Keith Underdahl

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Adobe Premiere offers a plethora of settings, and you could easily spend a day or two trying to sort through them all. Some settings are immediately relevant to your work; some won't be used until you perform more advanced work. The next few sections show you some key settings that help you make more effective use of Premiere on a daily basis. Setting up your scratch disks The scratch disk is the disk where you store all of your video stuff. When you capture video onto your computer, you capture it to the scratch disk. Likewise, when you want to preview transitions, timelines, effects, and various edits, they must be rendered. Rendering is where the transitions or effects are actually applied to the clips. The rendered clips are stored as preview files on the scratch disk. The scratch disk is your Premiere storage place — your video data bucket, so to speak. If your computer has just one big hard drive, then you won't necessarily have a separate scratch disk. Your scratch disk will actually be a folder on your main hard drive. But if you can get a separate hard drive to use exclusively as a Premiere scratch disk, go for it. Because big and fast hard drives are so cheap these days, there is almost no reason to not have a separate scratch disk. A scratch disk must be not only big, but fast. You'll need a 7200rpm IDE drive at the very least, or if you can afford it, a SCSI drive. If your drive isn't fast enough, you'll drop frames during rendering and when you try to output video to tape. You can choose different scratch disks and folders for different types of files. Premiere will always use whatever location you specify. To set up your scratch disks, follow these steps: 1. On the Premiere menu bar, choose Edit --> Preferences --> Scratch Disks and Device Control. The Preferences dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Configure your storage space using the Scratch Disks settings. 2. Use the Captured Movies menu to adjust the scratch disk setting for clips that you capture using Premiere. When you capture movies from a camera, video deck, or other source, this is where the video files are stored. The default location on a Windows PC is "My Documents." On a Macintosh, the default location is the Adobe application folder on the hard drive where you installed Premiere. To choose a different location, choose Select Folder from the menu. When a standard Browse (Windows) or Finder (Macintosh) dialog box appears, use it to navigate to and select a new disk and folder. 3. Choose a scratch disk for video previews from the Video Previews drop-down menu. When you want to preview part of your project or the whole thing, Premiere must render a preview file. The default location for these preview files is "Same as Project File," which as the name suggests is the folder where your Premiere Project (.PPJ) file is saved. You can select a different folder if you wish. 4. Choose a scratch disk for audio previews from the Audio Previews drop-down menu. Audio must also be rendered before it can be previewed. 5. Click OK when you are done adjusting your Scratch Disk settings. If your computer is on a network, you will be able to choose network drives on other computers when you set up your scratch disks. However, it's not a good idea to use network drives as scratch disks. Most networks are not fast or reliable enough to adequately handle large video files without dropping frames and causing other problems. Customizing other options You can customize what happens when you first start Premiere. Right now you probably see the Load Project Settings dialog box every time you start Premiere. If you wish something else would happen on startup instead, try this: 1. Launch Premiere, and click Cancel to close the Load Project Settings dialog box if it appears. 2. Choose Edit --> Preferences --> General and Still Image. The General and Still Image Preferences dialog box appears, as shown in Figure 2. 3. In the Window at Startup drop-down menu, choose None if you don't want any dialog boxes or windows to appear when you first start Premiere. Other "Window at Startup" options include the following: • Choose Open Dialog if you want the Open Project dialog box to open at startup. • Choose New Project if you want the New Project Settings dialog box to appear at startup. Figure 2: Change what happens when Premiere starts up. While you have the Preferences dialog box open, open the menu at the top of the dialog box and choose Auto Save and Undo. You should now see a group of Auto Save options. If you place a check mark next to "Automatically Save Projects," Premiere automatically saves your work every five minutes (or you can choose another interval). Auto Save can work in conjunction with the very cool Project Archive feature. When you set Premiere to automatically save your work periodically, and you have numbers listed next to "Maximum Files in Archive" and "Maximum Project Versions," Premiere then saves a different version of your project every time it autosaves — which can really help you out if you want to go back to an earlier version of the project. The archive files are saved in the same folder as your main .PPJ (project) file, so opening an archived version is as easy as choosing File --> Open. Because .PPJ files are small, you can safely use the Project Archive feature without eating up a lot of disk space. In the Preferences dialog box, you set how many versions you want saved. When the specified limit is reached, the oldest version is deleted in favor of the new one. Finally, open the menu at the top of the Preferences dialog box again — and this time, choose Titler. The Titler options appear, as shown in Figure 3. Here you can choose a specific Startup Template for when you first launch the Titler, and you can choose which characters to use for font and style samples. But the most important options here are the two check boxes: Show Safe Title Margins — Virtually all TVs overscan the video image. Overscan means that some of the video image is actually cut off at the edges of the screen. When designing video for TV viewing, you must take overscan into account. The title's safe margin is actually a border that appears on the video image. If you keep your titles inside that border, the words shouldn't get cut off by overscan. Even if you're only developing video for the Web or other digital source, it's wise to keep the title's safe margins on at all times. Show Safe Action Margins — Action can usually be shown closer to the edge of the screen than titles, so the safe margins for action are closer to the edges of the video image than are the safe margins of titles. You may find that setting safe margins for actions isn't very useful when you're designing titles (unless you have animated objects or graphics in your titles). Figure 3: Use the Preferences dialog box to control default settings for the Titler. Setting online preferences Adobe wants to help ensure that you have the latest and greatest version of Premiere. The company frequently releases updates and makes them available to you for free download online. The only catch is that you have to actually remember to check for those updates, unless you tell Premiere to automatically check for you. To get that automatic machinery in place, follow these steps: 1. From the Premiere menu bar choose Edit --> Preferences --> Online Settings. A small Adobe Online Preferences dialog box appears. 2. From the Check for Updates drop-down menu, choose an interval at which you would like Premiere to check for updates. You can tell Premiere to check for updates daily, weekly, monthly, or never. 3. To check for updates right now, click Updates. Premiere will go online (if your computer has an Internet connection setup and active) and check for updates on the Adobe Web site. If updates are available, they will be downloaded and instructions on-screen will help you through the installation process. 4. When you're done fiddling with online settings, click OK to close the dialog box.

