Smart workspace customization in Premiere Pro

- In this movie, we're going to take a look at customizing and saving workspaces in Premiere Pro. So in Premiere Pro, we have a number of workspaces available to us by default. Now you can access them from Window, workspaces, and here they all are. Notice that they are in alphabetical order. You can also access them from this shortcut bar at the top. Notice that these are not necessarily in alphabetical order. These are customizable, so you can have your shortcut bar look however you like, and to edit that, you just come into edit workspaces, and then you drag these up and down as needed, alright.

So number one is to the far left, and then two, three, four, and so on. So let's say that I want my color correction after editing, and let's say that I actually don't want to look at the Creative Suite 5.5, so I can either drag it to the overflow menu, and if I do that, it goes to this menu here, off of these two arrows. Or, if I don't want to see it at all, then I can choose do not show. So I'll just bring editing 5.5 down to do not show, and now it's not going to be available at all.

So the only thing I have in overflow is meta logging. So as you can see, these are totally customizable. Right now we're looking at editing. This is what effects looks like, this is what assembly looks like, so you have different windows, different sizes of windows, different layouts, and also different tools that you can show for each of these layouts. If I go to my editing layout, and I make any changes, let's say I want to make a little bit of a taller timeline view, and maybe I want to move this over a little bit to give myself even more room in my timeline, if I want to save this as my new editing view, I can just come to save changes to this workspace.

And if I do that, then every time I go to editing, it's going to look like this. Alright, so let's use that to our advantage and customize our own workspace. Last week we learned all about multicam editing, so I'm going to create a multicam workspace. To do that, I'm going to drag my program monitor all the way over to the left, because we know that when we're in multicam mode, which I can activate by pressing shift zero, we're going to need a lot of space. We don't necessarily need our source monitor, but we need a lot of space with the multicam monitor and the program monitor.

Let's also say that I want a nice long timeline, and for the heck of it, I'm going to bring my project pane up. So, to move actual windows around, and not just rearrange them, but to move them, I grab the tab and I move up. And you can see that I have all these drop zones. So anywhere you see purple or green that's along one of the two edges, you can drop it. So if you drop it in the middle, it becomes just a tab. I'll show you this. I'll go ahead and drop my project pane right here in the middle, and now you can see that it's a tab within my source monitor.

So there's my source monitor, and I'll just drag this over a little bit so you can see, that my project pane is now a tab within that environment. So I can do the same thing with my media browser, it becomes a tab, and so on and so forth. If however I want it to live beside it, I need to drop it in one of those drop zones. So let's rearrange this. I'm going to have my project pane live beside my source monitors, so I'll drop it here to the left, and then bring my media browser here, and that becomes tabbed, and libraries, and we'll bring info, effects and markers, and history up there as well.

Okay. So let's see, what do we have here. We have our project pane in the upper left, we have a small source monitor and company right beside it, we have a really long timeline, and then we have our multicam view. So right now, I'm in my editing workspace, and I've changed it. So if I go to windows, workspaces, and save changes, then I'm saving the changes to editing. Not what we want to do. Instead, I want to do save as new workspace, and I'm going to call this multicam, and OK, and notice a couple of things under windows, workspaces, you see that multicam got added, it's last in list, but as you can see, it's also in alphabetical order.

And we have multicam up here in my shortcut bar. So if I wanted to move that downstream, I certainly could, just drag that up like so, and OK, and there's multicam. Alright. Now I'm going to switch back to editing, and watch what happens, nothing happens. Because I had made a change to my editing layout. So I just want to go back to reset to saved layout, and it's back in my editing workspace. Of course we're still looking at the multicam monitor, because I haven't toggled out of that mode, but it's squeezing both windows in the program monitor space, rather than giving me the bigger view that I had before.

So it's very easy to switch back and forth between these. But you know what would be even easier? If we could map this to the keyboard, which we absolutely can. If you take a look at this list by default, we have keyboard shortcuts. So on a Mac, it's option shift one, option shift two, on a PC it's alt shift one, alt shift two, and so on. Alright, so right now they are in alphabetical order, and they're in numeric order. But you can change this if you want to, just come to keyboard shortcuts, and then I'm just going to type in workspace, and you can see that I have workspace one through nine.

So what you would actually have to do is see where your workspace was in that list. So you can see one through eight. And so if I didn't want to have to remember option shift eight every time I accessed my multicam workspace, I would just remap that to something else. So let's do that. I'll go back into keyboard shortcuts, and workspace, and I'll take workspace eight, and get rid of option shift eight, and let's see, multicam, let's try option M. Option M is already taken, so I can override that, or I can try something else.

Maybe I can try shift option M. Shift option M is available, and now I've remapped it. So I'll press shift option M, and I'm in my multicam view. And I'll go back to editing for now. Now just one more thing about this alphabetical list here. If I put a new workspace in this list, it's going to rearrange it alphabetically. So let me show you this. I'm going to just create sort of a random workspace here, we'll make a really big source monitor, a small program monitor, we'll shrink down the timeline a little bit, and we'll bring these guys in as tabs up here.

So I'll have lots of tabs going across the top, like so, and I'll bring my tool pallet up here at the top. Okay. So this is my random demo workspace. And let's go back to my source monitor here. And so now, I will save this out, save as new workspace. And I'm just going to call this demo, and OK. And if I go to my list, you can see that we're in alphabetical order here, right? Right in between C and E is Demo.

So everything got rearranged. So if you do remap your workspace keyboard keys, keep that in mind. Because as you can see, my option shift M is no longer linked to multicam, it's now linked to metalogging, because of that reorganization. So just be careful of that. Oh, and by the way, so far I've just been talking about moving windows and rearranging them, just affecting your layout. You can also bring additional tools into the game. So if I go into window, and then bring my timecode window in, I can sort of grab this, and maybe I want to put it right here by my tool pallet.

So now I have tools, and timecode, and we'll bring this down so we can actually see it. Okay. And so if I wanted to save that, I could just come to window, workspaces, and save changes to this workspace. So as I go back between editing and demo, we have a totally different look here. This is probably a workspace I wouldn't use too often, so for good measure I'll head back to my good good old trusty editing layout. Alright, so that's workspace remapping with Pemiere Pro. Certainly, the really neat thing is that you can literally make your workspaces contain any configuration, layout, or collection of tools that you want, and then you can immediately call it up with the stroke of a key.