14 Previewing with the Work Area Bar

#14 Previewing with the Work Area Bar

Though Premiere Pro's unrendered real-time transitions are usually accurate enough, you should always check these scene transition points with rendered audio and video, just to be sure. You do so by rendering a specific area of your project known as the work area. The work area is designated by the gray bar found immediately beneath the time ruler above the timeline (Figure 14a).

Figure 14a. Let's render the transitions. Click and drag the handles of the work area bar so it's just outside all the edits you want to preview.

As a default, the work area stretches over the entire project, which means that the markers used to adjust the beginning and end of the bar are generally not visible when you're zoomed in as we are in Figure 14a.

To render a specific area, do the following:

1.	Double-click the work area bar to make the handles appear within the current viewable timeline area; Premiere Pro will insert handles at the edges of the timeline.
2.	Drag the handles over the target preview area.
3.	Click and drag the grab handle in the middle of the bar to move the work area bar itself. (If you click anywhere else, you'll just move the current-time indicator to that location.)
4.	Once you've set the work area bar in the desired area, press the Enter key to start the preview. If the area is as tiny as in our example, it should only take a few minutes to render before playing (Figure 14b). Figure 14b. Preview should be only a minute or two away because you're rendering so few frames. The Work Area Bar During Rendering The work area bar can also limit the footage produced by Premiere Pro during actual rendering, and thus reduce the time required to render. For example, if you just want to render a short chunk of video to burn to DVD for a quick test, or get a representative sample of how your video will look at a given bit rate for streaming, you can set the work area as described here, and then choose to render only the work area. (See #71 for more details.)