Importing & organizing your footage inside Premiere Pro

Okay, let's get started, let's make sure you've got nothing open. So go to 'File', and go to 'Close All Projects'. So make sure, let's go to 'New Project', or 'File', 'New Project'. Let's give it a name. Now this project came with some paperwork. So we're going to go to our 'Project 2 - Wedding', in our 'Exercise Files', look, there's a 'Copy' folder, handy, and in here there's a couple of PDFs that came from the project. In this case, under 'Miller Kammes', can't say that, there is a PDF that has a few things. So A, we can get the name right, and in this case we're probably going to name it with the occasion. Actually have the name of how it's pronounced. It doesn't help me at all, Thames, anyway. Should help me. 

So we're going to do Wedding, say I'm a wedding videographer, I'm going to start them all, probably not with Wedding, because I'm doing all of them, but I'm not. My part-time wedding, so I'm going to put 'Wedding', so I know it's a wedding, and I'm going to put in a name, then I'm going to put the date in, and it said, the 24th of August 2013. Occasionally, like-- normally I use the date, today's date, so I know the month that I've actually got started, but in this case, because it's a wedding, it's quite a specific date, and it might make it easier to find in the future. 

Where am I going to stick it? I'm going to put it in my Exercise Files, you do the same. Put it under 'Wedding', and remember, we got a folder, all the project files go in here. So I'm going to stick it in; perfect. I'm going to change nothing else, click 'OK'. We're going to import the footage, we've done it a few times. You can go to 'File', 'Import', remember, just double click down here. We are going to go to our Exercise Files, and I want to bring in part of the footage. 

So 'Wedding', let's go to 'Footage'. Let's bring in, let's say the Cam A stuff, so go into it, 'A Cam'. Let's bring in all of this, yeah, why not. Let's bring it all, click 'Import'. What you might find as well, is if your computer is pretty slow, it might be buzzing away down here, saying, converting files, might need to process them so that I can use them, but this has come through just fine. Let's switch to 'List View', just because. Let's bring in another bit of footage, so we can't double click the background now, you kind of can, you can squeeze down the bottom there, but you could learn the shortcut for it, 'File', 'Import', it's not hard. 'Command I', I don't know, because I double click every time. 

Let's bring in, instead of the footage let's bring in the audio. Let's bring in just the three bits of music, let's click 'Import'. You can see quite quickly how this is becoming a little bit unmanageable. It's really well named, and it's very clear, you're not going to have this kind of clarity, so we're going to have to organize something into bins. What is a bin? A bin is a folder. That's just the way you call it in video land. Bins were just, actually literally bins, when they used to have film on reels, big physical reels, they just stick them in a bin. So you'd have different bins, and they used to be labeled. So they continue that along here. 

So if you hover along this, it should say New Folder, it says, let's make a big dusty bin. We're going to click on that one, and let's kind of re-- let's re-- kind of create that footage. That same folder structure I had. So I'm going to grab the first one, click it once. Scroll down to the bottom, hold 'Shift', click the last one, they're all selected. Scroll back up the top here, and grab one of them and try and get them in. 

How do I know they're in? They're kind of indented, and I should be able to close it, they all lock in there. Hah, phew; organization. Let's go to 'Music', so I made a new bin. Call this one, not going to call it Music, I'm going to call it Audio. There's no rule, you can call it Music if you like, but I'll feel bad putting dialogue in there if it's called Music. So you can see how bins can be really helpful for larger jobs. A little bit tedious to reconstruct, so I'm going to show you some tips, but actually one thing I want to show you, before we go off and do kind of a little bit more helpful stuff, is, bins can be confusing, so watch this, if I double click the footage called Bin, it opens up in its own tab, original one, the project, it's home base, the bin is open. 

So it can be handy just to have the footage open, and the audio open, so you can kind of switch between these two, but it can be confusing at first. So I'm going to right-- no I'm not going to right click it, I'm going to click the little stripy Hamburger Menu thing, and go to Close Panel, and I'm going to click on this one, 'Close Panel'. At this stage, probably what we want to do, is in the Project Window, is just twirl it down, twirl it up. Hit the little chevrons, there's nothing wrong with doing it this way, but if you do want to open up separately-- you'll probably do it by accident, and you can close the panel. 

So that's one thing with the Project Window. The other thing that happens is, when you're creating new bins, you might have already done this, and you're like, "Ah, my bin is inside another bin." You have to be very deliberate about where your bins go. For some reason it really likes to put them in where you've got selected. So if I've got audio selected I'm like, "I want another bin", and I want to put it next to all of these guys, called Copy, or Graphics, let's call it. So new bin, and you're like, "Where did it go?" There's a bin, I can't see it. What's happened is, because audio was selected, watch this, if I twirl it down, my bin ended up in there, and you're like, "What are you doing in here?" I don't know, it's just the way that Premiere Pro works, and it's a little bit, gets me all the time. So don't feel bad. 

So if you are creating a new bin, having something selected, means it's going to disappear inside. There he is there, you can just drag it out, by dragging it kind of out here, it's painful. I've just dragged it into Audio, it is hard, promise you. So Audio, it's easy when you can see the outside. So what I'm going to do is delete that guy, and just be very mindful, of having nothing selected, not you, not you. Just kind of click off in the background, or scroll down to the bottom, and is like, always a space at the bottom, click off, and then hit a new 'Bin'. 

You can kind of rebuild that structure we learned earlier. This one here, Audio, Copy, Footage, Graphics, Project Files, and Renders. You don't need Project Files obviously, inside of here, or Renders, because Project Files is a Premiere file, and Renders are something external as well, but you can rebuild these ones. So now that we learned a little bit about it we're going to delete it all, and you're like, "He does this again, there's an easy way," there is. Now that we understand it though we can actually do a nice, real easy way. So we can just double click anywhere, and if you have got fancy folder structure that you want to kind of rebuild in here, so let's click on that one. I'm inside of Project 2, I'm going to select all of these. Actually, don't want you and you, I want you. So I'm going to hold 'Shift', and click just those ones. You can import them one at a time. Watch this, I can import it and it will convert it into bins for me. It's fairly to import a couple of things, what's this? Not like--

It's something that is, I think it's the PDFs, I can't see it, hover above it. Failed to import. It hasn't imported the stuff in copy because it doesn't like PDFs. So it will only import the stuff it can use. So it's got things in here, yeah, that's the PDFs, but it's given me the actual folder. The cool thing about the footage is in here, remember it was kind of separated out in terms of other sub folders, Cam A, C, D. So it's kind of rebuilt all that, which is handy. Audios in there, so that's kind of the easy way to get started. Copy, am I going to need? Probably not in this particular video, so I'm going to get rid of it. 

You might be asking, "Where's the graphics folder?" That was definitely there, when we dragged it in. The graphics folder is not there because there's nothing in it. It's empty, so it's like, "Mmm, not going to bring in a bin that has nothing in it." Your last question is, "Can I just have them all lying around in the folder?", or just in here, without bins, you totally can. That's-- happy if you're happy to work that way. I always work that way to get started, and it takes me, like if it's a short project I don't change anything, they will just lie in the Project Window, but as soon as they start getting a little bit unwieldy, I start creating the footage, or creating the bins and start kind of organizing them a little bit. It's just personal preference, and you will need to-- a bin or two, there are some quirks to it, but now you know them. Let's save our project, and I will see you in the next video.