Amazing file management tricks to save the day in Premiere Pro

Hi everyone, welcome to the amazing File Management tricks, that are going to save the day in Premiere Pro. I'm trying to sex up this video, it's got some amazing tips and tricks in it, but I kind of had it down as file management, it was like, it's the subgroup that it's in, and I don't want you to go like, "Oh, geez." I'm going to skip old file management, because there's some good ones in here. All right, let's get started.

So first up, if you're playing along, I'm using the last video from the last file, It's got a bunch of stuff that I imported, I'm actually going to import some more of the same, it's going to be weird. So 'Command I', and I'm going to move more from Donut Dynamite. Let's say I wasn't sure, I was like, "Have I got this in here?" I'll just import it again. The weird thing about Premiere Pro, it'll import it twice, which can be really annoying. So what you can do, make sure you're in your 'Project', go to 'Edit', and you can go in here and say, 'Consolidate Duplicates', watch, they just get rid of them all, nice.

The next one is my favorite, no, I've put them in some sort of order of my favorites. So this, this video is destined to get less and less interesting towards the end. There's good ones, I've not included any bad ones, I think, but anyway, my next most favorite one, is when, let's say that I've got this, I'm going to add a couple of bits of B-roll here. So let's say we're cutting up some bad transitions, I'm just, let's just dump a few of them in here, onto my Timeline, and then you're like, "Actually, I've got all this other junk, what is it?" "Do I need it? Is it in the sequence?"

Make sure your 'Project' window is selected, you can go to 'Edit', and you can say, 'Remove Unused', it just deletes them, unless they've been used on a sequence, in this project, cool. That one's a bit, I don't know, I feel like that is too rash and harsh. Often I just want to know, like what's been used, and what's not being used. So what you do is, basically you do the exact same thing, and then go 'Edit', 'Undo', because then they're back in there, but they're highlighted, and that's kind of enough for me, I'm like, okay, I know that one's not being used, and maybe I should have, like, "Oh, why haven't I used the Mix Butter ones, the best one." I have no idea whether it's good or not, but you get the idea, right? You can remove them, but if you undo it straight away, it'll just highlight them, and I find that's quite useful.

Next is, what I normally call packaging your document, it's from like graphic design lingo, where we need to kind of, we've got a project file and we've got videos, probably everywhere, some on our desktop, some on our downloads folders, some are on a hard drive, somewhere on the SD card. We just want to get them into one place, because we either need to archive it, or we need to send it to somebody else, or just look less like a messy person. So you can do that easily in Premiere Pro, have the project you want to tidy up open, have it selected down here in the 'Project' panel, go to 'File', go to 'Project Manager', click the sequence you want to backup, all of them, one of them, I've only got one.

Over here I want to exclude any unused clips, depending on what you want to do. I'm going to exclude them, I'm going to include the Audio Conforms, and the preview files, and rename. I haven't renamed in my files and my clip name, so it doesn't really matter. These preview files, we talked about them earlier, remember, Premiere Pro couldn't, doesn't like to read an mp3, let's say. So it creates this wav file or unpacks it as a, I can't remember the extension, but unpacks it, into a format it can use. So do you want to include those, you don't need to, because Premiere Pro will generate them again afterwards, so it's up to you.

Collect Files to a New Location, so you're going to have a copy, that's the big one, it's going to collect them and copy. So you're going to have duplicates of all of this, it's kind of way of getting it off onto a backup drive, that's what I do. So you clicked it all, stick it onto a backup drive, and then you know you have to go and find everything, try and drag it, and links break, and you have missing files. I'm going to stick mine on my 'Desktop', let's go have a look how it gets created.

So there it is there, that's the name of my file, my project, I'm using the project names as the video names as well, so ignore that. This might be like, I don't know, 'Co Working Space' video', and inside of there you've got a copy of your project file, dot pr, prog j. Those are the previews that we brought along for the ride. There's the videos that are being used, these are all the videos that are being used, you will notice, I was going to, I wasn't sure if I put this in or not, but I guess I should. All the mp4s just get dumped in the file format, these movs in the project, some of the mov, some of the mp4s, these are using an underlying codec called avchd, and they, the way Premiere Pro needs to deal with them, is it needs to put them in this BDMV folder, inside Stream, and there it is there, that's the file that you are working with.

