Post Haste from Digital Rebellion to organize your project with templates is the perfect tool to start any project

 

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).

I have shown my Premiere Pro project organization here. I try to match us many categories as I can, so that starting at number 04, the categories match on the hard drive and in the project. I have also included folders RENDERS and EXPORTS. I set the scratch disc for Audio and Video to the RENDERS Folder.

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.

I am going to write some posts about getting the most out of Adobe Premiere Pro, things to help with stability to fix issues as well as organization for when you come back to a project later

Jonah On Premiere

It is 2021 and I am a video editor who has been working in the field for 20 years now. I am both a good editor as well as very technically proficient, and I want to pass on some of what I have learned.

Of late I am mostly using Premiere Pro for work, so I have decided to do a series of posts about working with Adobe Premiere Pro. I want to talk about things that I have learned that will make things more stable, things that will fix issues, and organization that will help you or anything else if they come back to a project after you have finished.

I work mostly on a Mac (I know, I know Premiere works better on a PC), so will mainly be including Macintosh leaned directions, but will include windows when I have a chance. I do have a Surface 3 that I love, though it is a bit underpowered for editing.

These posts will always include the JonahOnPremiere tag, so you can quickly get to just them, and I plan to post every weekday at least once, though not every post will be with this tag, though I would like to make at least 3 a week.

Adobe Premiere Pro is adding an Adobe Sensei Speech to Text Auto Transcription feature, and I wish I was beta testing it right now

 

Javier Mercedes has this video on a new feature that Adobe is beta testing right now, automatic Speech to Text using Adobe Sensei.

Unfortunately it isn’t just in the Premiere Pro beta, you have to request access, because I could use it right now. 

This feature would be mind-blowingly amazing for cutting testimonials, which as a commercial/direct response editor I could use almost every day.

The video shows just how impressive this feature is.

It makes me wonder if they will expand on the feature to allow editing via text, or if the jumping to the place in the sequence via the text will be the extent of it.

I also would like to see the options for exporting the text, as I would love some way to automatically export these as documents that could be automatically uploading to producers.

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And here is the Adobe page for the new feature. You can also sign up for the feature there.

Excalibur from Knights of the Editing Table is an amazing keyboard shortcut plug-in for Premiere Pro, it significantly speeds up my editing, it us a must have!

 Knights of the Editing Table has made the amazing new plug-in for Adobe Premiere Pro that adds quick smart keyboard short cuts for Premiere Pro. It reminds me of ObDev’s awesome keyboard launcher Launchbar, which I swear by and love, except thus us within Premiere Pro. You hit a quick keybiard shortcut, and the type what you want, say di for dissolve, then if you hit return it adds a transition or you can hit > and type how many frames you want it. 

Here is an overview.

At $75 it is a steal. I have written about it before, but after using it I have been very impressed, though even after the 1.0.1 update I have had some issues putting transitions on clips, but everything else has been incredibly fast, and Premiere really needs a paste on same track shortcut without turning off the track targeting.

Every editor should give this a try!

Apple app updates only compatible with Big Sur, but showing up in Catalina, and continuing to give notifications of updates is incredibly annoying

So I am running Catalina 10.15.7.

 

But Apple keeps sending me Updates Available, but the only available update is for Garage Band, which the update only works in Big Sur. I know they want me to move to Big Sur, but I literally can’t.

And the reasons I can’t just update to Big Sur are many. First off Catalina is running very well right now, but also I am on a job that uses Adobe Premiere Pro 2019 13.1.5, and I haven’t seen anything that shows that it runs in Big Sur. And while I would rather move to a newer version, that is what they are running at the company.

Excalibur for Premiere Pro adds quick keyboard shortcuts for Premiere Pro and is $25 off till the end of the year

 

Knights of the Editing Table has released a new extension plug in for Premiere Pro on Mac and Windows that adds quick keyboard shortcuts to Premiere Pro to speed up your editing workflow, it is called Excalibur. Check out the video above or their page on how this can speed up your workflow.

