What is the Media Browser in Premiere Pro

In all honesty, do I use it every single time? No. Media browser is perfect when I am both the videographer and the editor, so a lot of the time, is that, if I am doing a really big project, where I'm not the camera person, and I'm just doing the editing, sure that's a great way of doing it, if I'm just doing a small kind of social media video, nah, I just go straight to Project, and drag from my Finder into here, because often I'm dealing with stock images. There's not a lot of confusion about what kind of format it is, can it be read, so teeny tiny jobs, no, no Media browser, bigger jobs, or stuff that I am filming myself, so I need to connect to my camera, Media browser is great. All right, that's it, let's hope they fix it. 

All right, first thing is I've just opened up, and saved a brand new project, I called it 'Deleteme01', because it's a throwaway project, just to show you this feature, and I'm also going to set to editing. We've been on a kind of a learning workspace, we're going to go to 'Editing', we go to 'Window', 'Workspaces', 'Editing', and we're going to go to 'Window', 'Workspaces', 'Reset to Saved Layout'. So everything's the same and we've got a few more panels open by default. It's a good place to start. So the Media browser is along the bottom here. It might be under 'Window', then come down to 'Media Browser'. 

So Media browser is just a way of navigating your machine via Premiere Pro, rather than your, on Mac it's called Finder, and on a PC it's called a Window. So it's just a different way of doing it. Has some perks, let's talk about them. 

So the first thing I'm going to show you is more like a, have to get this set up, to make Media browser an useful thing. So Favorites, you need some favorites, because otherwise the kind of way this works, on this left hand side here. You can try and find your files by going all the way back to Macintosh HD, which is not great, because you've got to find Users and Daniel Scott, and find your documents. On PC it's C drive and Windows, and find all that. Up here it says Users, you can go to Home Directory. On mine it's kind of gone to the right place. On a PC I'm sure it'll look very similar. 

So I know that my documents, that I'm going to be working for this project, are on my 'Desktop', and under 'Exercise Files', under 'Tourism Island', and here's the 'Footage' that I want to look at. Actually yeah, I'll do it straight to Footage, probably. So what I want to do is, set up a Favorite for it, so before I go into it, if you do go in, you can use this little arrow to come back out, go back out one, there it is there, Footage. I'm going to right click it, and set it as a favorite. Now instead of, like this chronic crazy madness on the side here, you can go to the top here, and you've got your Footage, it's in your Favorites, look at that, close that down, oh, tidy. 

The one thing to note about your favorites, is that it's per project. So every time you start a new project, you're going to have to create a new favorites, which is not a big drama, just make sure you go to Home directory, and kind of start from there, a little bit easier. 

First perk is, let's switch it from List view to Thumbnail view, this is really handy. So the Media Browser, remember, we're not actually looking at stuff that's in my project yet, it's kind of like an in between, or before we get started, we can actually just kind of move our mouse. I'm not holding anything down, I'm just kind of moving my mouse back and forth, and it will give me a little preview, which is super handy, before I import to know which one might be the shot that I'm looking for, and when you do import it, let's say I drag it straight to the Timeline, to create a sequence and bring it in. What it does is it imports it in one file swoop, can you see, it's in my, it's in here, it's created my sequence, but it's gone straight to my project. I didn't have to, like a 'File', 'Import'. 

So often what you'll end up doing, is finding it on your finder, or in your Windows on a PC, finding it all, getting the right one, then going 'File', 'Import', and then-- it saves a step. That's even more useful when you are looking at a camera, that's connected to your computer. I don't have anything at the moment, but let's say we go to our local drives, you might find your camera in here, and you can preview this stuff on the camera, drag it onto your Timeline, or into the Project Window, and it will import it at the same time, and again you can combine that with the Ingest that we did before, so we can bring it in, bring Proxies, Media Browser, kind of adds that little extra level of professionalism. 

Another perk is, actually I showed you, you can kind of just hover, and do it as well. You can click on them, and you see, you've got a little scrubber to go back and forth, rather than the kind of hand mouse waving hover, up to you. 

The other perk is, you can actually look at them in the Source Monitor. So make sure your Source Monitor is open, under 'Window', 'Source Monitor', and you can actually just drag them into here, and preview them like full screen before importing. You notice that I'm watching, looking at Tourism B here, and it's not actually part of my project yet. Just a way of kind of previewing it, without actually dragging it into, and importing it, and then deciding you don't need it, and then it's offline, because you deleted it. I'm getting a bit-- speaking from personal experience. It's nicer just to preview in Source Monitor before importing, save some drama later on. 

