An overview of Productions - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- [Instructor] This next feature is a very large change and a pretty extensive feature that would require a full-length course just to teach you all the ins and outs. So what I'd like to do is give you an overview of the Productions feature, so you can decide if it works well for you, or if it's not going to change your workflow. Let's start with what exactly a production is. Productions were designed from the ground up to make it easier to share assets between multiple users. What's designed here is a general framework to help you organize projects and make it much easier to share media between projects. In the past, if you were working with shared folders or went to grab something from someone else's project, every time you added something into a project or a timeline, it would create a new master clip. Now, this didn't mean more media on your hard drive, but it did mean more assets loaded into RAM and more pieces in the project. And when you started to merge those projects back together, you'd have a lot of duplicated clips that would be repeated in bins throughout the project. This was designed with input from several filmmakers and Hollywood editorial teams. It's really designed for film workflows, documentaries, or broadcast workflows with multiple episodes. It's also designed to work with shared local storage. In order for this to work effectively, you'll need a network detached server where multiple people can access the same media files while editing. Adobe does offer a workflow for multiple people having mirrored copies of storage, but this is not the ideal workflow for this product. So what are the benefits with Productions? Well, there's really four. One is that it's designed to make it much easier to manage multi-project workflows. Meaning, if you're working on something, like a TV series with multiple episodes, and then promotions, and clips, and highlights, and excerpts for the web, all of those could have separate projects that are linked to the same media. The promotions editor can be working while the colorist is working on the footage at the same time as the video editor. This makes it so much easy for people to work with the same media files. For example, you can be editing with the footage while the colorist is looking at the actual clips and applying adjustments to the master effect of the clip itself. It's also much easier to keep projects synchronized because everyone is pulling from the same source projects where there could be a project for things like stock music, B-roll from day one, all the interviews from a multi-day field shoot, or things like graphics. It makes it a lot easier for people to have access to these projects. You're still limited to one person having write access to a project, meaning the ability to modify the project and add or subtract to it, but everyone else can still be reading and using the assets from these projects and add them into their sequences that they're working on. This makes it a lot easier to collaborate because everyone is always looking at the latest version and has access to the same pieces. You don't have to worry about, "Did I remember to send this graphic "to the editor working on the promo?" Or, "Oh, we got a new music package, "but we forgot to tell one of the editors about it." This also is designed for much tighter security over media storage. So instead of the Team Projects feature, which Adobe still offers and continues to ship for collaboration, this allows you to work with local storage. Assets are not stored in the cloud. This is important for a lot of entertainment-based projects or those where security concerns are in place. It's not to say that the cloud-based footage wasn't safe, but when you're dealing with a multi-million dollar project, you don't like taking chances, so having the storage locally is a great idea. How do you get this set up? Well, there are a couple of changes you need to make to your preferences. First, you'll need to change these options. De-select the option to write XMP ID to files on import. You don't want the media being changed. Additionally, de-select writing clip markers to the XMP metadata, and disable clip and XMP metadata linking. Additionally, go into your Collaboration preferences. Make sure that project locking is turned on. This allows someone to lock a project so other people can't modify it. And you can enter in a username so people will know who has a particular project checked out while working. You also should likely turn off the Workspaces option here that automatically adjust to the workspaces coming in from projects. Let's make those changes. We'll go to Premiere Pro Preferences and choose Media. Let's de-select the write XMP ID, write clip markers, and enable clip and XMP metadata linking. Now, switch to Collaboration. Turn on the feature here for project locking and enter your name. Now, click OK to store those changes. From the Windows menu, you can also choose Workspaces and uncheck the option to Import Workspace from Projects so your layouts don't keep changing if other editors had a different panel configuration. Now, effectively, this is what happens. From the File menu, you can choose to add a project here to a production. I'm going to make a new Production. I need to give this a name. Now, you see by default, it has a project in it. This is an untitled project. I can also choose to add additional projects here. We can click on the panel menu and choose to add a project to this production. Let me just select one here. And it's going to make a copy of this project because it's already been in use. So it copies that into the production. I can also make new projects for things such as music. Now, you see that I have write access as indicated by the green pencil. If I double-click, that opens, and we can add media into this project. Within a project, you can use anything else like you did before, putting in multiple bins, et cetera. But one of the goals is to keep the projects a bit smaller so they don't have so much material in them. You'll see, as you work, the ability to open up projects and continue to bring them in. Now, it's open. I also could decide how I'm working with this. For example, if I need it open, but I don't need the ability to write to the project, I could switch to Read-Only Mode. This leaves it open so I can grab assets and pull things out, but other people can continue to actually work with the project and modify it if necessary. Remember, that's just a right-click for Read-Only Mode. Additionally, you'll see the ability here to move things to the trash or make a copy, or also rename the files. When you do this, it is actually making changes in the Finder level. If I reveal this in the Finder, for example, you'll see that there's that whole folder here for the project called Training Series. There are the different projects stored within, there's the project set that explains how these projects are related, and everything else. So if I made a change here or someone was working, and I called this Starter Project, you see it actually updated in Premiere Pro. This is pretty cool because it means, as multiple people are working, the Productions workspace is going to stay in sync. Now, if you decide to get rid of something, you can actually move it to the trash. Doing so moves it to the system trash where it would need to be deleted. Now, you can continue to stay organized in here and make additional folders as necessary. Think of it this way, it's a lot like a Premiere Pro project, in that you can have bins and other items, except instead of having lots of bins, you're really using a project as a bin. This makes it so much easier to collaborate with others and to control who has access and who can make edits. And unlike the Team Projects feature for collaboration, which generally costs extra, this allows you to collaborate on local storage without the need for cloud-based storage or additional costs. If you'd like to explore Productions in greater depth, there's a detailed workflow guide that's very long, but I suggest reading before you implement this at your production company. You can visit Adobe's blog and look for an article called, Productions Available Today in Premiere Pro. You can do that with the Search menu. This is just at blog.adobe.com. At the bottom of this article is a detailed workflow guide. Choose this to access the PDF file. This is an extensive guide that talks about long form and episodic productions. I suggest downloading this and reading it fully. It is a very long guide, about 20 pages, but does cover a tremendous amount of useful information. I've given you a good overall workflow here on Productions, and I've walked you through the key benefits and workflow features, but you still may want to check out that guide to make sure you're fully up to date on all of the features.