Introducing Premiere Pro

Available Files

The following files are available for download from Microsoft SharePoint:

Download Exercise Files

Premiere Pro is a professional-level video editing application that enables you to capture, edit, and export video footage in a wide range of video file formats. With Premiere Pro, you can also incorporate graphics and titles into a video, apply effects to text and video footage, and even create transcripts and closed captioning.

In this course, we’ll be creating a video for a dance studio that showcases different types of dances. As we create the video, we’ll gain experience working with Premiere Pro and learn more about the video editing process, including editing techniques and video production terminology.

NOTE: Premiere Pro is a resource-intensive application, and may not run well (or at all) on some computers, including older machines and all-in-one computers that are optimized for basic computing tasks. Before attempting to install Premiere Pro, please check the Premiere Pro system requirements on Adobe’s website to see if your computer meets the minimum requirements for running the application.

Making sure you're using the most current version of Premiere Pro

This course was developed using Adobe Premiere Pro 2025. While you'll be able to complete most of the exercises in this course in older versions of Premiere Pro, there have been significant changes to the application in both the 2022 and 2025 versions involving creating projects, using and editing graphic templates, and more, which means the materials won't work as written in older versions of Premiere Pro.

NOTE: These materials currently use a mix of screenshots from the 2024 and 2025 versions of Premiere Pro – because of this, there may be some variations in the interface displayed in the screenshots.

If you have Premiere Pro 2024 or older installed on your computer, you'll need to update to the latest version of Premiere Pro in order to follow along with all of the exercises in the course.

The following instructions will walk you through how to update the Adobe Creative Cloud program you're working with if it’s out of date. To check for updates, you'll need to open Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop, which is separate from the Adobe application you're working with.

Open Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop.

The Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop app will open:

Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop application. On the left side of the screen is the navigation bar, where we can access all the apps in Creative Cloud and check for updates. The main section of the screen currently shows a list of installed applications.

Here, we can see what applications we have installed and which of them need to be updated. If there are updates available for any of the installed applications, a blue circle with a number in it will appear to the right of Updates in the navigation on the left side of the screen.

To see which Adobe Creative Cloud applications need to be updated, in the navigation on the left side of the window,
Click

Any applications with updates will be listed underneath the New Updates heading, similar to the image below:

Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app showing the Updates list, indicating that Illustrator has an update that needs installing.

To update an application, to the right of the application’s name and update description,
Click
To continue the update process, if necessary,
Click

The selected application will then start downloading and applying the update. This may take some time to complete, depending on the size of the update being downloaded and your internet connection speed. When the update is finished, the application will disappear from the New Updates list and appear under the Updated Recently heading, as seen in the following screenshot:

Adobe Creative Cloud desktop app displaying the list of recently updated apps. Illustrator is at the top of this list, as it is the most recently updated app.

Exploring the Premiere Pro interface

Before we create a new project and start working on a video, let’s take a moment to familiarize ourselves with the Premiere Pro interface. As part of this, we'll open an existing Premiere Pro project, ExampleProject.prproj, so all of the interface elements are active and we can fully explore the interface.

NOTE: The following steps assume you have downloaded and extracted the exercise files to your computer's desktop. If this isn't the case, navigate to the location where you extracted the files instead of the desktop.

Open Premiere Pro.
To close the What's New dialog box, if necessary,
Click

NOTE: The What's New dialog box will only appear if you've recently installed or updated Premiere Pro.

To open the file ExampleProject.prproj, in the Menu bar,
Click File, Click Open Project...
To navigate to the desktop, in the left-hand side of the Open dialog box,
Click
To open the appropriate folder,
Double-Click the Dances folder
To open the file,
Double-Click ExampleProject.prproj
To convert the project from an older version of Premiere Pro, in the Convert Project dialog box,
Click

Now that we have a project open in Premiere Pro, we can take a closer look at the interface. If you've worked in other Adobe Creative Cloud applications, the interface for Premiere Pro looks a little different than applications like Photoshop and Illustrator – however, many of the interface elements behave the same way as they do in other Adobe Creative Cloud applications.

