Premiere Pro's Interface

The main interface of Premiere Pro, which is practically unchanged since Premiere Pro 1. If you are used to Premiere Pro 1 you will feel at home in CS5.5.

1. The project window - fairly similar to most project windows with a series of bin for you to catalogue your footage.  Bins can either be floating or tab as part of the main window so you can have several open at once.  Note the second tab on this window - Resource Central - is a window that you will see in many Adobe programs and contains links to Adobe information on-line, free tutorials on Adobe TV, and free downloadable title templates.

2. The source window- drag clips in here to set in and out points. You can choose to see the picture or the sound and cut on either.  When showing the sound you can even zoom the waveform display vertically so you can see small changes in the audio.

3. The destination window - this shows the edit on the timeline.  You can also double click on the picture and some handles will appear to help you scale clips.

4. The timeline where you layout everything.   Tracks can be dragged to practically any hieght you like, video can be displayed with just the head frame as shown or a filmstrip and you can see various effect keyframes on the timeline.

5. Media Browser, Information, history and effects windows.  the Media Browser is designed to help import card-based footage, the information window shows useful information on a clip or timeline (on the timeline is will show the source timecode of every clip at the playhead);  a standard Adobe history palette so you can easily undo and redo many actions; and the effects window showing all the audio and video effects and transitions available. This list is huge, but thankfully you just enter the first few letters of the effect you want and all the effects with those letters appear - enter "time" for example and you see all your time based effects.

6. Audio meters & tools - Premiere Pro has two mixers - the small version shown here and a large version which shows the levels per track and also has controls that allow you to apply an audio effect to a complete track. mix surround sound and route tracks to submix tracks.  The tools are pretty standard and mainly unchanged since the original (not Pro) version of Premiere and includes ripple and rolling edit tools, slipping and sliding tools, a razor for cutting, and zooming and pen tools.

7, Choose your workspace - the drop down list shows all your possible workspaces including any you have made yourselves.  Workspaces are just different arrangements of the windows and you may have one layout which is good for effects, another for editing etc..  Workspaces are saved as part of the project so if you create a workspace when working on a different computer simply bring the project onto your main machine and open it, and the workspace comes too.

If you are still using Premiere 6.5 then the interface of  Premiere Pro will fell different.  However it is still based on the same principles as old Premiere and the closest program.  We have shown many people various editing programs as an alternative when they are thinking of moving up from Premiere 6.5 to something better and most feel at home as soon as they see the Premiere Pro interface.

The Premiere Pro timeline. 

Here you can see a timeline with one clip and one title.  The clip has been expanded to we can see the thumbnails, and is also showing a complete filmstrip of every frame that will fit into the display.

The audio for the clips has also been expanded and you can see the audio is only on one channel (we used an external microphone on the camera resulting in audio on one channel only).  You can also see the track header which has icons which let you switch tracks on and off, lock tracks, turn the display of effect keyframes on and off and is used by the "track patching" (a feature introduced in CS4).

The different colours at the top of the timeline indicate how easy the footage is to play.  Completely blank means the footage is extremely easy.  Yellow means there is some kind of effect (colour correction, scaling or simply the clip does not match the timeline - for example and HD clip on an SD timeline), but Premiere can play it anyway.  RED means the clip probably cannot be played unless it is rendered.  This screen shot was taken with the MERCURY PLAYBACK ENGINE turned off - hence the need to render the title on track 2.  If the MERCURY PLAYBACK ENGINE was turned on this timeline would easily play without any rendering.

No A & B tracks

In the original Premiere there were two main tracks - A & B and if you wanted to use a transition you had to put the two video clips involved on these tracks and put the transition between them.  Transitions could ONLY go between the A and B tracks.  This mimicked old fashion recording decks where you would have two video machines - A & B and a machine that did wipes between the two.  

Now everything is non-linear and transitions can go anywhere you want if does not make sense to keep the old A & B tracks and all the editing programs have gotten rid of them.  This actually gives you a lot more freedom as transitions can go on any track and to put a transition between two clips you just put them next to each other and put the transition on top.

Some people lament the passing of A & B tracks - well in Premiere you can still see an A & B view by looking in the EFFECTS CONTROL WINDOW shown here.  You can change the start and end point of the transition and even shuffle the transition up and down the two clips.  All this can be done on the timeline as well but it is nice to still have access to an A & B like view in the ECW.

