13.1 Using the Freeform View

[MUSIC] In this lesson, you will learn how to use the free form view to review, organize and prepare media for your projects. [MUSIC] I have a project here that I just started to put together that contains several clips of a farming or agriculture nature. I found all of these clips on Envato Elements. And I want to show you how to use the Freeform view to perhaps more creatively or more visually put these clips together and start organizing them in a visual kind of work flow or flow chart sort of method to get a better idea of what your edit is going to look like. Using the Project panel is plenty fine for a lot of projects, but it doesn't give you the same sort of visual flowchart feel as the freeform view. So let's check it out. You may want to switch over to the assembly workflow, and I'll just reset this so that it looks very similar to yours. And then if you have your footage in a bin or a folder, go ahead and double click that to bring it in its own panel here. So we can work with just the footage here, although you can use the freeform view in the project panel, but it will include all your sequences and all your other items. I'm just going to show you the Freeform view for just my footage items here. So right down at the bottom of the project panel, there's the Freeform view button and you can adjust the size of your clips here. I'm just gonna kinda leave them about like this. And in fact, I'm just gonna put this footage bin panel here, full screen by hitting the tilde key. And what the Freeform view allows you to do is to arrange these clips in a non grid sort of way. You can overlap. You can do a lot of the same things that you can do in the project panel, but you can kind of lay things out visually from top to bottom or left to right in a way that makes sense for you, visually. Now I'm just going to reset these to the grid by name. And I'll just go through how I might start laying this out in the Freeform view. So you can see I have a number of clips here. Some of them have people in them and if I hover over these clips, they will scrub. By default the poster frame is the beginning of the clip. But if for any of these you wanted to set a different poster frame, for example, the poster frame for this clip right here is not this guy smiling, but it's a nice clip of this farmer gentleman, smiling. So we may want to set that as the poster frame, maybe something like that. You can right click on it and then choose set poster frame. If we wanted to set another poster frame, maybe this guy holding the clipboard here, it would be shift p on the keyboard, so let's see shift p. You can also use J, K and L to scrub through these clips. So we can set an in and an out point here. So now, we can start kind of laying this out in a way that makes sense and get really creative with how things look here. So I might want to start with, let's see, I have this nice shot of the sunrise. And I can just take all these and kind of stack them. Whoa, maybe stack them over here. I'll make a little room and all, start to lay this out over here on the right side. Going to change this clip size here to extra large, maybe this will be the shot that I start on. You can also adjust what is displayed here. If you click on the little three bar or hamburger menu fly out here, we can change the Freeform view options. And we can change the metadata one from name to whatever metadata item you want. But you can also change the metadata to line to something like a video duration. That'll give you an idea of how long this clip is here, 11 seconds, that's probably too long. I'll just trim up that out point there. And maybe I'd like to go to this farmer guy here because that's also kind of sunrisey sort of looking. I can set these clips over here to maybe small. There we go and I can also realign those to a grid. And then I might want some other kind of aggro looking stuff here. Maybe we show a bare field. Then we show the guy doing some seeds here, that makes sense to me. Then we show the guy planting the seeds. That's looking pretty good. Maybe he's gonna walk and evaluate. Okay, I'm following here, then we go down here, we see the overhead shot of the tractor here. That's pretty cool. We don't necessarily have to keep all these separated here. We can also sort of overlap these if you want as well. You can kind of arrange it however you need to. We can get into, Maybe this shot here. Well, maybe come back to farmer guy, show some cows here. See what do we have here? Get some eggs. Maybe we'll show these guys here. This is a great shot of horses. It doesn't really fit with the farm vibe, but it's a great shot so I might put it right there. Maybe we'll come down to one more nice aerial clip, right here. That's fantastic. We'll get this guy smiling because that's very nice. And then maybe we'll end with that shot there. But before there, maybe we have this clip right here and then this guy looking at some stuff. Cool. So that's our arrangement. That's kind of the flow that I want to have for this project. Now, if I like this, if I feel like this is pretty solid, what I can do is save this layout. And that way if I want to start something new, if I want to, let's say, reset this to a grid, based on the file name, I can come back to restore layout farm one. And I have this laid out just like I like. You can also label clips. So if you wanted to maybe label all of these as teal, maybe label all of these as blue so that they're just distinguished a little bit differently or labeled a little bit differently in the timeline. You can do that as well. And I'm just going really quickly. And then once you have it kind of laid out in a way that makes sense, you can control click these, and you can see as I hover over these overlapped items here, they pop up. So I can click them and I can right click, and then choose New Sequence from Clip. And then check this out, right over here in the timeline I've created a new sequence which has the name of the first clip that I used or I selected, and now I have this nice little project here. And all those edits with my in and my out point Are all updated here. I see that I have a little variation in the clip signs so I might change my sequence setting, make this a 1080 comp and then right click in all these and set to frame size. There we go. Nice. Check this out. I got a nice flow of things. Cool, and that was the Freeform view. It's a nice tool to be able to visually lay things out. Something that you couldn't really do very easily in the project panel, and it's definitely worth experimenting coming up with different views. You can create a completely different edit just by arranging the clips differently in this Freeform view. And you can do that a lot faster than you could sorta picking up individual clips here in the timeline or even the project panel to rearrange things and then create a new sequence. Coming up in the next lesson, you're gonna learn how to use the auto reframe effect to crop your videos to different aspect ratios. So, check that out, coming up next. [MUSIC]