Freeform view - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- [Instructor] Freeform view deserves a special mention in Premier Pro. It's a long while since Adobe added a new way to browse and review your footage in the Project panel and this is a major leap. I'm just scrolling down here in the Project panel and I'm going to double click on the Mixed Media bin to open it up and I think just to illustrate this I'll double click on the bin name to set it to full screen and I'm going to switch to Freeform view. Freeform view really is a departure from traditional approaches to browsing and navigating your media. First of all, of course you can still perform hover scrub. You can move your cursor over a clip, you can select a clip, you can add In points and Out points in exactly the same way that you can in the Icon view. The major difference you might be able to see a clue to right away. You've now got these navigators that allow you to go way off screen and disappear into the far reaches of the background of the Project panel. This is not possible in the other views. You're also not obliged stick to a grid. If I go back to the Icon view and let me just shrink these thumbnails a little bit. You can see that I can move these items around, but they're always locked to a particular grid. Now you can change that by clicking on this sort icons menu and there's lots of ways that you can choose to sort your clips in the Icon view. But in Freeform view you can move clips anywhere you want. You're completely free to create groupings and in fact if you want to you can select a group of thumbnails as I have now by lassoing. You can right click and there's this new clip size option. I can set these three to be extra small, for example, and maybe I'll make all of these, I'm just going to right click again, extra large. You're not obliged to stick to just one size for all of the clips. You do still have a zoom control and if I zoom you can see all of the clips change size relatively maintaining that organizational system I just created by making some large and some small clips. I'll just deselect by clicking on the background of the Project panel here and I just want to show you if I hold Option here on Mac OS, that's ALT on Windows in this case, and I can just build these anywhere I want snapping the edges together. So in a sense you can begin to build sequences right here in the bin and almost see these as a kind of comic strip. We've been talking for a long time over the years about storyboard editing and this is really an enhancement that allows you to expand that approach to film making and organize your clips in a way that is let's say more freeform. If you're happy with a particular layout as I am now, well let's maybe clean this up a little over here and maybe move this down here and just group these together, there we go. And of course you can scroll as I am now with a trackpad, you don't have to use the navigators, but if you're happy with that particular layout you can right click on the background of the Project panel and choose save as new layout. I'll call this Freeform 1 and click okay and now of course if I move these somewhere else in the view I can right click and choose restore layout and choose the layout that I saved. And you can see there are some common options you'd expect like you can manage the layouts and delete them or save this as another layout again. You can also clean up the display. If I right click on the background of the Project panel I've got the option to align to grid and if I choose that everything just tidily arranges itself so it just looks a bit neater. I suppose that's useful when the producer comes in and you want to show your work, but you also have the option to reset to grid according to a particular sorting option. So for example, I could choose to reset to a grid and put them in name order. This just cleans up the view and puts it back to a default layout so you can begin again. There are a couple of additional options actually under the Panel menu as well. You'll notice that we have Freeform view options right down at the bottom. In here we can decide if we're going to display label colors or not, if we're going to display badges, that's these little icons that tell you the type of clip that it is, and whether or not we want one or two lines of additional metadata displayed. I think the name and maybe the video duration is pretty useful, so I'll click okay. And now we've got a little more information to make our decisions with. This is a powerful approach to project organization in Premier Pro and in a way it's another order, another layer of organization within the bin structure that you've already got. Now within a bin you can group your clips, separate them out, and identify them as being of particular interest while still seeing all of the other available media in one place. So that's the Freeform view in Adobe Premier Pro.