Specifications
25
A Digital Video Primer
Staying organized
A short production may include only a few clips; longer productions may require hundreds
or even thousands of assets. With the current propensity for repurposing, it has become more
important than ever for videographers to keep assets well organized. Make sure your soware
includes a good asset management system that lets you preview clips, identify clips visually with
still or poster frames you select, annotate clips with essential information, and easily access
detailed information about all your video and audio assets.
In Adobe Premiere Pro, the Project panel manages all the assets in your video project including
video, audio, stills, titles, and nested timelines. You can organize your assets into folders called
bins, which can be given custom names, such as Scene 12, Voiceovers, or Chase Scene. e
Project panel displays assets and associated metadata in columns, with which you can sort and
search data. e Project window can be displayed in a variety of dierent ways, depending on the
task at hand:
• As shown on the previous page, the Project panel can display Preview and Bin areas in List
view, providing a convenient overview of the les associated with a project.
➤
Preview area: Click the Play button under a thumbnail-sized poster frame to pre-
view a video clip. e Preview area includes basic information about the clip, such
as frames per second and average data rate. e poster frame used to represent a
clip can be changed from the default (rst frame) to any frame you select.
➤
Bin area: e Bin area provides a hierarchical representation of the les in your
project. Use the Search button to nd what you need, fast. Command buttons let
you quickly delete selected clips and bins, and add new items. e elds available in
List view include columns for media start/end, video and audio In and Out points,
oine properties, scene, shot/take, client, log notes, and more. You can rearrange,
add, remove, rename, hide, and show any column. In addition, you can create any
number of user-dened columns that oer text-entry elds or check boxes. For
example, you could create a Legal Signo column and check o each clip as usage
approvals come in for a video shot or piece of audio.
• Icon view: Presents media in an orderly grid. You can select and rearrange icons anywhere in
the grid, even in noncontiguous arrangements, and create storyboards.
The Adobe Premiere Pro Project panel showing Preview and Bin areas
ONLINE AND OFFLINE EDITING
Online editing: In online editing, you assemble and
edit all the elements to create your nal cut. Online
editing used to be done only on high-end worksta-
tions that could meet the quality and data-processing
requirements of broadcast video. Editors who could
not aord an online system had to rent time at a
post-production facility. As personal computers and
aordable workstations have become more powerful,
online editing has become practical for a wider range
of high-quality productions.
For online editing using analog source material, you
capture clips once at the highest level of quality your
computer and peripherals can handle. With standard
DV source material, all editing is typically done
online because DV compression makes standard DV
manageable.
Oine editing: In oine editing, you rst edit a
nal version of your project using low-quality clips.
Then you go into online editing and use the oine
version to create a nal version of the project using
high-quality clips. Oine editing was originally
developed to save money by preparing rough cuts
on less expensive systems. Although oine editing
can be as simple as writing down time points for clips
while watching them on a VCR, it is increasingly done
using personal computers and capable software such
as Adobe Premiere Pro.
If you are working with analog source material,
oine editing techniques can be useful even if your
computer can edit at the quality of your nal cut. By
batch-capturing video using low-quality settings,
you can edit faster, using smaller les. In most cases,
you need only enough quality to identify the correct
beginning and ending frames for each clip. When
you’re ready to create the nal cut, you can redigitize
the video at the nal-quality settings. This is another
example of where the logging and batch-capture
techniques in Adobe Premiere Pro can be useful.
Professional editors looking for a powerful, aordable
oine editor will appreciate the way Adobe Premiere
Pro software facilitates quickly building an oine edit
and exporting an advanced authoring format (AAF)
le. AAF les can be exported from Adobe Premiere
Pro for use with other editing systems. For more
information about AAF les, see “Good housekeep-
ing” on page 45.