After you’ve captured or imported your content, you can drag it to the My Project panel from either the Media view or Project view in the Edit workspace. Why two locations? As you’ll read in this chapter, each has its own unique strengths.
For example, Media view and its big brother the Organizer are ideal for tagging your clips for easy search and retrieval, for creating InstantMovies, and for creating albums to back up to Photoshop.com. Project view works well when you want to sort and trim your clips before adding them to the Sceneline or Timeline.
Fast and efficient movie production is all about organization. In this lesson, you’ll learn how to do the following:
• Manually tag your clips in the Organizer
• Apply Smart Tagging in the Organizer
• Create an album for backing up your projects to Photoshop.com
• Create an InstantMovie using manual and Smart Tagging
• Trim clips using the Preview window in Project view
• Drag clips to the My Project panel from either Media view or Project view
This lesson will take approximately two hours.
Before you start working with the footage, let’s review a final version of the movie you’ll be creating.
Your project file opens with the Monitor, Tasks, and My Project panels open.
To see what you’ll be creating in this lesson, you can take a look at the completed movie.
When you first open Premiere Elements, the Organize workspace is displayed. I described the separate views and functions within this workspace in Lesson 1, but since you’re here now, let’s review.
As you saw in the previous chapter, if you click Get Media (), you’ll enter Get Media view where you’ll capture or import video into your project.
Media view () should be open when you first run Premiere Elements. This is a customized view of the Organizer, which you can open by clicking the Organizer icon () in the top toolbar.
The InstantMovie icon () starts a wizard that automatically and quickly steps you through the selection and editing portion of movie creation, allowing you to add theme-based effects, title, transitions, and audio. You’ll produce an InstantMovie of the basketball shoot around tour later in this chapter.
In Project view () you can view, sort, and select media you have captured or imported into your current project. There’s some overlap between Media view, Project view, and the Organizer application, so I’ll discuss that. The Organizer is a separate application that contains all audio, video, and still image content that you’ve input into either Adobe Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements since you first installed the programs. It’s a great place to start many projects and provides access to a wide range of organization and collection functions.
Media view works neatly within Premiere Elements’ Organize workspace. It doesn’t offer the breadth of capabilities enabled by the full Organizer, but it’s convenient and provides a customized subset of functions that let you efficiently find and deploy media within your movie projects.
As mentioned, Media view is the default view in the Tasks panel and should be open when you run Premiere Elements for the first time. If it’s not showing now, click Media in the Organize workspace, or choose Window > Media.
When you first run Premiere Elements, either by loading an existing project or starting with a new project, Media view will display all files currently contained in the Organizer, so you can easily reuse this content if desired. As you import content into the project, Media view will show only the newly imported content.
In contrast, Project view displays all content that you’ve imported into the project. Clips appearing in Media view and the Organizer when you first run Premiere Elements won’t appear in the Project view until you either import them or drag them to the My Project panel. Let’s load some files from the lesson folder to reinforce this point.
Follow this procedure to import audio and video clips from the Lesson04 and 05 folder.
Premiere Elements opens the Add Media dialog.
After importing the clips, Media view should display only the clips you just imported. Project view, which previously contained only the one MOV file, should contain all the new files that you just imported plus Lesson04_Movie.mov.
If you compare the two panels, you will see the same files in both. However, if you close the project file and later reopen it, Media view will again contain all files previously imported into all previous Premiere Elements projects, whereas Project view will contain only those files imported into that specific Premiere Elements project.
With this background information, let’s take a deeper look into both workspaces, starting with Media view.
Media view’s role is to help you find files using different search methods. Some basic search methods are available without any action on your part, and advanced methods are available after you’ve rated the clips or have applied keyword or Smart Tags to your clips; all of which are discussed later in this lesson. In this short section, you’ll learn how to use the basic tools in Media view to find the desired file.
• Browse through the entire catalog by using the scroll bar at the right side of Media view.
• Select either Newest First or Oldest First from the Media Arrangement According to Date menu located in the upper-right corner of Media view to sort the files in chronological or reverse-chronological order.
