Working in the Project panel

The Project panel is the place that links to your project's media files such as video clips, audio files, graphics, still images, and sequences. You can use bins in the Project panel to organize your assets.

To speed up your workflow, you can customize the appearance and position of the Project panel.

After you obtain an asset, its name appears in the Project panel. The Project panel lists detailed information about each asset in your project. You can view and sort assets using one of the following views in the Project panel:

• List view
• Icon view
• Freeform view

List view displays additional information about each asset. You can customize the information it displays to meet the needs of your project.

The Icon view is great if you want to view the clip in the Project panel (hoverscrub). Move your cursor over an icon and the clip plays backwards or forwards as you drag your mouse.

The Freeform view allows you to visually organize your assets and create storyboards with your media.

• To change from one view to another, click the List View button or the Icon View button at the bottom of the panel. Alternatively, select View > List or View > Icon from the Project panel menu.

Use List View to see all of your media files. You can sort your list by different criteria to find or group your files

• To sort items in List View, click the column heading by which you want to sort the items. If bins are expanded, items sort from the top level and down the Project panel hierarchy. To reverse the sort order, click the column heading again.
• To hide or show the thumbnail viewer and clip information, choose View > Preview Area from the Project panel menu.
• To hide or show thumbnails, choose Thumbnails from the Project panel menu. Change the size of the Thumbnails by dragging the Zoom slider.
• Hovering over clips with the mouse provides a tool tip with information about the clip.
  
• Hovering over columns with the mouse, provides a tool tip with information about the column.

The names of most of the Project panel columns are self explanatory. Following are definitions for the less obvious ones:

The columns of metadata in the Project panel List view tell various things about the assets listed. The Project panel can display any XMP metadata fields you choose, not only the clip data fields. You can select which metadata columns Premiere Pro displays, add properties to schema, and change the order of columns. Premiere Pro saves your choice of columns in the project file. The same selection of columns appears in the Project panel whenever you open the project.

In the List view of the Project panel, drag the column header horizontally to the desired position.

To change the width of a column, position the mouse over a dividing line between column headings. When the Column Resize icon  appears, drag horizontally.

To sort based on column, click a column name to switch between ascending and descending sorts based on the content of that column.

Use Icon View to see your media files as a grid of thumbnail images. You can preview clips in this view.

Icon View in Premiere Pro has the following features:

• Use the Zoom slider to increase or decrease the size of icons. Icons can be zoomed to a large scale so that you can view the contents of your media more easily.
  
• To scrub through the contents of a clip, do one of the following:
  • Move (but do not click and drag) the cursor across the thumbnail of the movie clip. This action is called "Hover Scrub". Hover scrubbing is most valuable for quickly previewing the contents of a clip before you edit it into a sequence. You can see the entire duration of a clip when hover scrubbing thumbnails left to right. At the left of a thumbnail is a clip's Media Start point, and to the right is its Media End point. When you move the mouse outside the boundaries of the clip, or focus is set away from the Project panel, the thumbnail resets to the poster frame. No audio is played during hover scrubbing.
    
    • Turn off Hover Scrub in the Project panel menu, or press Shift + H.
      
    • When Hover Scrub is off, you can press the Shift key to temporarily enable Hover Scrubbing.
      
    • Use the keyboard shortcuts I and O to set In and Out points for the clip while hover scrubbing.
      
    • While hovering over a portion of a clip, double-click the icon, and the clip loads into the Source Monitor where the pointer was hovering. With this technique, Insert or Overwrite edits can be quickly made to the timeline.
      
  • Click the icon. Drag the playhead across the slider to scrub the clip.
    • After clicking the slider on the thumbnail, a clip playhead appears. You can:
      • Drag the playhead to see clip contents, or to monitor audio.
        Use J-K-L keyboard shortcuts to shuttle through the clip.
        