The Effects Control Window

The EFFECTS CONTROL WINDOW (or ECW) is where you control all the parameters of the effects (audio and video) that you use inside Premiere Pro.  It is very closely modelled on the way Adobe After Effect's timeline works - which is great because once you know the Premiere ECW you get a head start on using After Effects as well.

Each clip automatically has several attributes - 2D motion, scaling, opacity, flicker removal, time remapping and volume. If you want to change the size of a clip you just click on it and adjust parameters in the ECW. You can even just click on the clip in the destination window and wireframe handles appear around the picture - just pick it up and resize away!

The ECW has a huge amount of control - including various ways to change the way the picture moves through the keyframes. You can have auto bezier which adds an automatic ease in and out as it moves through each point - or choose a mode where you have bezier handles which allows you to control the curve and flow of the motion.

The keyframes are actually pinned to an exact point on the clip - so trim the end of the clip off and you may trim off the final keyframe, again this can be very useful.

Because this mimics the After Effects control window, if you copy a clip from the Premiere timeline into AE which has motion attributes attached then these are still there when you are in After Effects. This means you can layout basic effects in Premiere, then open the timeline in After Effects and tweak them to your heart's content until you get exactly the result you want.

If you have the Adobe Production Studio then you can take your final AE composition and put it back onto the Premiere timeline, without rendering through a feature called Dynamic Link. The composition then gets rendering in Premiere Pro with all the other effects. The beauty of this is that if you change anything about the composition in After Effects, then your changes are automatically shown when you pop back into Premiere Pro.

Nest timelines

You can put one timeline inside another - known as NESTING.  This is very handy - you can group several clips together and apply the same effect to all. Or you can have many versions of the same edit in one place - meaning you can edit, keep the original version and work on a copy, play around with the edit but easily return to the original. 

It is also very handy for splitting a long edit into smaller managable sections.  A wedding for example could be 4 timelines - getting ready, ceremony, photographs, speeches, all combined together into one Master timeline. 

Premiere Pro CS5 even has a command that lets you select several clips on the timeline and nest then into a new timeline in one click.

Proper track patching and targeting

There are two ways to get a clip onto the timeline - by dragging the clip with a mouse or using a button or keyboard shortcut.  If using a button you need a way to tell Premiere where a clip is going and what happens to the other clips around it.  With CS4 Adobe introduced proper TRACK PATCHING, with sync locks per track and the ability to enable and disable tracks so you could control exactly how a clip was inserted and what happens to the clips around it.  If you are used to a program like Avid Media Composer you would wonder Premiere users could live without track patching - well now they have it!

If you are used to putting clips on the timeline by dragging and dropping then you can practically ignore the track patching!

Preferences

* How long a still image defaults to (although you can drag it our to be as long as you like)
* How the timeline will move when playing - page scroll means when you get to the end of the visible timeline the whole timeline shifts forward by another window, where as another option, SMOOTH SCROLL, means the playhead stays in the centre of the screen and the timeline moves around it.
* Whether you show the keyframes on the timeline or not - a really useful recent addition for me personally because when keyframes were shown I would constantly grab the wrong thing on the clip and accidentally change the opacity of a clip - now I can have the keyframes turned off as a default and turn them on when I need them.
* Default scale to frame size - when you load a clip into Premiere that does not match the timeline Premiere will keep the original resolution and just use a section of the video or still image.  With this box checked all clips will be scaled to fit automatically (which of course you can change later).
* When you open a new bin does it open in a new window, in place or in a new tab.

There are lots of preference like this so you can make Premiere do what you want it to do and speed up your editing.

Customise the keyboard shortcuts

If you learn the keyboard shortcuts for a program you will be able to edit faster.  Many Premiere Pro keyboard shortcuts are still the same as they were in earlier version of Premiere - space to play a clip, J, K & L for jogging, arrow keys for moving one frame forward or backward, I for in and O for out etc...

However you can change the shortcuts to anything you like - just fire up the keyboard customisation dialogue box, fine the command and change the shortcut.

With CS5.5 Adobe have added a search box to the keyboard shortcuts customisation list.  Just type in the word for which you are looking -EDIT in the case opposite - and you see all the commands with the word EDIT.