The following video shows the Premiere Pro interface in detail — if you’d prefer a text-based introduction to the Premiere Pro interface, scroll past the video for a diagram of the interface with a detailed description of the individual interface elements.

Familarize yourself with the Premiere Pro interface by watching this video.

Description of the video:

[music] In this video, I’ll be introducing you to the different elements of the Adobe Premiere Pro interface. For today’s demonstration, I’ll be using Premiere Pro 2024. If you’re using a different version of the application, your interface may look slightly different than what’s shown in this video, but all of the interface elements I point out today will be in roughly the same locations. The Premiere Pro interface is composed of various panels in different locations on the screen. These panels contain tools and features that will help us edit video efficiently. I’ll start by talking about workspaces in Premiere Pro. Premiere Pro has a collection of workspaces that display different panels that are helpful when working on specific types of tasks, such as working with graphics or editing audio. The appearance of these panels may differ slightly than what’s shown in this recording, depending on your display’s size and resolution. To switch to a different workspace, in the upper right corner of the screen, click on the Workspaces icon. A list of workspaces will appear, with the active workspace highlighted in blue. The currently active workspace in this video is the Editing workspace. Next, let’s look at the panels that are visible in the Editing workspace. There are a couple of different parts of the screen where panels may be collected. Let’s start with the panel group at the top left side of the screen. Currently, we see the Source Monitor, which allows us to view a video clip and perform basic edits to it. At the bottom of the Source Monitor there are controls for playing a clip, setting the In and Out points, and placing a clip in a sequence. Other panels may display in this location, like the Audio Track Mixer panel. We can switch between open panels by clicking on a panel’s tab at the top of the panel group. To the right of the Source Monitor, we have the Program Monitor, where we can preview the contents of the Timeline panel. This panel looks very similar to the Source Monitor, and has similar controls for playback and editing. However, the Program Monitor’s controls focus on previewing and editing the contents of the timeline instead of a single clip. The Timeline panel is visible across most of the bottom half of the Premiere Pro screen. This is where we assemble and edit video clips, audio clips, still images, titles, and more into a finished sequence – or, in other words, a section of a video project. Each clip we add to a sequence is represented by a rectangle of a different color. Video clips are blue, audio clips are green, and still images and titles are pink. You’ll notice that when I press the Play button in the Program Monitor, the playhead in the Timeline panel starts to move. The playhead indicates what frame of footage is being displayed in the Program Monitor, and we can also see what frame is displayed in the playhead position timecode at the upper left corner of the Timeline panel. To the left of the Timeline panel, we have the Tools panel, which contains the different tools available for editing clips on the timeline. The location of this panel may vary, depending on what workspace we’re using. In the Editing workspace, it appears on the bottom half of the screen between the bottom left panel group and the Timeline panel, but in the Captions and Graphics workspace it appears between the left panel group and the Program Monitor in the top half of the screen. To activate a tool in the Tools panel, click on the tool’s icon or use its associated keyboard shortcut. For example, to activate the Type tool, I’ll click on the Type tool’s icon, which looks like the letter T. The tool’s icon color will change from white to blue, indicating that it’s now the active tool. In the bottom left corner of the window, we have another panel group, which is currently showing the Project panel. The Project panel contains the files we’re using in the currently active project. These files are commonly referred to as clips in Premiere Pro, and we can organize our files using bins, like we see in the project I have open here on the screen. If we want to open a panel we don’t currently see on screen, we can display the panel by clicking on the Window menu in the Menu bar, then clicking on the name of the panel we want to open. It will display in one of the panel groups we see on screen, or may open a new panel on the right side of the screen. For example, if I click on History in the Window menu, it will show the History panel in the lower left panel group, where the Project panel was previously displaying… … however, if I click on Essential Graphics in the Window menu, the Essential Graphics panel will display in a new panel on the far-right side of the screen. There are many more panels available in Premiere Pro than shown in today’s video. If you want to learn more about all the panels available in Premiere Pro and what they can do, check out the Premiere Pro user guide on the Adobe Help website at https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/user-guide.html. At this point, you should now be more familiar with the Premiere Pro interface, and can get started with editing video. [music]

NOTE: Depending on the resolution of your computer’s screen, the Premiere Pro interface may look slightly different than the examples shown in the previous video and following diagram.