• Select which media type to show—or not to show—using the icons just below the Ratings field.
• Restrict your search to files created within a period of time by choosing Set Date Range and then entering a start and end date in the Set Date Range dialog.
• Select the Details checkbox to show star ratings, filename, and other details in Media view.
• Use the Media Arrangement According to Date menu to display the newest clips first or the oldest clips first.
• Click the Filter By: list box and choose either an Album () or Project (). Media view will display content from that Album or Project.
• To show all content in the Media view, click the Show All button.
The Media pane shown in the figure will look different from yours because it shows all projects previously edited on this computer, as well as other content previously imported. Since it’s impossible to tell what’s in your Media pane, we decided to show what a typical Media pane would look like.
Sometimes when you drop a clip into the My Project panel, you’ll see a note that says “Clip being dropped contains solid background color. Do you want to apply Videomerge on this clip?” Click No if you see this message, except as directed in Lesson 6.
Media view is great for quickly finding clips, but the Organizer is Premiere Elements’ best tool for serious organization and search and retrieval work. You can open the Organizer by clicking the Organizer icon () in the top toolbar. This exercise will detail how to perform manual and Smart Tagging in the Organizer, and then how to search for clips using those tags in the Organizer.
Let’s start with a brief description of tagging, which you perform in one or more of three ways, via star ratings (1–5), applying keyword tags, and using Smart Tags. At a high level, all tags allow you to more easily find the clips to include in a particular movie. For example, if you review and rate all your clips on a scale of 1–5, you can later search for only clips that you rated 4 or above—an easy way to find high-quality clips and eliminate poor-quality clips.
Keyword tags allow you to tag a clip by person, location, event, or other tag, with customizable categories. For example, in this exercise, you’ll apply several keyword tags to the clips from this project, and then search for clips containing these keyword tags.
When you run the Auto-Analyzer on a clip, Premiere Elements analyzes the video to detect scenes based on content; you can hunt for scenes with faces and identify scenes that are out of focus, shaky, underexposed, or overexposed. Using this qualitative data, Premiere Elements then categorizes all clips as high, medium, or low quality. This serves a valuable triage function that you can later use to search for the best clips for your movie. This analysis is also used for features like Smart Trimming, which you’ll learn in Chapter 5, and Automatic Quality Enhancement, as discussed in Chapter 6.
For example, if you shot an hour of video on your last vacation, Smart Tagging allows you to identify medium-quality-and-higher clips containing faces (presumably family members), and produce a movie containing only these clips. What would literally take you hours to accomplish manually, Smart Tagging can produce in a few moments.
Using all these tags in any combination, you can hunt for clips to manually produce into a movie or create an InstantMovie, which is a professional-looking edited movie complete with titles, soundtrack, effects, and transitions that you’ll produce using a fast and simple step-by-step process.
Let’s open and explore operations in the Organizer. To open the Organizer, click the Organizer icon () in the top toolbar. To make your Organizer look like the one in the figure, click the View menu and make sure that Details, Show File Names, and Show People Recognition are all selected.
Follow these procedures to apply and delete star ratings, and to search for clips based on the star ratings. Ratings range from 1 (on the extreme left) to 5 (on the extreme right).
You can position the Organizer anywhere onscreen by grabbing the docking header and moving the panel to the new location. You can also resize the panel by grabbing and dragging any edge to the desired size.
Premiere Elements includes general categories of keyword tags that you can apply as is or customize with your own categories or subcategories. In this lesson, you’ll create and apply two custom categories in the Organizer, and then search for clips based on those keywords in Media view.
Premiere Elements creates the new subcategory.
As mentioned earlier, the Auto-Analyzer analyzes your video clips for content and quality, and is integral to a number of functions, including Smart Tagging, Smart Trimming, and creating InstantMovies, which you’ll learn to do later in this chapter. You can run the Auto-Analyzer manually, as you’ll learn in the next section, or run it as a background process. In fact, by default, the Auto-Analyzer will run on clips that you’ve imported anytime your system is running and idle.