If you want to tidy things up for whatever reason, you can drag them out. Premiere Pro won't like it because it'll be missing them, but you can link them, it's up to you whether you want to keep them in these, like, I don't know, messy folders, or not, but anyway now I can grab this thing here and I can say, Zip, and on Mac it's called Compress, on a PC I think it's Send to WinZip, or this Compress Folder, I can't remember what is on PC, it's in here somewhere, and you can then zip it all up and send it off, or stick it on a disk, you know what to do with it, but just remember it's a copy, and you will never remember, it is under 'File', 'Project Manager', which doesn't seem, I don't know, seems a bit ambiguous, but really handy to tidy up those messy files.

All right, the next one, we've done maybe once or twice during the course, but let's put it all in File Management, is Reveal in Finder, so in here, and you're like, "Where did this one, where did I get this from?" I can go right click, and somewhere in here, Reveal in Finder, I'm not sure what it is on a PC, is it Reveal in Windows? You'll know, because it'll say Reveal in something, Finder is a Mac thing, I thought. It'll open up, let's open up my other window here, my other screen, there it is, it's just telling me where it is.

You can do it from over here as well, you can right click it and say, actually, show me this in the Finder, towards the bottom, Reveal in Finder, you can also Reveal in Project. So Reveal in Finder gets us back to the exact same place, but Reveal in Finder, let's look at something else, it'll highlight it over here, which is handy, Reveal in Project, there you go.

Next tip, the next one is searching in here. I've made it bigger to make it-- we're going to do a lot down here in the Project panel, so we did searching or finding here in the Timeline, remember it was just Command for Mac, Ctrl for PC, F, and you could do finding stuff. We did that earlier, you can do it over here as well. So just whatever you've got selected, will activate that, using that same shortcuts. So over here, on my Mac, 'Command F', 'Ctrl F' on a PC, and I can do my Find, I want to find everything that has the word butter in it.

Now one thing can be a bit confusing, is that, it's got two things here, and if you've adjusted it like we did earlier, it's going to go fine. Mine makes a happy little noise, it's the computer butt hitting against the glass. I can't find it, I know there's the word butter there, it's because we've gone, match this, so all, it needs to match all of these things, I want to say match any of these two, this or that, any of them, and it's highlighted over here.

There's an easier Find in this one, you can just use it up here. So let's type "butter," and there you go. The strange thing though is that it doesn't turn off, ever, you have to like remember to hit the cross to get rid of it. It's pretty good, you can search for frames per second, so 25 is weird, like it's bringing me everything, that has anything to do with 25. So this has 25 somewhere in the Meta data, it's not the frames per second, these ones are perfect, there's something in there, you can see it, can you see it, I can't see anything in there, it says 25, something in the Meta data finds it, so it's pretty-- tries to find everything, but if we do 25.00, still has it in there. I'm not sure why that one's appearing, just make sure you delete it when you're finished.

You can be thinking camera model, if that Meta data is included in the video, the different camera models, maybe the date, anything you can search in there. His little friend over here is quite interesting, this one creates a search bin, we know bins is like little folders, so what you can do is, click this, and say we get kind of a similar search as we had before. So find all the Meta data that has that 25 frames per second, and this, no, just all of that, and let's click 'OK', and you can see over here, it's weird, it's created a little bin with a little, can you see the little spy glass in it, this bin has grabbed a bunch of files, that have the word 25 in there somewhere, this random guy, but weirdly, look, there's--

Let's look at Color Correction 02, that's something that you won't have in yours, because I randomly imported that before, but you can see here, it's there and there. Have I got duplicates now? No. This is just like this permanent search, it's always running, well kind of, it's like a saved search. It means that if I add something else later on, it'll appear in here as well, just kind of like a way of segmenting things. It's not a duplicate, I can use it out of here, but it's just like a-- it's not a copy, I don't want to use a copy, it's like a-- what's the word I want, another iteration of this, if that's a word, I don't think that's the right word, but hopefully you get what I mean.