This looks very cool. I already use Launchbar from Obdev to do similar things for the Mac, and Andrew Kramer from Video Copilot has one for After Effects called FX Console.

I wouldn’t have known about this if it wasn’t for the article about it at ProVideo Coalition by Scott Simmons who beta tested it.

I purchased this and will be testing it out, as I love speeding up my workflow. My biggest frustration has been getting used to things like this and then having to go work in an office and not having it, but with the Covid Pandemic forcing my editing to be from home, I can safely use it for the time being.

Why do the font engine in After Effects no include the ability to underline text?

 

So this the font style selection box in After Effects, which lets you select faux bold, faux italix, Upercase, UpperLower Uppercase and subscript settings.

Premiere Pro is exactly the same as After Effects.

This is the Type Options in Photoshop, which includes Underline and Strikthrough, as well as more options.

Why is there no Underline option in After Effects and Premiere Pro? Sure you can add a line if you want to, but it won’t follow the text.

Really this is the dumbest thing. WHY WOULD YOU NOT IMPLEMENT AN UNDERLINE ADOBE?

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OK so the latest version of Premiere Pro’s Essential Graphics now includes the underline function, but not After Effects. This makes it even weirder and more glaring.

What is up with sort order in Adobe Premiere Pro? Can someone explain to me it’s behavior?

 

OK, this is an issue that has been bugging me for a while, and I would really love to hear an explanation for the behavior of Premiere Pro.

The graphic above shows the sort order of my bins, I am sorting by Media Start so I can merge my audio and video using the merge clips function.

This is an image of my bin with the 2 clips selected that I am going to merge in a bin sorted by Media Start.

This is the same bin, now showing the merged clip as soon as I have merged the clips. The bin is still sorted by Media Start, and the Media start of the new clip is 11:39:19:19, so why does it move to the top of the bin (well almost the top, under the folder in the bin) as soon as it is created. Why isn’t in the sort order? And if you close the bin and re-open it, or create a new file, that file then moves into the sort order of the bin, but when created it jumps to the top of the bin. WHAT IS GOING ON?

Here is another case.

Here I have the files sorted by Name, and I have a version B of a file that I want to update to be the version 12, so I change the name and date of the file to be after that of V11.

The file is renamed, and the folder is still sorted by name, but the file is not sorting by name. What the hell is going on?

Adobe updates Premiere Pro to 14.4 (September 2020 release)

 


Adobe has updated Premiere Pro to version 14.4, the September 2020 release. 

The new features are:

  • Scene Edit Detection using Adobe Sensei AI
  • HDR Rec.2100 Clor space for broadcasters, with Apple ProRes and Sony XAVC-I formats fully color managed and GPU accelerated
  • Export with Proxies for a quick export that doesn’t require full resolution
  • Scans Audio plugins multiple times faster.
  • Export AAF with Breakout to Mono p[r audio channelization.

Now I know why Adobe denied my request for years on apps, they have made all apps in the same category the same color, so they are harder to tell apart!

So I opened Adobe’s updates today and low and behold, they have updated a great swatch of apps, but even worse they have updated the icons so that applications in the same category are the same color. Sure it means you can tell this years apps from earlier versions, but now it is easier to confuse different apps for each other as all the video apps are now the same damn color, WTF! And this will get even worse when they release next years versions with the same damn app icon (why can’t they put some versioning in the icon?).

These are the swath of Adobe Apps I keep in my Dock, and without dragging over them with a cursor it is a pain in the ass to tell them apart (and yes I need the different versions as some companies I work with run older versions because of stability issues).

Hell even the beta icons are changing already, though at least they will let me keep breaking up the apps

I guess at least this year for individual apps it will be easier, but what about when the previous 2 versions have the same damn icon, and they are all the same color?

For a company that makes applications for designers they sure have a shitty sense of design!