The Premiere Pro interface is made up of a collection of different panels that contain tools and features that help us in the video editing process. To learn more about the interface elements outlined in the following diagram, expand the appropriate accordion fold below the image:

Diagram of Premiere Pro interface. Contents are described in following accordion folds.

The Source Monitor allows you to view and perform basic edits to individual video and audio clips that you want to add to a sequence.

The Program Monitor allows you to preview the contents of the active sequence in the Timeline panel.

Workspaces are collections of panels that are geared towards specific video editing tasks, such as working with audio or editing special effects. Many of these workspaces are accessible through the Workspaces icon located on the far right side of the header bar at the top of the Premiere Pro window, and can also be accessed through the Window menu. We can also access the Import, Edit, and Export workspaces from the far left side of the header bar.

The workspace shown in the diagram above is the Editing workspace, which we’ll be using often as we work through creating the dance video. When you open Premiere Pro for the first time, you’ll likely see the Learning workspace, which looks different than what’s shown in the above diagram.

The panel group in the lower right side of the screen contains multiple panels grouped together that may be useful when editing a video. The Project panel, Media Browser panel, History panel, and others are all collected here, and we can switch between these panels by clicking on the appropriate tab at the top of the panel.

The Tools panel contains the different tools we can use to edit clips on the timeline. The location of this panel may vary, based on the workspace being used. For example, in the Editing workspace, the Tools panel is visible between the panel dock and the timeline in the bottom half of the screen; however, in the Captions and Graphics workspace, the Tools panel appears between the Text panel and Program Monitor in the top half of the screen.

The Timeline panel is where we assemble and edit video clips, audio clips, still images, title templates and more into a finished sequence, or section of a video project.

A note for macOS users about keyboard shortcuts

As we work through the course’s content, we’ll be making use of a variety of keyboard shortcuts, many of them involving the Control key on Windows. For those using macOS, in any instructions that reference the Control key, you’ll use the Command key instead. If there are any keyboard shortcuts or other differences between Windows and macOS aside from the Control key/Command key swap, these will be noted in the materials.

Changing the interface color and contrast

The default interface color for Premiere Pro is dark gray, which is done intentionally to help the video being edited stand out from the surrounding interface elements. However, you can change the color of interface elements to a darker or lighter color if desired. You can also change the contrast of interface elements to help them visually stand out more. These options are located in the Appearance section of the Preferences dialog box.

NOTE: The screen captures for these materials were taken with the Premiere Pro interface set to the Dark setting and with the accessible color contrast option enabled in order to help make the interface easier to see in the screenshots.

If you want to change the color and contrast of the Premiere Pro interface, instructions for doing this are in the following accordion.

To view the Premiere Pro preferences, on the Menu bar,
Click Edit, Point Preferences, Click Appearance

NOTE for macOS users: To view the preferences on macOS, on the Menu bar, Click Premiere Pro, Point Settings..., Click Appearance.

To change the interface color, at the top of the Preferences dialog box,
Click the thumbnail for the desired interface brightness
To increase the contrast of the interface elements, under the color theme thumbnails,
Click the "Accessible color contrast" toggle
To accept the changes made, in the lower right corner of the Preferences dialog box,
Click

Now that we’re a little more familiar with the Premiere Pro interface, we're ready to create a new project. Before we do, let's close the practice project and return to the Welcome window.

To close the example project, on the Menu bar,
Click File, Click Close Project

The project will close, and the Welcome window will display again.

Introducing Premiere Pro

Available Files

Making sure you're using the most current version of Premiere Pro

Instructions for updating Adobe Creative Cloud applications

Exploring the Premiere Pro interface

Step 1. Open Premiere Pro, then open ExampleProject.

Source Monitor

Program Monitor

Workspaces icon

Panel group

Tools panel

Timeline panel

A note for macOS users about keyboard shortcuts

Changing the interface color and contrast

Step 1. If desired, change the color of the Premiere Pro interface to a lighter or darker shade of gray, and adjust the contrast of the interface elements.

Step 2. Close the example project.