To access this preference option, in Organizer, choose Edit > Preferences > Media Analysis (Windows) or Adobe Elements 9 Organizer > Preferences > Media Analysis (Mac OS). In the default setting, Premiere Elements will work in the background with imported media, so when you’re ready to edit, you won’t have to wait for the Auto-Analyzer to run.
In most instances on most computers, background operation should work just fine. On older, less powerful computers, and those configured with the minimum RAM, background operation may cause a noticeable drag on foreground operations, particularly when working with H.264-based, high-definition formats like AVCHD and video shot by DSLRs. If you notice any sluggishness in your foreground operations after importing footage or experience any system instability, try disabling the Auto-Analyzer as a background operation by deselecting the Analyze Media for Smart Tags Automatically check box.
To manually run the Auto-Analyzer and apply Smart Tags to the project clips, follow these steps.
As with keyword tagging, you can use the tags created via Smart Tagging in either the Organizer or Media view. You can use these tags by themselves or in conjunction with keyword tags or even star ratings. For example, in the Organizer, click four stars “and higher” in the top toolbar, click the Layups tag in the Keyword Tags, and click In Focus in Smart Tags. Premiere Elements will display only those clips that meet these criteria.
Let’s take a moment to understand what happens to clips after Smart Tagging. To review, during Smart Tagging, Premiere Elements breaks the clip into different scenes based on content changes (as opposed to timecode, like DV files); finds different types of content like faces; and rates the quality of each clip based on factors like exposure, focus, and stability.
In the Organizer, you’ll know that the clip has been split into multiple scenes if there is a Step Forward icon () on the right of the clip. Click that icon, and Premiere Elements displays all scenes separately in the Organizer, surrounded by a border that’s a lighter gray than the rest of the Organizer. This lets you know that all the scenes are part of a single clip.
In the Organizer, you can treat each scene as a separate clip, for example, dragging it to the My Project panel to include it in a project or double-clicking it to play it in the Preview window. You can consolidate all scenes back into a single frame by clicking the Step Backward icon to the right of the final scene (). Note that you can expand and contract a clip into its separate scenes in Project view using these same controls.
In this exercise, you’ll create an InstantMovie from the basketball clips that you tagged in a previous exercise. Again, an InstantMovie is a professional-looking edited movie, complete with titles, soundtrack, effects, and transitions that you’ll create by following a simple wizard.
• Customize the Opening and Closing Titles.
• Select the Auto Edit check box to have Premiere Elements analyze your clips and edit them to fit the selected theme, which is recommended. If you don’t select Auto Edit, Premiere Elements uses the clips as is and doesn’t edit them. Also choose whether or not to Apply the Auto-Analyzer to clips that you haven’t previously analyzed.
• In the Music box, choose the Theme Music radio button to use the background music from the selected Theme, or choose the No Music radio button. To use your own background music, click the My Music radio button, and then click the Browse button to choose the target song. Then drag the Music/Sound FX slider to the desired setting, dragging to the right to prioritize audio captured with the video clips and to the left to prioritize the selected background music. If you have dialog in your project (which these clips don’t), select the SmartMix check box and Premiere Elements will reduce the volume of the music track when it detects dialog.
• In the Speed and Intensity dialog, adjust the Effects and Cuts sliders as desired.
• In the Duration box, choose the desired option. Match Music produces a movie that matches the duration of the selected music and is recommended. Or, you can specify a duration or choose Use All Clips, which uses all clips at their original duration with no background music.
• In the Sequence box, choose Theme Order (recommended), which allows Premiere Elements to use clips as they best match the theme, or choose Time/Date, which uses the clips in the order that they were shot.
• In the Theme Content box, choose the content to incorporate into the InstantMovie and whether to replace any existing content with theme-based content.
• In the Render Preview box, choose Yes to render a preview of the InstantMovie after completion or No to preview in real time from the My Project panel (recommended).
