Using the Import window and the Media Browser - Premiere Pro Tutorial

Now that we're a bit more comfortable with the Premiere Pro environment, let's drop back to the beginning and spend this chapter talking all about how we ingest and organize our media. Then in the next chapter, we'll start in on all things editing. Now, so far in this course, we've mostly been setting up projects from scratch and we're gonna continue doing that here. So I'm going to choose new project and I'm gonna call this one Farmer Demo 2. I'm okay with it living on the desktop. I'm not going to assign a template, and I do not want to skip import mode. So I'll say create. Now in the previous chapter, we learned a few ways to import our media, including a brief look at the import window. So here, I'd like to spend a bit more time looking at the import window, and then we'll also take a look at the media browser in software, which is a very similar tool. Now we know that by default, we're looking at our sample media from our going home project. Adobe provides these assets for editors if they'd like to use them. But for this, let's instead import some of our built-by-live footage. So I'm going to navigate to the desktop, and I'm going to go into Exercise Files, and Media, and B-Roll. All right, now that we're looking at our clips, let's take a look at some additional tools in the import window. So we know that each of these clips we can look at as little movies. I'm just hover scrubbing over them. You can hover scrub forward or in reverse. You can adjust the size of these icons up here. I can go really small or quite large. I can look at them as icons or in list view, and this comes with some important columns information. I also have the ability to sort. Right now, I'm sorting by name in ascending order, otherwise known as alphabetical order, but I can go in descending order, which is reverse alphabetical, and then it also gives me the ability to sort by creation date in ascending or descending order. Let me go back to name in ascending order. Over here is a filter for videos, audios, or images. So if you have a folder with lots of different types of media, that can be useful. Right now, this is just video files, so not as useful here. This next tool allows me to access the directory for specific camera file types. And then here I have a text field, which is nice. So if I type in the word Vince, here are all the clips with the word Vince in them. And I'll go back to icon view. All right, so some nice tools at the top to zero in on the footage that I wanna bring in. And then I actually have to select the clips that I want to bring in. So I can select all of them by pressing command A or control A on a PC. And now I'll head over to import settings and we'll take a closer look here. Now, organized media allows me to bring all of these clips into a bin. We know what bins look like now. So I'm going to go ahead and do that. And I'm going to call this Vince B-roll. I'm going to skip over copy media. Again, this is going to create new media files. That's not what we want to do here. we just want to point to the existing media files. So we'll leave that unchecked. And then under Create New Sequence, again, this is going to create a sequence based on all of these clips. It's not gonna set any in or out points, it's just gonna place the entire clip into a sequence. Usually not that useful, but let's go ahead and do it so that we can populate something in the timeline. I'll go ahead and call this Vince B-Roll Selects. I'm gonna skip automatic transcription for now, but in a moment, we'll bring in some interview footage where we will choose this. All right, so I've selected my clips, I've made some selections and import settings. Let's import. All right, let's go back to our source monitor here. And then down here in the project panel, I have my Vince B-roll bin that I created, and here are all my Vince B-roll clips. And then here is my Vince B-roll selects sequence, and it's loaded in the timeline. Let's go back to the import window. And this time I'm going to climb into my interviews bin, and let's bring in our Vince interviews. So I'll go back to media, and it's not showing anything because I still have my Vince filter on. I'll remove that. And then I'll go into Interviews. And I'm just going to bring in a few of these. Maybe I'll select these bottom two rows here. And then I'm going to come up to Bin. And instead of Vince B-Roll, let's just call this Vince Interviews. And I'll change the name of the sequence to Vince Interview Selects. And then under Automatic Transcription, let's go ahead and transcribe the dialogue. We can choose a language. We can do speaker labeling. So we have both Vince and the interviewer. It will separate out those speakers. So let's go ahead and separate those out. And then I'm going to transcribe all imported clips. Okay, and we'll import. Okay, so over here in the project panel, I have my Vince interview clips, and then I have my Vince interview select sequence, and here it is loaded in the timeline. You'll notice that I have two sequences, B-roll selects and interview selects. I can have as many sequences open as I like, and they'll all be separate tabs within my timeline. And then I'm gonna open up the text window so that I can look at my transcribed dialogue. All right, so with my interview select sequence selected, you can see that here is the transcribed dialogue that corresponds with all of my clips. If I go into my interviews bin, and I just want to look at the transcribed dialogue for one of my source clips, I can do that too. So I'm just going to load this clip here. And then if I go to my text tab, you'll see that this dialog corresponds with what's loaded in the source monitor. If I want to go back to looking at the sequence dialog, I just select my sequence, and the sequence dialog is displayed as such. All right, so you can see that the import window really does contain a lot of nice tools to help you navigate and hone in on exactly the media you want to bring in. I want to show you an additional tool called the Media Browser, which is very similar but contains fewer features. So I'm going to click on Media Browser. Again, if this is not there, you can go up to Window and make sure that Media Browser is checked. And I'm just going to navigate to my desktop. And here are my exercise files. And here's my media. If I want that to be always accessible, I can make that a favorite. I can just right-click and choose Add to Favorites. All right, and here is my media. So I can see this better. I'm just going to press tilde to maximize the window. And let's, again, go into our B-roll bin. And again, this looks a lot like the import window. I can hover scrub over my clips. I can make them larger or smaller. I can go into list view if I like. There are some filters up here by file type, and I can look at specific directories. And then here is my text filter. I'm just going to filter on mountain. And here are all my mountain shots. You'll notice that the Media Browser doesn't have an import button down here. Let me show you how to import things from the Media Browser. I'm going to select all of the clips that I want to import, and then I'm just going to right-click and choose Import. You'll notice that they were actually imported into the Vince Interviews bin. Let me grab all of them and drag them out of there. And I think they need their own bin, so I'm just going to call this Mountain B-Roll, and let's put that into the right bin. And I'll press tilde again to minimize. So most of the time you're going to use the import window. It has more features, and I'd say it's a little more elegant. But if you're editing away inside of Premiere Pro, the Media Browser is a really quick way to climb in, get the footage you need, and then quickly import it into your project.