Things to check when you create a new Premiere project, work from a different computer, or open someone else's project.

Over the years, when I've been asked to help out people that have issues with Premiere and find it messy or not behaving the right way, a lot of the issues have stemmed from a project that wasn't properly set up to begin with, and have created a number of issues

The main thing to be aware of is that there are 2 categories of settings that affect how a Premiere project behaves. The Project Settings, and the global Preferences.

Project Settings are editable in the 'New Project' Window, or in the Project Settings menu in the case of an existing project. These settings are specific to each Premiere project. A new project will not necessarily have the same Project Settings as the last one you worked from. Opening someone else's project will have their Project Settings applied. For those reasons it's good to check through all of this when creating a new project or picking up after someone.

Preferences are global app settings that affect every project that is opened on the machine. They do not travel across when you open someone else's project, and they will be different if you bring your project to another computer. While these differences will not affect anything you've already done in the project, it will affect future behaviour.

A) The 'New Project' Window

Unless you're working from a template file, this is where all new projects start. Create a new project from the Premiere Welcome Window, or in File > New > Project to access this window.

1) Project Name and Location

This is one is extremely self-explanatory, and it's hard to get it wrong, but checking the location of your project before you start doesn't hurt. Especially because it defaults to the last folder you've created a project in.

It's easy to move the project later on, when you've realised your mistake, but some of the extra files created along the project's life might stay in the old location, which could create issues down the track.

2) Video Rendering and Playback

This setting has to do with your Graphics Card (GPU), and which render engine is used. Depending on your card/platform, you might not have a choice, but the 4 options are:

• Software Only

Rarely the right choice, aside from when troubleshooting render issues.

• OpenCL

The only option if you have an AMD card, but also available with Nvidia cards.

• CUDA

Specific to NVidia cards (need for drivers to be installed).

• Metal

MacOS only. Supposedly faster but still experimental.

The best thing to do is to run some tests on your own machine but as a general rule, Windows user will have better performance with CUDA (with Nvidia cards), while MacOS users might see similar performance with OpenCL and CUDA. Try rendering out the same sequence with both settings and see which one is faster. Also check how it performs in an 'Editing' context, ie scrubbing, fast-forward, etc...

When a sequence tends to crash on export, Software Only is a good way of troubleshooting the issue. But it turns off all GPU support and performance will be a lot slower.

3) Display the project item name and label color for all instances

There is no right or wrong choice for this option, but it can drastically influence your workflow and should be chosen based on how you like to work.

Every clip on a Premiere timeline is associated with an item in the Project Window - the one that is selected when right-clicking and choosing 'Reveal in Project'. With the option ON, all the clips on every timeline that share the same project item will keep the same name and label colour. Editing the name or label of the item in the Project Window will ripple through all the clips on all the timelines that use this item, and changing the name/label of a clip on a timeline will also update all the other clips as well as the parent item in the Project Window.

In my opinion this should be the default choice, as it keeps the project tidier, and makes things easier to search and locate between the Project Window and the timelines.

That said, there's some very good workflow reasons to switch this setting OFF. For example if you like to log a long take of an interview by cutting it up on the timeline, renaming each section to give an idea of what the answer is about, and using a specific label colour based on the topic or how good the answer was. With the checkbox unticked, you're able to edit each portion of a clip as you see fit without affecting anything else in the project.

This avoid the use of subclips, which can achieve the same result (since a subclip is considered a separate item in the Project Window, it therefore has its own name and label). This is a matter of workflow preference.

4) Scratch Disks

The often overlooked 'Scratch Disks' tab in the New Project window can look overwhelming or a waste of time, but it's worth setting it up properly and avoid little hassles down the track.

• Captured Video/Audio

I'm going to assume that no-one captures from tape anymore and we can all ignore this setting, but if you do, this is what it's for.

• Video/Audio Previews

Every time you render your timeline for playback (and get that Green line above the timeline), files are generated in this folder.

It's a good idea to set it on a relatively fast drive to speed up renders and make playback smoother afterwards. This folder can be safely deleted, Premiere will lose the link to the renders but they can be regenerated. You won't lose anything. So save space on your secure RAID or precious System drive and set it somewhere else if you can.

• Project Auto Save

This is where the automatic project saves (that we'll set up later in this guide) will be stored. The main piece of advice for where to put these is: don't leave it on the same drive as your project. If your project drive fails, you want your auto-save to be somewhere else...

• CC Libraries Downloads

Anything downloaded from the Library Window (stock footage etc...) will be downloaded to this folder. If your media is on a different drive from your project you might want to set it where your media goes.

• Motion Graphics Template Media

Some Motion Graphics templates (either that you made yourself or downloaded from the Library Window) use external assets, like photos, PSD or Illustrator files, audio, etc... This is where they end up.

All these options can be set to 'Same As Project', which is handy if you're moving the project around, sharing it with clients/collaborators, etc...

