Organization

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Welcome back. This lecture is going to be all about organization in Premiere Pro specifically tailored to audio. Now when you open premiere, you should see your layout similar to this. This is the default workspace. That premiere comes with default editing workspace. You look up here, here in different stock workspaces that it gives you, as well as you can set your own.

I've got Jason's second favorite workspace because my first got lost. So here's editing. Let's say it launched you up on color, you can hit editing, and if your editing is all messed up, you're missing stuff. You've got no idea where to start, it looks like this. Click these, click the menu, hit reset to save layout and your back. Now for organization there are four areas that we Really want to be comfortable with and premiere first is the project area where you import files and organize them.

Second is the timeline where you actually edit your video and edit your audio. And third is going to be the audio track mixer, which will show up here. But let's start with the project. There's nothing here but before we even import anything, let's set ourselves up to stay organized. Let's create a new band called audio and everything audio will go inside here. Let's make a subdirectory called music.

We'll need some music. Another one for sound effects. Another one for voiceover and how about full mixes just in case we need to round trip our full mix back into premiere from a different program. Or we get it from somebody else. This is where those should land. Great.

And I like to do this for my video and other assets as well. The more broken out it is, the easier it is to find stuff when projects get crazy. And the easier it is for other editors to jump on your project, if you're collaborating, or let's say you finish a freelance project, and you need to send your project files to an agency or to the client, and if they need to make further changes down the road and have a different editor, they are going to be very happy that you are this organized and that can lead to more work. So we'll just stick with our audio organization right now. And to get the time to get a sequence first before you making a sequence, I would make a sequences folder bin and I like putting a little asterisk in the beginning because when you sort alphabetically it'll stay on top.

The symbols precede any of the letters So sequence new sequence here, let's just do 10 ad and call this organization. So that's what we're going over today. And I will just pull in a recent beat I made to show off a little bit, just kidding. And we can drag that onto the timeline, hit play. And there's our music. Now, the first thing that's helpful, especially if you're working on a smaller screen, is you can't do much when you're this far out.

So first of all, you can use the plus minus keys to zoom in and out. So I'm gonna hit plus a few times, and it's still hard to see. So if you hover over between the tracks, you can expand the track. And now you get a better view of the waveform, which we will cover in another lecture. So great we have we have our Oregon ization here. Again, if this starts getting super crazy, you can lapse your stuff.

And now let's say you're editing, editing, you're like, Oh, I need another piece of music that I have in my project, you know where to find it. Now in the timeline area here, the key things to look for, or to pay attention to are the track names. So it's a four audio. Up here you have the four video, and we have a one, a two, so on and the master. We're pretty much never going to touch the master down here. But here are the audio tracks.

And let's say we have a bunch here. Let's say we have a bunch of stuff we need to put in. We have voiceover we have sound effects, multiple pieces of music, and all of a sudden we've run out of room. If you right click in this empty space down here, you can hit Add tracks. And we don't need any video tracks right now. Let's say we need three more audio tracks, put in three, and the placement tells you where it's going to insert those.

So after a four means it's going to go down here. Okay. And there, you see it's created three more for us to play with. The next most important thing for organizing your audio in the timeline is actually keeping things together that are the same type. And the three main types of audio are going to be dialogue or voiceover music and sound effects. And it's kind of a standard rule that voiceovers and dialogue should be the first track.

And we've already put our music on the first track. So why don't we drag this down, and voiceover let's see what I got. About a Jason, do scratch See, I just drag this in before you forget about it. And I know when you move fast, you want to just drag this on right here. But before you do that, put it where it belongs. That way, you'll be able to find it later.

Now we can drag this on, we've got voiceover, or dialogue on the first track music on the second track. And let's say we have another voiceover. Let's say this a different person, instead of putting it on the music track, or putting it down here, theoretically, this would be okay. But it starts to get confusing if you got voice music, voice music. So keep all the voice up top doesn't matter how many layers you use, but essentially we want voice and then voice and then music. And I actually like giving myself just empty layers of space so I can really visually see where things are.

I know that below this space, I'm dealing with music above it. I'm dealing with more And then the last thing in the timeline panel are the solo and mute. Let's say we just want to hear the music and hit solo. Or we just want to hear my awful do. We hit solo here, documentaries, music videos, I did say awful. And let's say we've got more than one track all stacked up, or more than two tracks, we can hit and we want to hear these two.

We can either mute this one and these two will play or we leave this alone and solo these, whatever soloed will play. Okay. So we have our organization, we have our layer organization in the timeline. And one thing that some editors do that if it's helpful for you, or even when you're starting out, you can label and color pretty much everything in Premiere. So default audio files will be this green color, but if you right click And hit label. You can change the color.

Let's say you want to label all or color all of your dialogue, a certain color. There now from bird's eye view, you can tell super quickly, what's voice and what's music. And it's helpful. So now we want to look at the audio track mixer. And where's the audio track mixer? Good question.

It should be up here but in the default, thank you Creative Cloud, the default editing workspace, it doesn't show up. So we have to go up to Window audio track mixer. And this is the audio track mixer. And this is probably the kind of stuff you were looking to avoid because it reminds you of DAWs digital audio workstations such as Pro Tools or logic which seems super complicated, and honestly they kind of are but this is a stream And audio mixer that is incredibly powerful. And knowing how things relate between the timeline and audio track mixer will save you a ton of time and a ton of headache. So, just really briefly, remember our track names a one a tune, so on.

Here they are an audio track mixer, a one, a two, a three. Now here it's horizontal, just like you're used to. But in the audio track mixer, it's vertical. So a one is here. And because I don't like listening to my voice, let's worry about the music. So let's solo the music and hit play.

See how it's on a four. That's because it's on track a four here and check this out. If I unsolo this and now we're getting voice and music together. We can make an adjustment super Quickly, instead of going like this, I see a lot of editors dragging this line. And if it's too loud, and they bring it down, well, you probably be doing it on the music. musics too loud, right?

Music. And in every situation knowing, yeah, it's too loud. You can't really hear the voice as clearly as you should. So other editors will go like this. Drag the line down, try to get it quiet. And did you did you see how it jumped from negative 22 to infinity in barely any space.

It's just too time consuming to deal with unless you're really experienced with sound and you absolutely love the pen tool, which we'll get into in another lecture. Pencil is actually great. If we want to make a really quick adjustment and bring the music down instead of messing with this. Let's just drag the slider and which slider do we check drag? Oh yeah, a four. Let's go to eight.

Four sounds kind of like chess. And in real time while it's playing, you can adjust the slider. So that's really low. So now we'll do a really, really quick mix with our dialogue, every situation knowing. And in every situation, knowing how to use music and sound effectively has been my foundation for successful video. So that sounds a bit better.

And look, all we did. I mean, it took me a while to show you explain all the different relationships and everything. But all we did was drag this slider from here to here and you have a rough mix and it's not perfect. We would go in and edit around the dialogue and do all these things, but as a baseline adjustment. It's great to do it here because now you can do the small adjustments with this line. That wraps Presents game or volume, just following these simple things, creating bins to keep yourself organized and staying disciplined with those organizing by type, dialogue, music, sound effects, and knowing the relationship between the track names and the sliders and the audio track mixer will help you so much and being organized and fast and allowing yourself to focus on creating

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