Depending on your membership level in Photoshop.com, you can back up at least 2 gigabytes (GB) of video, audio, and still image files to the site. To upload files, you must first create an album, and then add the video file to that album.
Follow this procedure to back up video files to Photoshop.com.
Photoshop.com services are currently available only for Premiere Elements users in the United States.
Once you create the album, you may be prompted to log into www.Photoshop.com. If you haven’t created an account, you can do so by clicking Join Now on the www.Photoshop.com Home page. If you don’t have an account or aren’t currently logged in, you’ll get an error message in your Preferences panel.
• Select the Backup/Sync is On checkbox.
• Twirl the Advanced Backup/Sync Options to reveal the advanced options. Here’s where you can set options like which file types to archive and how to resolve conflicts between your online and desktop albums. Adjust these options as desired.
• Select the Sync check box for Hoops Shoot.
Synchronizing video files seems like a great idea, but remember that only ten minutes of DV or HDV video will consume the entire 2 GB of starter storage space on Photoshop.com. Keep that in mind when you select the file types to synchronize.
As discussed previously, Project view is where Premiere Elements stores all clips captured or imported into a project. The filenames in Project view identify the files imported into the project.
It’s important to note that files listed in Project view are simply references to the clips you import, not the actual clips. The original clips you import are on your hard disk and are untouched by Premiere Elements. Cutting or editing a clip in Premiere Elements does not affect the original file. Premiere Elements records your modifications along with the reference to the original file in Project view. This means that a 20 MB clip takes up 20 MB of space on your hard disk whether you use only a portion of the clip—by trimming away unwanted sections—or whether you use this clip in its full length (or even two or more times) in a project.
By clicking the column headers, you can choose to sort by other attributes or toggle between ascending and descending order. You can customize which columns you want shown in Project view by choosing Edit Columns from the panel menu in the docking header of the Tasks panel.
One of the most important editing tasks is removing unwanted footage from the beginning and end of your clips. Premiere Elements has multiple ways of accomplishing this task, but you can access one of the simplest techniques in Project view.
Trimming a clip in the Preview window does not change the In and Out points of instances of that clip already included in the My Project panel. It only sets the In and Out points for all subsequent instances of that clip placed in the My Project panel.
The timecode in the lower-left corner of the Preview window displays the timecode of that clip on the original DV tape, whereas the timecode in the lower-right corner shows clip duration. You can navigate through this clip by clicking the timecode in the lower-left corner of the Preview window and then dragging left or right.
When you set In and Out points in the Preview window, they’re automatically applied–prospectively–when you drag the clip into the My Project panel, but these In and Out points aren’t retroactively applied to clips already in the My Project panel. You’ll learn how to trim clips in the My Project panel in the next chapter.
1. What’s the difference between Media view and Project view?
2. What’s the difference between the Organizer that ships with Premiere Elements and the Organizer that ships with Photoshop Elements?
3. What is Smart Tagging? Are there any situations in which you wouldn’t want to apply Smart Tagging?
4. After creating an InstantMovie, how do you break up the movie to edit it further?
5. How do you upload your clips to Photoshop.com?
1. Media view contains clips that you’ve imported into all projects and has multiple tools to help you find your clips. Project view contains only those clips that you’ve imported into the project.
2. This is a trick question—there is no difference. If you have Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements installed, both programs can insert content into the same shared database and sort through and retrieve data from that database.
3. When you apply Smart Tagging to a clip, Premiere Elements analyzes the clip to detect scenes based on content, hunts for certain content types like faces, and ranks the quality of your clips. Other than processing time, there’s very little downside to applying Smart Tagging. Your video clips will be divided into useful scenes, and you can find high-quality clips much faster than you could manually.
4. Click the clip with your pointer to select it, and then right-click and choose Break apart InstantMovie.
5. To upload clips to Photoshop.com, create an album in the Organizer and drag the new album tag onto the target clips. Then access the Organizer Preferences panel and make sure that that album is synced with Photoshop.com.