Organize media in your Project Assets panel

When you're working in quick view any media files you add to your project are immediately to your timeline. When you are working in expert view on the other hand, any media files you add to your project are added first to the project access panel which is sort of a holding area for your videos, stills, music and audio. But the Project Assets' panel is more than just a passive storage space. There it is right here. It also includes a number of tools for managing the media in your project, even a few bonus tools, for creating special media clips for your movie.

And by the way, you might notice that my Project Assets' panel is rather large. You can change the size of it right here by dragging on the corner. I like mine pretty big. Now, the Project Assets' panel has a pin option to it. You can see that little pin there in the upper right corner. Pinning means that it's one of the few panels that stays open even when you click away from it. So, it's pinned open until you click the tab again to close it. Usually you prefer to have your project assets open so that you can get to your media files. Now you can turn if off simply by untoggling the pin of course.

Now you can see that when it's in grid format it makes it very easy for you to identify each of your clips. You can see sort of a, the first frame of each clip, which makes it pretty easy for you to figure out what the clip is, but it's not very efficient use of the space. See if you had many, many clips and I do here, you have so many clips that. They kind of go beyond the size of your panel, and quite often, when I'm working on a project, I might have as many as 100 clips in my Project Assets' panel. It just doesn't make sense to keep it in grid view for me unless I use some of the other tools here for managing my files.

Now, you can switch to list view which I think is a more efficient way to look at your media files. And, you can do that simply by clicking on the panel options button here in the upper right corner of the panel and selecting list view. There we can see them listed. By default they're listed alpha numerically by name, but you can see we have a number of ways to change how they're displayed. When you're here up in list viewing you can do that simply by just clicking on, if you like it to be based on their duration, if you like it to be based on what type of media it is, name is by default here, and that's a nice easy way to look at it.

You also have filters here in the upper left hand panel. So that you can look at, if you only want to look at the audio files, you can turn off Movies, and you can turn off still photos, and you'll only see the audio files that are displayed in your Project Assets' panel. But it can also get a little cumbersome to try to maintain all of these and to find your way around these various clips, and like I say if I'm working on a wedding or something, I may have dozens and dozens, maybe a hundred different clips that I'm trying to search for. So there are great tools in here for managing the assets in your assets panel.

And these tools are listed under, panel options, again in the upper right hand corner. One of the cool things in here is the ability to create folders, and subfolders. And subfolders within subfolders. So for instance, I can create a new folder here. And I can call it, for instance, Farmer's Market. And if I drag all of my clips here that have to do with the farmer's market into it, displaying my clips becomes a little more manageable. Because I don't have to look through hundreds of clips, I can put all of the clips that deal with one specific thing into a folder.

For instance I can, I can create another folder here. By the way, you don't have to go all the way up here to Panel Options to create a folder. You can just right click, any place where there's a blank space and select New Folder. Everything that deals with loading a truck, for instance, I can drag into that folder. We can also create a folder here, for still photos. And rather than drag them down into it, we can also select our still photos, right-click, cut, and then open up the still photo folder and paste into it. Now notice that there are a couple of ways to display here.

I can toggle open my folders. To see what's inside them, or if I double click on the folder, it opens into the folder itself. And again I can create subfolders in here, for instance I can create a new folder in here called grapes. And I can grab just the grape pictures and put them in the subfolder. This make sit very, very easy for me to manage my files. So I'm not looking now through hundreds of files anymore. I'm going directly to the folder. So I can have a folder in here for instance for wedding vows.

I can have a folder in here for the procession down the aisle. I can have a folder in here for greeting the guests after the ceremony. And now instead of going through hundreds of clips when I'm creating my wedding video, I can just deal with one particular sequence or one particular scene at a time, by simply using the folder system to categorize my files into smaller groups. Now to navigate through the different panels, you see that I double click to go into a folder, to go out of a folder, I just go up here to the Up button. And I can go into my main directory and go all they way up, and now it's grayed out because I'm all the way up in my main directory, but I could go down into a folder and then to the subfolder and use my Up directory button here to go back out to the various directories. This is a very handy tool.

As a matter of fact, one of the first things I do when I create a project after I've gathered all of my assets is I start subdividing them and putting them into different folders. So that I have a much more manageable way to locate a specific file. Now here in Project Assets, I'm going to make this smaller so I can work. Now here in the panel options, we also have a couple of cool tools here for creating special clips, for special circumstances. So if I click on this, and I do new item. I have options for creating for instance, the universal counting leader.

You've sen this at the beginning of movies, right? Where it counts down from eight to about two seconds before, and then it goes black for two seconds. You can use this to set up if you're giving your video for broadcast. Often they'll need to queue it up and you can use the Universal Counting Leader, so that they can queue it up to a specific spot. And of course you can customize this into any colors you want. Traditionally, as with most counting leaders,it goes down to two seconds when there's queue blip. A beep. An then it stops counting. It goes to black so that, that's the cue-up for the beginning of your video.

An it kind of of looks like this. Additionally, if you're creating something for broadcasting, may also ask for color bars, and tone, and you can get that right here under the new items in the panel options. Color bars and tone allow them to set up their equipment to a certain sound level and to a certain color space. It looks like this. So they can again set up their equipment to match whatever color space you happen to be using for your particular video. That comes in handy, if you're especially if you're creating something for broadcast. And finally under Project Assets, you have the option to create a couple of different color clips.

Black video comes in handy a lot if you're going to include a blank space in your video. I do encourage you not to have a blank spot in your video where there's no video at all. This sometimes confuses Premier Elements. So if you are going to have a blank space or if you just going to have a spot where there is a few seconds of black, I would encourage you to use a black clip instead. You see that you can also create clips of other colors. Color map will create a clip into any color you want. Now this is very useful if you're creating a background for titles for instance, and you want your titles to be shown over red or green, or blue.

So not only does the panel include tools for ordering and managing the media files that you've gathered for your project, it also includes valuable tools for generating special media clips that you might need in your project.