Instant Save

One thing Premiere users will fail to locate is a Save button. This is because Liquid Edition automatically saves your work thirty times a second, which means even if a crash should occur, you are unlikely ever to lose any of your work.

Undoing information from previous sessions

The save function also retains all the undo information from previous sessions, allowing you to undo several days' worth of alterations if you needed to. This undo information is retained even if you close the program and switch off the computer.

If you have ever watched several hours of editing go south courtesy of a program crash only moments before you thought, "When was the last time I saved this?" you will really appreciate this particular chore being done automatically.

If you are worried about overwriting something important, Liquid Edition also allows you to save various copies of Projects which you can refer back to.

Tip

• If a crash should occur, Liquid Edition will always restart the Timeline with a new empty sequence. Don't panic; your sequence is safe; it's just hidden from view. Go to the Sequence drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the interface and you will find your sequence there; usually it is the next one down on the list.

How Nonlinear Editing Actually Works

The important thing to remember about nonlinear editing is that it's a safe, nondestructive form of editing that does not alter the actual clip stored on your hard drive. You can:

• Alter the length of that clip.

• Add a filter to it.

• Change its color tones.

• Speed it up or slow it down.

…anything you likeit doesn't matter because the original clip will always remain intact. This is creativity without the worry.

How does Liquid Edition do this?

By using the original clip only as a reference point, the software can display a proxy version created from temporary files stored in memory or on the hard drive. If you decide the media clip should lose 10 seconds from the start and 30 seconds from the finish, Liquid Edition won't actually delete 40 seconds of media; it will just adjust the way in which it looks at and displays that media clip. Similarly, if you decided to adjust the red tonal color of a media clip, then the software would simply create proxy files to display a red media clip but leave the original clipyep, you guessed itunchanged.

In a nutshell, this means you can happily experiment with your media clips, adding super-looking effects to video, adjusting sound levels, and so on, until you end up producing the most experimental video any art house would be pleased to controversially screen. What's more, you can do all of this secure in the knowledge that your original clips will remain in their original form, ready to be used again in another Projectperhaps one a tad less experimental.

The exceptions to this rule are the commands Consolidate and Condense (covered in Chapter 14, "Advanced Techniques"). These are special functions that will produce copies of the media clips that are different from the original. However, these commands will not delete the original media clip unless you specifically ask for this to be done.