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Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

Organizing your video editing footage like a Pro in Premiere

Daniel Walter Scott

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All right, I promised you exciting, editing a wedding, and it's going to be great, I tricked you. We're actually going to be organizing the files within Premiere Pro, but doing it right. 

So this is the exercise files. You'll notice the first project I gave you, inside of it, that's all just dumped in here, like here you go, there's some mp4s. That works fine for little projects, when you get into something slightly more complicated, like this wedding, you'll notice that if I go into Project 2, in your Exercise Files, we've got a nice file structure in here, this is the one that I use. So this is how-- whenever I start a new job, doesn't matter what it is, I have an audio file, I have a copy file, footage, graphics, all of these six. 

So audio is any dialogue or music. Copy is, there's often some sort of text that goes along with it. It might be talent releases, it might be a shooting kind of timeline. It might be, in this case like a wedding program, actually had the timings on it. Footage is where everything goes, that's the main stuff, that's all the mp3, sorry mp4s. All the stuff you've captured off a camera, or being given. Graphics is just any JPEGs or PSD files I'm working on. Project Files is where my Premiere Pro files are going to be, and Renders is that final, like export folder. It's called Export or Renders, it's up to you. 

These are the-- this the footage that I, or this is the structure that I use. So if you want to copy that, I've actually included it in here. It's called ZZ Template Folder Structure. ZZ, is just so it's at the bottom. So you can just copy and paste that. So whenever I start a new job I go, all right, copy, paste. Then I call it the New Project, and I give it the date. In Jan 2024, in the future. So at least I can get started now, start putting the footage in the Footage folder. 

It's just a nice quick way to get started. You might not like that. Everyone's slightly different, you will find, working at agencies, or other kind of editing houses, that they'll have their own structure, but I find that's a real kind of generic one, that works most of the time for all projects. Let's look inside Wedding.

Now the other thing I want to point out is, this footage came through and split up by cameras. So A cam, B cam, it just means, this wedding actually had four videographers, with cameras. Running around, recording everything, and that's the way that this footage was given to me, to say, okay, that is-- here you go, here's camera A, camera B, camera C. It seemed like an easy way for them, well, that's the way they organized it. Let me show you different ways of organizing it, so you don't, freak out, you're not going to freak out, but let's have a look. 

The Jacuzzi, that's the one that I was working on, that New Zealand kind of short film. It's going to that. They've given me this, so they're called it Media. I often go and rename, call it Footage, just to keep my own kind of sanity good. What they did is they broke it into different sections. So OO is the driving scenes. There's a section in here, whereas this bit's all the kind of entering into the building. So this is the second scene, and then this is all the, these third to fifth scenes, so they've organized these by scenes. They're just kind of like groups in this short film. 

Let's have a little look in-- this is a television commercial. So we go into this one, they've put it into scenes. They've broken it into different sections. This one has kind of some footage of somebody folding an airplane, that we're going to use. Then there's a section of trying to throw it in to get it going. So they've broken it into kind-- seems similar to the Jacuzzi, but nice, explicitly named, so it's really easy for me as an Editor, to kind of know which ones to start jumping into. 

Let's have a look at one more, let's have a look at-- So this one, Parkour, we're going to do this a little bit later, but if we look at footage they've broken theirs into indoor and outdoor. What they did was, they did a lot of naming of the cameras. So they've used two different cameras. So they've used, it's a Canon DX2, and a 7D. Oh no, sorry, it's a 1DX2, they've named the cameras. So they've actually filmed in two separate cameras, and they've just grouped those together. So indoor, to kind of group all the indoor stuff, and then there's an outdoor section, which we're going to be doing the most of. You can see, a Hero 4 is a type of camera, it's a GoPro. 1DX is a type of Canon, I think as well. 

So this is the way that they have grouped it. So you're going to get stuff all grouped like this, hopefully. It's just good to see how other people do it. If you're filming your own stuff it can be really handy, if you're like, "Man, I just throw it all in the desktop, and it's fine." That's fine too. I'll have a panic attack when I open your computer, but, you don't have to put it anywhere, there's no real rules, but when you are working with larger jobs, and if you're a little bit like me, you'll love a little bit of folder structure. So you can come back two years from now, and they say, "Can you grab that stuff for us?", and you're like, "Oh, the stuff." And you're like, "Can you grab that footage that was shot, that was outside?" You can go, "Okay, cool." You can know the folder, you know it's in footage, you know it's on the outside. 

All right, that's enough of the theory of how to actually get your files all together. Let's actually start bringing it together inside of Premiere Pro in the next video.