      • Use the keyboard shortcuts I and O to set In and Out points for the clip while paused or shuttling. After marking clips with an In and Out point, a yellow bar shows where the In and Out points are located.
        
• To set a poster frame for the icon, drag the playhead or shuttle to the desired frame, and then press the Shift+P (Windows) or Command+P (Mac OS) keys. To clear the poster frame, press the Ctrl+Shift+P (Windows) or Option+P (Mac OS) keys.
• To view if the clip has been used in a sequence, hover over the filmstrip icon with the mouse and view the tool tip. The indicator also shows how many times the clip is used in the sequence.
• To locate the clip in a sequence, click the filmstrip icon and choose the sequence and sequence location (in timecode) from the context menu. The playhead jumps to the clip in the proper sequence.
• To arrange items in Icon view, drag a different location in the grid. As you drag, a vertical bar indicates where the item will be located. If you drag an item to a bin, the item goes into the bin.

To sort  icons in the Icon view, click the Sort Icons button at the bottom of the Project panel. A list of sort options appears:

• User Order: Lets you sort the icons in any order that you want by dragging around the icons.
  
• List View Sort: Sorts the icons in the sort order chosen in the List view. For example, if you sorted the clips by "Media duration" in the List view. When you switch to the Icon view, the sort order is retained and the icons are also sorted by media duration.
  
• You can sort using commonly used metadata properties like Name, Label, Media Type, and such. You can select the sort order as ascending or descending.

You can use the Freeform view to arrange clips freely into a custom layout, unrestricted by any kind of grid and sort order.

The Freeform view is especially useful when you want to think spatially, stack or group media files, or arrange clips as storyboards and assembly edits. You can also save different layouts for the same project and switch between them.

There are multiple things you can do in Freeform view.

Zoom in and out of clips using one of the following options:

• Hold down the Opt/Alt modifier while scrolling the mouse wheel
• Pinch zoom on a trackpad
• Use the + and - keyboard shortcuts
• Use the zoom slider control (which you can reset to default zoom by double-clicking on it)

You can specify the type of metadata displayed on line 1 and 2 of the Freeform view thumbnail. The label color swatch and thumbnail badges can also be toggled on and off.

To align clips to grid: Select multiple clips, right-click and select Align to Grid. To align all clips to grid, right-click an empty space in Freeform View and select Aign to Grid.

To reset clips to grid: Select all or multiple clips, right-click and select Reset to Grid. Choose a sorting criteria and Premiere Pro aligns all the selected clips in the order you specified.

After you arrange your clips, you can choose to save them as a layout.

To save your arrangement of clips as a new layout:

You can go back to earlier saved layouts. Right-click an empty space in the Freeform view and click Restore Layout from the context menu.

You can clean up the number of saved layouts in your project.

To delete unnecessary layouts: 

If you open the Project panel for a specific project and bin in a workspace for the first time, Premiere Pro places it in a default location according to these rules:

• If there are any existing project panels open in the workspace, the new Project panel is placed in the same workspace frame as those project panels.
• If there are no project panels open, the new Project panel is placed in the same workspace frame as the Media Browser
• If there are no Media Browser panels open, the new Project panel is placed in the same workspace frame as the Effects Panel
• If the Effects Panel is not open, the new project panel is placed in the same workspace frame as the Effects Control Panel.

However, you can customize the placement of the Project panel according to your workflow. To move the Project panel, select it and move it to the location you want. You can also dock the Project panel or leave it floating. For more information on docking and undocking panels, see Dock, group, or float panels.

When you customize the position of the Project panel, Premiere Pro remembers the position of Project panels by project and by bin so those panels will always open in the same location. 

If, for example, you close a project in workspace 1, change the workspace to workspace 2, and reopen the project, the Project panel opens next to the current active project (open bins are remembered and open next to the project).  If the workspace does not change, then Premiere Pro remembers the position of the Project panel.

If you open multiple projects, then the Project panel for each project remains in the position that you set for it for that particular project.