5) Ingest Settings

The Ingest settings are useful if you want Premiere to do some Media Management for you.

With the default behaviour, Ingest checkbox OFF, Premiere just creates a link to the files you import, regardless of where they are stored. It means if the file moves, is deleted or if the drive is disconnected, that file will go offline.

With the Ingest checkbox ON, there are 4 options:

• Copy

All the media imported into Premiere will be copied to a specific location. While the copy is happening you can start working from the original location, and the files will automatically relink to the copy as soon as it is completed.

• Transcode

Similar to Copy, but the video files are converted to a format of your choice. You need to use an existing preset or create an Adobe Media Encoder Ingest preset that will then queue each imported clip into AME, and relink to the transcode once it is completed

• Create Proxies

The original media is left in place, but proxy files are created automatically and linked to the clips.

• Copy and Create Proxies

A combination of the Copy and Transcode options. Files are copied to the chosen location and proxies are generated for it as well.

You can instead manually generate Proxies for specific clips from the Project Window.

6) Create Project

Once all of this is set up properly, you can click OK and the project will be created. If you want to check or change any of these settings later, you can access them again in File > Project Settings. Only the Name and Location settings will be unavailable (these can be changed manually in Finder/Explorer by renaming the .prproj file and dragging it to its new location.

B) The Preferences Window

The Preferences Window is an important place to check for settings that will affect how your project behaves. It's especially important to check those settings on a new machine, or after syncing Preferences with Creative Cloud.

Note: These settings affect the whole application, across all projects. And opening the same project on a different machine will not carry through any of these settings. For this reason it's good to check these settings on each machine you use.

There's a lot of settings in the Preferences that affect how the application behaves, and that would be good to go through, but I'll limit this guide to settings that might need to be tweaked based on the nature of the project or the editor's workflow preferences.

1) Audio

In the Audio tab, the main checkbox to look at is the 'Automatic Waveform Generation'.

When importing media, a lot of the conforming that Premiere does in the background is spent on generating waveform. While the files generated are small, it can take a lot of time to generate all of them, and depending on the project you might not need the waveform of every file to be generated.

If you've got a project with some interviews and a ton of B-Roll, you probably don't need to generate the B-Roll waveforms. Or if you're working on a music-based project where you're going to discard the camera audio anyway, you only need the waveform of the music track, and could save some time by turning off the auto waveforms.

If you do turn the option off, there is still the option of manually generating them for specific clips by selecting them and choosing Clip > Generate Audio Waveforms

2) Auto Save

• Automatically save projects

This is where you can set up how often your project auto-saves, and how many versions it keeps. This should be based on your personal preference. Just keep in mind that on big project, saving can take a few annoying seconds during which you can't interact with Premiere, and the auto-saves never choose the best time to interrupt you.

You can always cancel a save if it's bothering you (by pressing Esc on your keyboard or the Cancel button), but then it defeats the purpose of setting it up at regular intervals. There's no downside to upping the maximum project versions though (unless you're worried about the space it takes).

• Save backup project to Creative Cloud

This should really be ON. This is probably the most useful auto-save of all, and it has saved me a lot more often that the auto-saves.

What it does is that, regardless of where your project is saved, it will make a copy of it in your Creative Cloud files. Unlike auto-saves it is in sync with your manual saves, and it's 'in the cloud' so you don't have to worry about losing it, and it's easy to send it to a client that worries if they have the latest version.

There are some times where the save won't sync with the Creative Cloud version of it, mainly when you save twice in a row and the upload of the first one hasn't finished, but you always get a warning about it.

3) Collaboration

This is specific to multi-users workflows, but it's good to quickly check this tab. I won't go into Team Projects as it doesn't concern most users, but Project Locking can be important.

Project locking means that if you're working off a central storage, across 2 or more machines, you can allow only 1 user to edit a project at the same time, while the others can access it in 'Read Only' mode

If the project locking option is OFF, the .prlock file won't be generated and the other users will still have full access to the project file. Dangerous!

4) Media

• Default Media Scaling

There are 3 options for this. None, Scale to frame size, and Set to frame size. This setting needs to be chosen before importing media into the Project Window. Each clip will behave according to what the setting was at the time of import

None means that adding a clip to a timeline will keep the size at 100%, and place it pixel-for-pixel in your sequence. If the clip is smaller than the sequence, there'll be black around it, and if it's bigger it will be cropped. This is my preferred setting because of the problems with the other two choices that I will explain below.

Scale to frame size means that the clip will be scaled to fully fit into the sequence (including some letterbox/pillarbox if the aspect ratios are different. The 'Scale' setting will still read 100% though, so this is a 'dangerous' setting because if you are adding a large clip to a small timeline, the clip will be sized down, but zooming back into it to reframe it will NOT bring back any of the original resolution. It is the equivalent or scaling the clip down and rendering it. I believe it mainly exists for legacy reasons (Set to Frame size was introduced fairly recently and is more often a better choice). I would very rarely recommend using it.