Article / Updated 03-26-2016

Markers can be extremely helpful as you work in the Timeline. You can use markers as reference points for key events, visual indicators as you edit, or cues for events such as Web links or chapter references. Any markers that were added to a source clip before it was added to the Timeline will also appear in the Timeline. Markers that are added only to the Timeline, however, will not be added to the source clips. Timeline markers appear on the Timeline ruler, as shown in Figure 1. Figure 1: Timeline markers appear on the Timeline ruler. Adding markers to the Timeline Markers can serve various purposes. Figure 1 contains a Timeline marker to indicate where a specific visual event occurs. You could use that marker as a reference later if you planned to edit in some audio that needed to align with that marker. To add a marker to the Timeline: 1. Move the edit line to the exact location where you want to place a marker. If necessary, use the Frame Jog or Frame Forward/Frame Back buttons in the Monitor to move frame by frame to the correct location. 2. Choose Timeline --> Set Timeline Marker --> and choose a marker from the menu that appears. The marker will now appear on the Timeline ruler. Pretty easy, huh? If you ever want to get rid of a marker, simply choose Timeline --> Clear Timeline Marker --> and sentence one of the listed markers to the electronic ether. Moving around with markers Moving around in the Timeline is perhaps the most fun way to use Timeline markers. As you're working through a project can say to myself, "I will probably want to come back to this point." That's your cue to create a marker. Eventually you have a collection of markers that you can use to quickly jump back and forth in the project. There are several methods for moving around in the Timeline using markers: Choose Timeline --> Go to Timeline Marker --> and then choose a marker. On the keyboard, press Command+Shift+Up arrow (Mac) or Ctrl+Shift+Up arrow (Windows) to move to the first marker in the Timeline. Substitute the down arrow to move to the last marker in the Timeline. In Windows, right-click the Timeline ruler, choose Go to Timeline Marker --> and select the marker to which you want to jump. Using Timeline markers for fun and profit Perhaps the greatest revolution in home multimedia entertainment that is happening right now involves DVDs. The Digital Versatile Disc is quickly becoming the standard for mass-market video distribution. After a few minutes spent watching a movie on DVD, it's easy to see why so many folks are eager to abandon their rattling old VHS tapes. One of the unique DVD features is the ability to quickly jump from scene to scene with the click of a button. No more do we have to wait for a tape to cue forward or back when we want to skip to a specific scene. But when you click that button, how does the DVD player know where the next scene is? Someone who helped prepare that movie for DVD spent some time creating chapter references at key intervals in the program. Premiere lets you create your own chapter references in your projects. Chapter references will not only be useful if you decided to output your movie to DVD but also if you're distributing it online in QuickTime format. The Apple QuickTime Player supports chapter references as well. To create chapter references in your Timeline, first create markers at the desired locations for the references. Then, double-click a marker. The Marker dialog box appears. Enter a name and/or number for the chapter reference in the Chapter field. Click OK when you're done. Another excellent use of markers is to create keyframes. Most codecs (those are the compression/decompression schemes used to compress video for export) use keyframes to efficiently compress video. Rather than save 30 individual frames for one second of video, many codecs save two keyframes — one keyframe shows the first frame of that one second of video, and the second keyframe shows the frame at the end. The codec then extrapolates the difference between those two keyframes during playback. Most codecs automatically set keyframes at specific intervals (once every 30 frames, for example). However, you can specify additional keyframes in certain circumstances. For example, suppose you have a clip that contains a relatively still subject. Then, suddenly, some action explodes onto the scene. If you place a keyframe at the very beginning of the action, most codecs will be able to compress the clip more efficiently. To do so, first set a Timeline marker at the desired frame. Later, when you export the movie, click Settings in the Export Movie dialog box, click Next until you see the Keyframe and Rendering settings, and place a check mark next to the Add Keyframes at Markers option. Note that this option will only be available if the export codec supports keyframes.