With the latest version of Premiere announced, but not yet available, it is hard to get excited about writing about the current version. BUT… this week, I was reminded of three media shortcuts hidden in the Spring, 2017, version that can speed your editing.
NOTE: Well, OK. There’s actually four tips here. Sorry.
SCALING IMAGES
When editing high-resolution images that are larger than the sequence size, Premiere defaults to displaying the video centered in the frame at 100% size. This is great if you plan to reframe every shot. But, it is time-consuming to correct if you don’t.
So, here’s my first tip: Change Media > Default Media Scaling to Scale to Frame Size.
This centers the image and, at the same time, scales it so that the entire image fits in the sequence frame size.
Best of all, Effect Controls > Motion > Scale reflects the actual amount the image was scaled, which allows you to change it at anytime in the future, with no loss in quality.
ENABLE PROXIES
While you can enable displaying proxy files using Preferences > Media > Enable proxies, a much faster way is to:
When the proxy button is blue, you are looking at proxies. When it is white, you are looking at camera native masters.
IMPROVE PERFORMANCE
First, in Preferences > Memory, set the RAM reserved for other applications to 3 or 4 MB. Other apps – like email or web browsers – don’t need a lot of RAM and Premiere wants as much as it can get.
NOTE: There’s no perfect value. I have 32 GB of RAM, so I set this to 4. If you have less RAM, set this to 3. The lower this value, the better Premiere will run.
This memory pool is efficiently shared between all Adobe apps. So, when you quit all your Adobe apps, the RAM reserved for them is fully returned to system use.
And, thinking of improving performance, unless you are editing sports, you probably aren’t working with “Growing Files.”
Growing files are a special video format that allows us to edit the beginning of a file while the end of the program is still being recorded. Editing sports highlights on game day is a classic example.
However, when Media > Growing Files is checked, Premiere checks your hard disk every 60 seconds to see if these growing files have changed. While this checking doesn’t diminish performance a whole lot, still, if you never use growing files there’s no reason for this to be turned on.
SUMMARY
Premiere has all kinds of hidden feature scattered throughout the program. I can’t wait to see what the new version has in store.
Feel free to add your own tips in the comments below.