Set to frame size has a similar behaviour, where the clip will be made to fully fit within the sequence size. but the 'Scale' value will adjust. If you're putting a UHD clip into an HD sequence, the clip will be sized down and the Scale will read 50%. You're then free to resize it as you please. The main issue with it is that if the option is turned on in the Preferences, copying one or several clips from one sequence to another with a different resolution can erase some of the sizing that has been done manually.

All of these settings are only a default behaviour, and can be overridden on a clip-by-clip basis by right-clicking on a clip on the timeline and choosing the right setting:

• Write XMP ID to files on Import

This means that when you import a file into Premiere, a tiny bit of metadata is added to the actual file to make it easier for Premiere and other Adobe software to identify it.

One important thing to note, though, is that this modifies the actual file. As soon as you import it, you'll see the Date Modified change in Finder/Explorer.

It can be useful, but can also introduce issues when you're dealing with backups (which won't have the ID and have a different Date Modified), which then affects how the Media Cache is behaving (see next section)

• Write clip markers to XMP

Again I won't go into too much detail but XMP is metadata that lives either within the file or in a separate file next to the media (depending on if the file format supports it or not), and contains metadata about the file. In case of video it can be Scene/Take number, a description, a rating, etc... There's the option of writing markers to that file, which means that the markers you add in Premiere (or other Adobe software) travel with the file itself, which can be quite useful.

This is something that also modifies the actual file and therefore should be carefully considered.

• Enable Clip and XMP metadata linking

Items imported into Premiere have 2 type of metadata: Clip and File.

Clip metadata lives inside Premiere. It is specific to this item in this specific project and won't be visible outside of Premiere, or in another Premiere project (unless you import that clip from one Premiere project to another, the Clip metadata will be copied, but it'll then be separate).

File metadata is linked to the actual file. It's the XMP metadata we talked about above. Editing it will edit the actual file, and ripple through every project/software that uses it.

Some of the Clip metadata is basically a duplicate of the File metadata. If this metadata linking option is unticked, they each have their own value, but if you turn it ON, editing one of them edits the other.

Once enabled, if you look at the Metadata Window, you can see which options are linked. Clicking the blue chain links toggles between linking and unliking File/Clip metadata.

The best choice for these options is fairly workflow-specific, but as a general rule:

Enable linking if you want the metadata to be available between projects, softwares and users.

Disable linking if you want to preserve the integrity of the media.

• Allow duplicate media during project import

This is a setting that should definitely be OFF. It's especially important if you're working in a multi-user workflow and want to import sequences between each other's projects. Having the checkbox unticked avoid the media being duplicated in the Project Window (if it's already in your project, it will just link to your version of it, and if it's not there, it will import it).

Keep in mind that changing something like the name of the clip in one of the projects will end up causing a duplicate (since the project item isn't identical anymore, even though it is linking to the same media).

5) Media Cache

The Media Cache Files and Database are important for optimal Premiere performance. They should be stored on a FAST DRIVE.

You can set up the automatic Media Cache Management if you're worried about it taking too much space. Note that the 'Delete Unused' deletes all cache files that are associated with media that is currently offline, ie for which the path isn't accessible. Which means if you work off a lot of external drives, it'll delete the cache of files that are on drives that aren't currently connected to your computer.

In any case, accidental deletion of cache files and database isn't an issue. Files will be automatically re-generated. The easiest way to fully clean the cache is to manually delete the folder that contains all the files.

6) Timeline

The last setting I want to mention will affect the behaviour of clips and their audio tracks when they are dropped onto the timeline.

Some editors prefer all audio tracks from a clip to be bundled together into one Adaptive track. Some prefer each to go on a separate track. The Default Audio Tracks settings give you the choice between these.

This can be quite a complicated concept to grasp, that involves understanding the difference between each type of Audio Track (Mono, Stereo, Adaptive, 5.1), and rather that trying to explain those concept here I'll just advise to read the docs.

But the main thing to note about these settings is that 'Use File' will be the right choice most of the time. If you do find yourself wishing Premiere organised your audio tracks a different way, then get into the docs and figure out the right configuration for your workflow.

C) Conclusion

I believe this covers the most important steps to ensure a Premiere Project stays organised and behaves the right way throughout post-production. With these options carefully set at the beginning of the project (or as early as you can after realising your mistake), it should alleviate a lot of the complaints I've been hearing over the years from editors that can't wrap their heads around how Premiere is behaving and who end up with messy projects with media stored all over the place.

If you think of anything else to add to this list, of have any questions, get in touch through my website.

Copyright Note: Please do not partially quote this post in your own article. If you'd like to refer to this guide in your own content, use the Adobe Spark embed link.

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Julien Chichignoud is a Video Editor & Colourist based in Melbourne, Australia