Starting Up Adobe Premiere Pro CS5

Opening Premiere isn't like opening other software. Some of the menus are strange and you have to have an open project for the software to even start up. I'm using Premiere Pro CS5 and a Mac using OS 10.6.4, but most of this is rather universal.

To start before the beginning, when working with video (and most other projects, in my opinion), organization is the key to managing your files and not wasting time searching around for things. In the case of video, it also keeps you from separating your source material from your Premiere files, a situation that nearly always leads to disaster, tears, and the rending of garments.

So, you have to begin by making a new folder. Click on the desktop and pull down the File menu on the upper-left-hand side of the screen to create a New Folder.

Usually, I save my project files somewhere around here:

Since I am in a computer lab and not at home, I don't have the option of renaming or saving or moving files in that location, so instead I made a folder on the desktop. I will take it all with me when I leave.

For various reasons, where you save a file can matter a great deal. It affects where your scratch disk information is saved, which can be very large. If you find that your system is crashing a lot, or even just Premiere is crashing a lot, you may need to manage your scratch disk situation.

But for here and now, I will just vow to save often, and since we won't be doing terribly long or difficult sequences of editing, we should be able to get away with not worrying about a scratch disk.

Here's my folder. I like to name it with the date my first footage was shot and some keyword.

This is the screen that comes up when you first go to open Premiere. 

In this case, you want to hit "New Project", which brings up this:

I like to leave the default settings alone unless I know why I would change them. In this case, I've pointed the Location to my Desktop folder by using the Browse button and named the project "Knitter". After I hit "OK", I get this:

I just leave everything in this window alone and hit "OK".

Next post: What you see after this.