Subtitles of the Movie

As I mentioned in an earlier movie, Premiere projects consist of a set of instructions that refer to media files that are located outside of the Premiere file on the computer's hard drive somewhere since the project file contains all of your editing hard work, it's important to protect from possible mishaps. The most common mishap that my students encounter when working with Premiere is losing the source clips in their projects. When working on a project, Premiere looks for files in the same location that they were in when they were imported into the project. Notice over here in my Project window or Project panel, I have two files here with these icons, and those icons indicate that the source file has been lost or it's been broken. Premiere Pro can no longer find the source file, Saline Ambient Bed Wave, and Saline Car 08. It could be that these source files were moved, deleted, or renamed, so Premiere Pro is having trouble locating them. Premiere Pro will make an attempt to locate these files when you first open up the file, prompting you to confirm where you think it's located. In this case, when I opened this project file, I could not remember where I put those or what happened to them, so notice that when I bring them into the Project window, they have that icon. Also, this clip was placed in the Timeline. Notice that has this icon here in both the Program view and also the thumbnail in the Timeline view here or the Timeline down below. Now I can also designate these clips as offline. In that case, Premiere Pro will no longer give me the missing prompt when I open up this file. It's designated as offline until you decide to capture it or re-link it with its source media. I can show you a demonstration of this if I open up this project again. This is Copy of Sample, NTSC right there. And notice that it gives me this: Where is the file Saline Ambient underscore bed wave? So I can designate this as offline. Now it's asking me where Saline Car is. Let's go ahead and find that one. Saline Car AVI is right there. Let's select that and then the third one it's asking me for is Saline Car 08. I can also designate that as offline. Those offline files, notice, will still give me that icon. There's the Offline icon there in my Program view. Also here in the Project panel, it gives me that Online icon, but the next time I open up this file, Premiere Pro will not ask me where it is. I'll need to re-link these files to their source files if I want to then be able to actually complete this project. So again, once the clip is listed as offline, Premiere Pro treats this media as a holder or an offline clip until I locate the missing clip. In this way, the clip will not display, but at least you can open the project and continue working with it. To re-link an offline file, find the clip here in the Project view and right click on it or Control click if you're on the Macintosh. In the contextual menu that opens, choose Link Media, browse to the location of that missing file, the one that Premiere Pro couldn't find when I opened up this project, select it, and then click on the Select button. Notice that the icon is replaced; the Offline icon is replaced with a thumbnail. That's the first frame of that clip. I also can see the first frame in the Program view, as well as a thumbnail here in the Timeline. By the way, you can take that clip offline again by again, right-clicking or Control clicking here in the Project panel and then choosing Make Offline from the contextual menu. You have a choice; you can make the media files remain on the disk, or you can delete the media files, and notice that the icon, the Offline icon, comes back. Another common beginner mistake with Premiere to lose work. To avoid this frustrating mishap, save your project files often and back up your work on a separate hard drive or external media. Premiere Pro CS3 will automatically save your files to the Premiere Pro Auto-save folder, located in the Premiere Application folder. If the unthinkable does happen and you lose your file, you can always retrieve an archived copy in this folder. To set up your Automatic Save options, choose from the Main menu, Edit, Preferences here at the bottom, Auto Save, and that will bring up the Preferences dialog here in the Auto Save section. Here you can automatically save your projects by putting a checkmark next to that option, and then you can specify how often to save your project. I've got every 20 minutes, and the maximum project versions that will be saved at any one time is five. In other words, after I've saved my fifth version and I go to save the sixth one, the first version will be deleted. So that's a very important Preference to set up there just in case you do lose your work, you can go back again and retrieve your work from the Premiere Pro Auto Save folder, located in the Premiere Application folder. Let me now move on to the next movie and give you some tips for improving your system performance while working your Premiere Pro CS3 projects.