Premiere Pro Panels

These are notes on the Adobe video - https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/work-explore-panels.html. Download the sample files from the website.

When you start Premiere Pro, you will see a start screen. In the Start screen, select Open Project and open a project file. Alternatively, in the menu, select File>Open Project and open a project file Premiere Pro project files have the extension .prproj. You will see 4 panels, arranged as below.

Source Monitor (upper left)

When you double click an item in the Project Panel below, that item is then displayed in the Source Monitor

The Source Monitor has controls to play, stop, etc. the item displayed here.

Program Monitor (upper right)

Lets you view the sequence you have built in the Timeline Panel.

The Program monitor has controls to play, stop, etc the sequence that is built in the Timeline Panel.

Project Panel (lower left)

The Project Panel panel contains the assets that can be used in the movie. The assets are often inside folders (called bins in Premiere Pro)

The project panel has two views:

list view (which lists the name of each file, its frame rate, and other information, which you can access by using the scrollbar below the files and scrolling to the right). If you click at the top of a column in list view, it will sort the contents by that heading. If you click again, it will sort it in reverse order.
icon view - you can drag the slider at bottom left to enlarge or make smaller the thumbnails

You can switch between these two views at the bottom left of the Project Panel.

If you double click on the Media bin, it will open it in its own panel. Bins have the same controls as the Project Panel.

In icon view, If you hover over a thumbnail and move your mouse, the left side will show the beginning of the clip and the right side will show the end; this feature is called "hover scrub".
If you single click on an icon, you will get a blue timeline at the botto of the icon and you can drag the playhead to different positions and you can use the space bar to play and stop.

You can enter words into the search field to display the clips that match your search terms.

Timeline Panel (lower right)

You will bring one or more clips from the Project Panel into the Timeline Panel.

Time moves from left to right in the Timeline. Wherever the blue playhead is placed (on the yellow line at the top of the Timeline) you will see that frame in the Program Monitor above.

Constructing a sequence is largely placing clips one after another in the Timeline panel. There is a horizontal line in the Timeline panel that separates the video and audio clips. You can drag this boundary up or down by clicking to the left of the vertical line that divides the track headers (on the left) and the tracks themselves (on the right).

Each video in the Timeline panel has a track output option; the eyeball - it's a toggle like in Photoshop; for audio tracks, there is a mute option (a capital M).

You can drag clips and they will snap into place, unless this option is turned off (the blue horseshoe icon at the top left of the panel).

You can change the height of individual tracks by dragging in the track header; some of the controls in the track header may not be visible until the height of the track is large enough.

There is a zoom control at the bottom left of the Timeline panel to zoom in and out (in terms of time).

Video tracks play as a stack, so a clip on an upper video track will appear on top of a clip on a lower video track when you play the sequence in the Program Monitor. Audio tracks play together, so you can create a soundtrack mix by positioning multiple audio clips on different tracks.

Features Common to Source and Program Monitor

At the bottom left and the bottom right, there is timecode that measures where we are in the clip in terms of hours, minutes, seconds, and frames.

The timecode at the bottom right shows the duration of the clip.
The timecode at the bottom left shows where the clip is relative to all the media the camera recorded.

You can move through the clip by moving the playhead (scrubbing) or by using the space bar. You can use the arrow keys in the middle to move back one frame and to move forward one frame (watch the blue timecode at the left as you click the arrow keys; it will increment or decrement by 1 on each click).

You can use portions of a clip by selecting the Mark In and Mark Out buttons that looks like { and } respectively. If you use this clip anywhere in a sequence, you will only get the highlighted portion you've selected.

You can specify the marks at any point just by moving the playhead to the desired point and then selecting the appropriate mark.
These marks are persistent; they will still be there if you close the project and then reopen it.
You can get rid of the marks by right clicking the picture and choosing "Clear In" (delete the left mark) or "Clear Out" (deletes the right mark).

Features Common to All Panels

There's a very useful keyboard shortcut that when pressed over any panel will make that panel display full screen; pressing it again will have it resume its usual place. The shortcut is the accent grave key - the location of this key varies, for me it is immediately to the left of the 1 key at the top left of the keyboard.

Revised: April 12, 2023 Comments to William Pegram, wpegram@nvcc.edu