Using the exercise files - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- If you're a premium member of the lynda.com online training library, you have access to the exercise files used throughout this title. Once you download the appropriate exercise files, you'll see that they've been compressed to a zip file, and when you unzip the file, you'll see a folder labeled exercise files. You'll be using the exercise files in chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this course. If you open up the folder, you'll see three folders inside. Your main folders are: Dialogue Media, Dialogue Project, and you also have an Additional Materials folder that houses your script. Now, the media folder is broken down by type of material. While technically you can go in here and start looking around, my advice would be to leave everything alone; that's because the project file in this other folder, points to the Media Folder. So, if you move or change anything in here, then your connection can break. Instead, just work within the project and just follow along with the instructions that I give you within this training, and I'll tell you exactly where to go to access certain resources, As you can see, this is a Premiere Pro Project File. Technically, if you use this project file, you'll be working in Premiere Pro, and I'm working in the June 2015 version of the software. If you're working with an older version of the software, you won't be able to open these exercise files. Instead, you just have to ingest the media from the Dialogue Media Folder into an empty project, and work with these clips from scratch. This should be pretty easy since we're just building very basic dialogue scenes. By the way, you do the exact same thing if you were working in another software like Final Cut Pro Ten, or Avid Media Composer. Just bring these raw materials in and you can start working. Just realize that you won't be working with any pre-built sequences, of course. You'll have to create those on your own. No matter what software you're working in, if you're brand new to the software, I'd highly recommend watching the appropriate lynda.com Essential Training to learn the basics. Back to the exercise files, which assumes that you're working with Premiere Pro, the June 2015 version or later. You can double-click on this project file or you can go by the traditional way of launching Premiere Pro, you can go to the Welcome Screen and then navigate to that project file. By the way, you'll notice that I'm obviously working on a Mac here, but because Premiere Pro works on both Macs and Pcs, you'll be able to follow along, with this training if you're using a Windows system as well. Here, you just access the Create tab, and then choose Open, and then I'll just navigate to my project file, which is called The News, and Open. The first time that you launch the project, you'll likely need to link your media appropriately. When you get this screen, the Link Media dialogue box, you'll see that you need to link all the media for this project. You're going to come down to the Locate button, but before I do, I just want to make sure that this box is checked: Re-link Others Automatically. This is going to allow you to find one piece of media, and automatically link all the rest of it. I'm going to choose Locate, and then this is where you point to where your media is located. I happen to know that it's in the Exercise Files folder; if I want to go even deeper, I can go inside and say, "I know it's in the Dialogue Media folder." I could even technically say, "Hey, I know that it's somewhere "on my Macintosh hard drive." While this would technically work, it's going to take a very long time to find your media. So, bottom line, choose the level that you know for sure that the media files reside. Let's say that I know for sure that it's in my Exercise Files folder, and now I'm going to choose Search. What is it searching for? It's searching for this file right here. It happens to be a music file; it's called Sarah Instrumental. I'm going to choose my Exercise Files folder, click Search, and here it's found it. Once you've designated a location to search, it usually does a pretty good job of finding the exact file that you want. So, you would just select Sarah Instrumental, and choose OK. All we needed to do, was find one file and because we had that box checked that said Link Others Automatically, all of my media is now online. Inside of your project you'll see two bins: one is called Assets, and the other is called Exercise Files. If I twirl down my Assets bin, the names of these bins inside should look pretty familiar, they're the same names as the folder at the finder level. So, these are all of my raw materials; my video and my audio files. Most of the course however, you'll spend within the Exercise Files bin. If I twirl this down, you'll see that I have Chapters 3, 4, and 5 and you'll simply follow along per chapter and per movie. If you're working in Chapter 3, Movie 2, then you would just twirl this down, and go into 3.2 and here's all the materials that you'll need for that particular movie. You can see that everything is contained within each of these movie-specific bins. If you do not have access to the lynda.com Exercise Files, then you should definitely follow along with your own assets. All right, let's get started!