2 Changing Your General Settings

#2 Changing Your General Settings

Technically, you can't change your General settings; they're permanently grayed out as shown in Figure 2a. However, if you import a Premiere Pro project into another project, the imported project will assume the General settings of the project into which it's been imported.

Figure 2a. Yikes! How do you change the General presets? They're all grayed out!

Say, for example, you originally produced an HDV project using the HDV preset to render the result back to tape. Then your client asks for a 4:3 SD DVD. Rather than starting from scratch or blindly exporting a 4:3 file that could wreak havoc on titles and framing, you can remedy the situation by doing the following:

1.	Create a new 4:3 project file.
2.	Using the File > Import command (and not the File > Open Project command), import the HDV project into the new one (Figure 2b). Figure 2b. Fortunately, Premiere Pro allows you to import a project into another project, effectively changing the General presets to the new settings.

Changing the Default Number of Audio and Video Tracks

The fourth window in the Project Settings dialog box (Figure 2a) is the Default Sequence window. This is where you can control the default number of audio and video tracks that appear with each new project.

Premiere will import all files associated with the project and store them in a separate bin in your Project panel. It will then apply the new project settings to all sequences you've imported into the project. Presto, change-o, you've got new General settings, albeit in a different project.