Open Premiere to your workspace. If you just finished transferring clips to your "scratch disk," they should show up in your workspace's Project window. But you may have shut down Premiere without saving your project and have just reopened it to find a Project window staring blankly at you--just as it's doing in Figure 4.1. Not to worry. Figure 4.1. An empty Project window. Fill it up by right-clicking inside it and selecting Import, File.
The Project window is simply a means to help you organize and access your "assets"--video clips, audio cuts, and graphics. The Project folder is basically just a collection of links. Only the names of your assets will reside in the Project window. The files themselves --the video clips and so on-- remain in their scratch disk file folder(s).
I'll assume you need to gather your assets. As usual with Premiere you have several ways to do that. Here's the one I like. Right-click anywhere within the white area of the Project window (except for the little monitor in the upper-left corner). Figure 4.2 shows you how this action opens one of several right-click-accessible menus in Premiere. Figure 4.2. Premiere's right-click menus provide a convenient way to perform many functions. Use the Project window's right-click menu to import your clips to a new project.
Select Import, File and then locate your scratch disk. Once there, select whichever clips you want to use in this project. You can Ctrl-click (Windows) or Shift-click (Mac) filenames one-at-a-time to select more than one clip.
Now that you've selected your files, you'd think you could just drag and drop them to your Project window, but Premiere won't let you do that. Instead you click the oddly named "Open" button, which closes the Import window, sends the selected filenames to the Project window in the editing workspace, and returns you there.
Take a look at your assets. Figure 4.3 is representative of what you might see. The icons tell a story:
Figure 4.3. The Project window filled with clips. The icons visually characterize each clip's file type.
Play around with the Project window a bit. Just as I did in Figure 4.4, drag the window's right side to your workspace border. Turns out there's a lot of information associated with each listing. You can sort on each column's field by clicking that column header. Clicking Name alphabetizes your clips, and clicking Media Type groups them by, well, media type. Note that Video Info shows their resolution. Figure 4.4. Expanding the Project window reveals more information about your clips.
Right-click a blank space within the Project window and select Project Window Options (if you right-click a clip you'll get a clip menu). Figure 4.5 shows a collection of check marks that indicate what columns will show up in the window you just stretched to the right. Figure 4.5. You access the Project Window Options dialog box by right-clicking within the Project window. This sets what will display in the expanded Project window.
The drop-down list lets you change the appearance of the clips in the Project window from the default List View to Thumbnail View or Icon View. Thumbnail View displays the first image of a video or graphic along with its name and resolution. Icon does something similar but is more an unordered collection of thumbnails on a page than an ordered list.
I prefer the list approach. It has more readily available information and consumes less processor power than graphics-oriented listings. |