It's just showing you another way of looking at this, and you can open it up separately, you can double click on it, and just look at this stuff, I can go back up to my original one, and let's say I do add something else to it. So something else, 25 frames-ish, so this Color Correction H, I'm hoping is 25 frames, I'm not going to drag it into that folder, it's not a folder, like we've been using, it's a search bin. So if I drag it down here, it is 25 frames, and you're like, "Oh, didn't appear in here." This thing is not-- oh, it did appear, it's not very quick, just give it a second. It eventually does the search again, I have no idea, like the time difference, I end up just kind of clicking on it, and going and clicking things, and it seems to happen. I don't think my clicking helps, there is just a timer that goes--

I'm going to go search some more, but I think it's controlled by hamsters, so just be patient and wait for it to update. How to get rid of it? You can just delete it, and you're not actually deleting your files, it's just a different search. You might have a search bin that has 1080p, or, actually drop this down, there's quite good stuff in here, depending on the Meta data of your original footage, is in Frame Rate, hopefully that'll clean it up, and get rid of that guy, it did finally. So I've just got those ones with 25 frames per second. All right, that is doing some extreme searching, let's get on to the next trick.

The next one is to do with the Meta data, across the top here, we've looked at, kind of adjusting this in the past, but you can save it, so, let's change it a little bit. So let's say that, for us, Frame Rate is not that important, or it is, but there's other stuff, so let's just turn on something else. You right click any of these guys along the top here, top of the columns, pick something else, let's have a look at Basic. What else we want? Let's use, say-- whether the video and audio being used, and maybe, what video codec is using. So we can click 'OK', get it in the right order, by scrolling left and right, I'm using that scroll wheel mouse, you can just drag a bit left and right, I'm using that scroll wheel mouse, I can hold 'Shift' and drag it up and down a little, scroll wheel, that's a handy trick, and pretty much most of these, if you hold Shift down and scroll left and right, it'll scrub left and right on them.

When I say scrub left and right, I mean, scroll wheel, holding shift, up and down, up and down on the scroll wheel, goes left and right. So I'm going to go along to this end point, where is it, here, I want to move all these along, it's a bit of a pain, kind of getting them all the way along, but it works eventually. Did I select all of those, did I? Video usage, it might be the audio channel as well. Okay, we've got there, kind of shuffle them all along. You can save the layout, you can click on this option here and say, 'Save As New View Preset', so I can say, this is my, I don't know, "Assembly." When you're doing kind of-- is that Assembly, that looks good to me. So it might be Assembly, you might have, I don't know, it might be an audio version, where the audio information is closer, or you just might have one that you use all the time, the Dan one, and I'm going to not do that.

You can obviously set a preset, remember, do that, then go into your keyboard shortcuts, find the words Project View, and then turn it into a shortcut. I'm unlikely to ever do that, I don't switch them enough, click 'OK'. So it just means that later on, I can switch them back and forth between different ones, if you do need to load a different one, because you've saved a different one, you can go back to this.

The other thing to note is that this view here, is also tied in where my workspace is, so Dan - Editing, if I save the changes to this work space now, it will remember this as well. So video usage, I'm going to drag it all the way over here, and Media End, Back End. So this one here is kind of in the wrong spot now, so if I go back to my 'Window', 'Work Spaces', and say, actually, let's 'Reset to Saved Layout', you'll notice that it all comes back to normal. So you might have your, remember, editing version, you might have it, your version for audio, and switch these around, spend a bit of time getting it right, Color Correction 01, just so that you can see what you need to, codecs or frame rates, whatever it is, and they will save and connect to the work space.