So what else? Actually the next thing I want to show you is kind of weird, because it's broken. I'm going to leave it in this course, because yours might still be broken, and if yours isn't, and it's working perfectly, let me know via the Facebook group, be up on the screen here, just let me know that-- this video, add a link to it, that is ready to be re-recorded, because it's all working again. So it's going to be a little bit of hand waving, but if it's working on yours, or it's fixed in the future, it's brilliant. 

So let's say that I've got a camera connected. So I'm going to go to my local drive, where I have got a camera connected. This is my Canon, I have no name drive, but in here, somewhere is my footage. I know it's in this one here. I’m going to right click it and say, 'Set to Favorites', Add to favorites, which is handy, and I can go in here, and this is really handy, we talked about it before, you can see stuff on your camera, but when it comes to working with your camera, like my Sony, which, some reason is not connecting at the moment, which is another bug for Premiere Pro, bad Premiere Pro, but you can go to Filter, and my one has a lot of xml files , and I don't want to see those. I just want to see the video files. 

So you can go up to here, and filter, and say, just show me the video files, not the xml or, just, you can turn things on and off, depending on how your camera shoots, and what extra files that it brings along, so you can filter them. You'll notice my filter, I can click on it, and it doesn't work, it's kind of a bug, it's definitely a bug, it doesn't work. What's also really good, and still not working, is that, you notice how my format was a bit strange, you have to go local drives, here, here, here, that's not too bad, the Sony that I'm using uses a different structure, and it's harder, you've got to go to clip and miscellaneous, and all sorts of other stuff, to actually find the video footage. 

I don't know why they hide these things so well, but anyway what you can do is, you can actually click on your local drive, say, you know it's a camera, a Canon or a Panasonic, or a Red, and you can go to this little option, go into it, go to this, and click on, say Panasonic, and what it will do is it'll take you straight there, because Premiere Pro knows, it knows that, your P2 camera, stores it here, here, here, here, and down, all these, like wormhole of directories, and will just take you straight there. 

So it's super handy. Same with Canon, depending on how you're shooting, it will take you directly to that folder, rather than having to dig it out yourself and set a favorite. That's not working at the moment, nothing's working, this one or that one, I've seen conflicting stuff online now that says, "Hey, Premiere Pro are not supporting this feature anymore," they'd turn it off, I feel like if they were, but it's been broken for a while. 

So yours might be working perfectly, so, awesome! yours is still broken like mine, ah, Premiere Pro, come on, but anyway, it's worth mentioning, because it's a really handy feature for using the Media browser when you are connecting two cameras and like sucking the data straight off, especially when you're going to tie it in, with that amazing Ingest that we learned in the last video. 

Actually, quickly to recap, if you are using this to kind of find stuff on your camera, and you are dragging it to your Project panel or to your Timeline, from here, you want to turn on Ingest, and make sure your Ingest setting's set to whatever you want, if you're not using proxies, or you are using proxies, go to 'Project Settings', make sure your Ingest settings are on, in my case, let's say we're not doing anything, other than copying, so we're not going to create proxies, we're just going to copy it straight over. 

Where's it going to go, not same as Project. I'm going to put mine into a folder that I choose, so when I'm previewing on my camera, I'm going to make sure, when I add them to my Project panel, they're going to copy to a place, that I choose in my 'Footage' folder, or wherever it is, that's, you know, it's a nice method, and way to work with your camera and your SD card straight from your camera. 

All right, pros and cons. Pros, you can work with camera files, and especially ones that maybe aren't natively viewable from your computer itself, but you can do it from Premiere Pro, via the Media browser. You can preview stuff before it comes on, it can be copied using Ingest, you can filter when it works, and you can actually see directory structures quickly, when that works too. 

This is a long video, to show this, a lot of stuff that doesn't work in Premiere Pro, I didn't make it, and I will come back and video this again when it is working perfectly, or gone completely, if these are disappeared. They were turning it off, and I was wrong, and the one con for me, is that you have to set up the Preference-- Favorites, which makes sense for every project, not a huge big drama. In all honesty, do I use it every single time? No. 

Media browser is perfect when I am both the videographer and the editor, so a lot of the time is that. If I am doing a really big project, where I'm not the camera person, and I'm just doing the editing, sure, that's a great way of doing it. If I'm just doing a small kind of social media video, nah, I just go straight to Project, and drag from my Finder into here, because often I'm dealing with stock images, there's not a lot of confusion about what kind of format it is, can it be read, so teeny tiny jobs, no, no Media browser, bigger jobs or stuff that I am filming myself, so I need to connect to my camera. Media browser is great. All right, that's it, let's hope they fix it.