Learning about the Premiere Pro Interface

Premiere Pro is Adobe's professional level video editing software. It will allow you to capture, edit, and export video for many different devices and purposes.  

To help you learn how to work with Premiere Pro, today's project will focus on creating a video for Michael, a dance instructor who wants a video to show prospective students what his dance studio offers.  During the process of creating the video, you'll get accustomed to working with Premiere Pro and learn the basics of creating and editing videos. 

Premiere Pro can be intimidating for newcomers, but with some experience you'll soon be comfortable editing video in Premiere.  The best place to start when learning how to work with Premiere is to familiarize yourself with the interface.  We'll do that now as we create a new project.

Creating a New Project

Let's open Premiere Pro now.

Step 1. Launch Premiere Pro.

NOTE: If this is the first time the program has been launched on your computer, you may need to accept the license agreement before you go on.

Premiere Pro launches, and you see the Home screen:

From here, you can start a new project, open a saved one, or access the Adobe Community Help. Today we will start a new project.

Step 2. To start a new project,

Click 

Premiere Pro will now display the Import screen:

Here, we can create a new project and choose what files we want to import as part of the new project, if desired. For now, we'll just create a new project, and import the files we want to work with later on.

We'll start by giving the project a name, then we'll indicate where the project should be saved on our computer.

Step 3. To name the project, in the Project Name field in the upper right corner of the screen, type:

Dances 

NOTE: The following steps assume you have extracted the exercise files (downloaded from the Available Files section at the top of the page) to your computer's desktop — if you've extracted the files to a different location, navigate to wherever your files are located on your computer instead of to the Desktop.

Step 4. To set the location for saving the project, in the Project location drop-down menu,

Click , Click Choose Location...

The Project Location dialog box appears.

Step 5. To move to the Desktop, in the panel on the left,

Click

Step 6. To select the appropriate folder, 

Click the PremierePro_Basics folder

Step 7. To specify the folder for the new project, at the bottom of the dialog box,

Click

The dialog box closes. At this point, we're ready to finish creating the new project.

Step 8. To finish creating the new project, at the bottom right corner of the Import workspace,

Click 

The new project is created, and we're moved to the Edit screen.

NOTE: The Premiere Pro interface is intentionally dark, so that the video being edited will stand out from the interface.  This might be too dark for some users. To brighten the interface, on the Menu bar, Click Edit, Point Preferences, Click Appearance. In the window that appears, Press & Drag the Brightness slider to the right to brighten the interface.  The screenshots in these materials were taken at the default dark setting.

Understanding the User Interface

The following diagram shows a breakdown of the Premiere Pro interface:

Premiere Pro is a complex program, and as such, its interface is also complex.  The Premiere Pro interface is composed of a collection of panels, and the panels that are visible when we first open Premiere aren't the only panels available to us.  When you look closely at each panel in the Premiere interface, you may seem that some of them have one or more tabs.  These tabs allow us to easily switch between panels that are grouped together in different parts of the interface.

For example, if you look in the panel dock, in the bottom left corner of the workspace, you will see a Project: Dances tab, a Media Browser tab, a Libraries tab, an Info tab, and possibly other tabs (depending on your screen's resolution). Clicking on a specific tab will show the content of that tab.

Let's see how this works by switching to the Effects panel.

Step 1. To open the Effects panel, at the top of the Project panel,

Click the Effects tab

NOTE: If a tab is not showing in the panel dock, in the upper right corner of the panel dock, Click  and it will show a menu of all the different panels grouped in the dock.

The Effects panel opens.  

There are many different panels available to help you create and edit videos in Premiere Pro - you'll only be working with a handful of them while creating the dance video.  The following table lists the main menus and panels we will use today, and summarizes the main function of each:

Each of the panels also has a panel menu. The panel menu icon is located on each panel's tab, and looks like this:  The panel menus give us additional options for working with a specific panel, and the menu button only displays when a specific tab is active. 

Exploring Workspaces

Workspaces are a collection of different panels that are geared towards specific video development tasks, such as working with audio or adding special effects. When opening Premiere Pro for the first time, by default you'll be brought to the Learning workspace. You aren't limited to just using the Learning workspace, though. As with all of the Adobe applications, you have a number of different workspaces to choose from. 

Let's take a look at the different workspaces now. There are a couple of different ways to switch workspaces — the first one we'll try is by using the Window menu.

Step 1. To change the workspace, on the Menu bar,

Click Window, Point Workspaces, Click Audio

The user interface changes, and you see the panel arrangement that Adobe experts feel would be most useful when working with audio.

Step 2. To look at the other preset workspaces available, on the Menu bar,

Click Window, Point Workspaces

You see fourteen preset workspaces at the top of the menu, and at the bottom of the menu you see options for creating, deleting, resetting, and importing workspaces.  You can also access the different workspaces available from the upper right corner of the Premiere Pro window.

Since the Editing workspace meets our needs for the majority of the work we'll be doing today, we'll switch to that workspace.

Step 3. To change the interface back to the default preset, in the top right corner of the screen,

Click , Click Editing

The user interface is now set up for general editing.  Let's switch back to the Project panel in the panel dock while we're at it.

Step 4. To switch back to the Project panel, in the bottom left corner,

Click the Project: Dances tab

Now that we're a little more familiar with the Premiere Pro interface, let's get started with working on the video project.