All right, the next one is kind of tricky, you can get yourself into problems with it, it's pretty easy to do. Let's say that you're working on stuff, and you've got a bunch of stuff that you have already used on the Timeline, and it's really messing, you're like, "Actually, I just don't need any of this, that, and that, I just don't need to see it," just need the interview, and all the stuff can go away. You can right click any of them, and go to 'Hide', look at that, nice, tidy Project panel. The problem is, is the next person to come along, that you send it to, goes, "Where's all the footage?" I can see it over here, it's not here, where is it gone? So make sure you tell the person you're sending it to, and you can, to get it back, you just right click anywhere in here, and say 'View Hidden', and toggles it back on, and it is a toggle switch.

So let's say you just turn it on for a second, to start checking these things in the Source monitor, and adding them, and then you actually, want to go back to your tidy option. If you go 'View Hidden' again, it toggles back and forth. All right, I'm going to turn that off, 'View Hide', it is a nice way of tidying up a project. I'm too scared to turn it on myself, for fear of losing stuff, and spending ages trying to find it.

All right, next tip, next thing is a quick easy one, finding footage, right clicking it, and instead of trying to like search the Meta data, and turn it all on, on these little columns, you can actually just find properties. So right click the 'File', go to 'Properties', sometimes you need to give it a second, for it to go through and figure it out, and this is the stuff, that this file, Premiere Pro knows about your document, all in just one big lump, rather than trying to turn things on and off, and depending on how it was shot, how much Meta data the camera put into it, or what's been stripped out in the editing process, you might find lots in here, you might find very little, but that's the way to do it.

Let's close that down, oh, one thing I thought of is, there's actually a panel for Meta data as well. So let's select on this one, go to 'Window', go to 'Metadata', mine's already on somewhere, if it's ticked on it's just on somewhere, that it can't-- oh, there it is, you turn it on and off, so you can see it all, there is a panel as well, and the cool thing about this, the problem with this is, you've got to kind of do a bit of searching through, to find the stuff that's actually applied, but you can actually add stuff to this. So you can start deciding-- adding Meta data this way, using this panel here. All right, let's go back to my Source window, and next tip.

All right, this last one I hope you never need, if you're, for whatever reason Premiere Pro crashes, it will try and load up our version, it tries to say, "Hey, I've got this version, let me try and load it", and you say, "Yes please, please," and you cross your fingers and you go, "Please, please, please,” and you hope it loads with all of the changes. If that's not the case, or just something happens, know that this is the file, the project file, the main file, that we'd be working from, but there's this other file called Auto Save, and in here are a bunch of versions. So the current one plus all the ones, and it's kind of, they're time and dated backwards, they're in sort of chronological order.

These are actually just separate project files, you can open them up separately, just to see if there's one of them in there that, you know, has the thing you wanted or at least, maybe you were part way through, something that you plan to undo, but it crashed. So have a look through those, just in case there are other versions, not just the original pr, prog.

All right, thanks for sticking with this one, it was a long one, that is file management, and I hope you learned something. Hope it wasn't too boring, let's get into the next video.

Amazing file management tricks to save the day in Premiere Pro

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Transcript

How do I organise and clean up files in Premiere Pro?

Premiere Pro File Management Tricks That Actually Save You Time

Key Takeaways

1. Clear Duplicate Imports with Consolidate Duplicates

2. Remove Unused Clips, or Just Highlight Them

3. Package Your Project with Project Manager

4. Find a Clip on Your Drive or Inside Your Project

5. Search the Project Panel Without Getting Caught Out

6. Create Search Bins for Searches You Use Repeatedly

7. Customise Metadata Columns and Save Your Views

8. Hide Clips Without Removing Them

9. Inspect Properties and Add Metadata

10. Look in Auto-Save When Recovery Does Not Give You What You Need

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FAQs

How can I identify unused clips without leaving them removed?

Does Project Manager move my original media?

Why does a frame-rate search return unrelated clips?

Why is some footage missing from my Project panel?

Can I open Premiere Pro Auto-Save files directly?

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