From the course: Premiere Pro: Documentary Editing

Adding interview metadata - Premiere Pro Tutorial

From the course: Premiere Pro: Documentary Editing

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Adding interview metadata

In Adobe Premiere Pro a lot of the actual logging--that is adding annotations to our clips--happens right inside the Project Panel. And that may be new if you're coming from a different nonlinear editor used to adding metadata as you bring in footage from a tape. But in Adobe Premiere Pro, it's very normal just to be editing your metadata columns in the Project Panel, which is what we're going to do now. I've already rearranged these columns to be using the ones that are most important to me in particular Log Note and Description. I'm going to click on the Media Duration column head to order this by duration. I want to see the longest of my interviews rise to the top as they are now. See a 31 minute interview and then an eight minute interview and then some of my shorter ones. That's naturally going to put these in an order where I'm dealing with the things that are probably most important to the project first, and that's very much what I want. Now I'm going to use the Log Note column, and I want to use it to just capture any of the important logistical information. Mostly people's names, maybe where they work, the types of things that would go in a lower third. A little later I'm going to edit the actual clip names and so I might lose some of that information at that point. I want to make sure I have it here in Log Note. So starting with this first interview we can see that it's BD the farmer, it's long, and I already know from a quick glance that this is going to be an important interview. Moving down I have John Downey who is the chef, it's also going to be featured. And then I get into some of these shorter ones, and I may go in and listen to a bit of the interview to get the information out, but I'm also not that concerned if I don't have absolutely full information. So in the case of Jonathan I don't actually have his last name, but I'm not terribly worried about it. In the case of Owen I have his first name and where he works but I don't have his last name, so again I am not going to stress about it just going to write down what I have. It could be even later on a producer is placing some phone calls to get the exact name of someone but frankly we don't even know if these clips are going to make the cut or not. So for now let's just make sure that the information we have stays in our project. Okay, so that column now captures all of that important information, and that means that I can move over into the actual clip names, and without worrying about it I actually change these clip names to be whatever is going be most meaningful for me in the edit process. So that's how I like to see it. This detailed information, last name, and where he is from, let's sort of demote that over to the right and during the editing process that's what I need to know. It's BD, this is his full interview. This is the chef, John Downey, and this is also his full interview. Jonathan is a market vendor, and that's probably what I need to know more than his name when I'm actually editing. Justin is a chef visiting the market, Owen is also a chef visiting the market. So we'll just call him Chef 2 for our purposes in this column, and last Sarah is a Market Patron. Okay, now I sort of have my quick-draw clip names here, and I've got my longer log notes with the information. The last thing I want to do at this stage is use the Description column but I'm going to use it in a very specific way. I basically have two types of interviews here, a traditional sit-down, like BD, and John Downey is also done in the traditional sit-down interview. But if you take a look at the Market Vendor and some of these others they're just shot standing up at the market, and I usually refer to that as a run & gun interview. You might have a term you like better, it's also called a vox-pop interview, which stands for voice of the people that kind of stand up, give me your thoughts for a second. And couple of different names for those but they're really different than the sit-down interview, and that's what I want to know at a glance. In the sit-down interview it's going to be very good to use for things like voiceover but in a run & gun interview it's very hard to cutaway from that interview, you really have to see the person and their surroundings. So I've added metadata to these three columns. We've got clip names that are informative and Description about what type of interview it is and then our Log Note that's going to be particularly handy when we go back to do our lower-third identifications. We're just moving one step at a time here and slow but steady progress is definitely a good way to proceed in the early parts of your project.

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