy and basic ways to keep your projects organized. In the next lesson, you're gonna learn how to create a sequence and add your assets.