So I am starting my posts on Adobe Premiere Pro with a 3rd party application called Post Haste from Digital Rebellion. This was the first product I remember from Digital Rebellion who also makes the Pro Maintenance Tools that I will cover here at another time.
Once you donwload and install the program, which is free, you need to spend a little time setting up your templates, this means not only setting up a folder structure for your projects on the hard drive, but also setting up a project template for Premiere Pro (and After Effects if you would like), and I have shared my current template on my site (you can download it here) and will be going through it a bit in this post.
This is the screen that opens up. You can select your Project Template. It will automatically update the project number. My Project name includes the client name, so I don’t update that, but you can easily do it that way as well
This the template you can download (and you put in the template folder that is set in the preferences which I show below), and it shows the file structure I have created for my projects including sub folders, so that every project has things organized the same way. Anything that is named [template] is replaced with whatever you enter in Project Name on the first page.
You can see that there is a Premiere Pro project file included here as well, and I have layed that out as well (the file is for Premiere Pro 2019, and if you need a newer version, just open it and save it in the new version with the same name).
And I export all my cuts to the EXPORTS Folder.
Now this is the first Preferences page, and here you can see I have moved my Template location to iCloud, so I can access it from anywhere, but otherwise it will tell you where your templates are located.
Here you can see the preference for Strict Naming and to automatically rename Template to the Project name, which actually means [template] will be renamed to the Project Name you enter on the first page.
The Parameters page of the Preferences deals with the settings in the first page and how you want the renaming to go into the folder and file names, as you can see I have set to just include the Project name in the template (use in path). I don’t use a date or editor name, and I include the client name with the project name it is just easier for me, but you can do it any way you would like. and you can also see the auto increment for project number.
For my filenames you can see that I use [template]_MASTER.prproj which is my premiere pro file and [template]_AE_MASTER.aep for the After Effects Project (which is just a basic project file, but I like it name correctly). Now as for MASTER is because I use a single project file that I keep using, but every day at the end of the day I duplicate the file, and rename MASTER to the date (year first of course, so for today that would be February 24th 2021, I would rename the file to [template]_210224.prproj and then I copy it to my Creative Cloud files, and move into an ARCHIVE folder to get it out of the way, so I have a daily backup.
I find that project organization is so important, and something that so many editors unfortunately completely ignore.
If you organize your project and files this way every time, then going back to a previous project is always easy as you will always know the organization, and where the files and sequences are. And within each project I always use the date in the sequence names such as 21-02-24 for todays date, so you can tell when the sequence is from, and then I add a version number after that in something like _V01. This means that all my exports will have names that match the sequences, so you can always go back to any days sequences.
And if you always use the same organization structure, you can hand it off to other people and all the projects will be the same.
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This is my first post from Jonah on Premiere, and I hope you enjoy it. Feel free to let me know if you like the article or there is anything you are interested in me writing about.
