OK, so let me know if what I'm about to say has happened to you before. Have you ever started a premiere project and had black bars all around your video? How about video files that were zoomed in too much. Choppy playback on the timeline? Low resolution video previews? Well, if you answered yes to any of those, then listen up because I'm going to make sure this never happens to you again. If you guys are new here, welcome to the channel. My name is Chris and I love to create Premiere Pro content that helps you better understand what is actually happening in this program. My goal is to simplify and explain in depth what all of the functions. In Premiere are so you never have to watch another tutorial about the same topic twice. So today we're talking about sequence settings. Let's go ahead and break it down. OK, so we've got a blank Premiere Pro project and the reason people tend to get in trouble with sequence settings is because they take one of their clips. Drag it to the page icon an let Premiere generate the sequence settings for them without actually understanding what they just made. If you aren't already familiar with this feature. If you take a clip and drag it to that icon, Premiere will create a sequence that is based around the clip that you dragged in. So if you had a 4k 24FPS clip it would make a 4k 24FPS timeline that matched the settings of your camera. Now you might be thinking, well, that sounds like a good thing. Why would I not want that? And the reason that people get into trouble using this feature is because, as film makers, we often shoot clips in various framerates and resolutions. Maybe for a project your interview was in 1080p 24FPS, but then all of your B roll was 4K60FPS. Well, if you wanted your project to be edited and delivered in 1080P but accidentally dragged in a 4K clip first. Now your timeline settings would be completely wrong for your project. Most people who use this feature don't pay attention to what clip they drag in first, and that is the reason it's a problem. This feature can be great if you know exactly what you want your project settings to be an you dragging the correct clip first, but more often than not I see people pick a random clip and let it generate a sequence for them without ever double checking what it actually made. So yes, this feature can be awesome, but not if you don't double check to make sure that it actually created the sequence settings you wanted It always make sure that you know the resolution. And frame rate. You want your video to be in before you shoot the video. It will help make your post production life a lot easier. If you aren't asking these questions. Once you get to the edit bay. So what we're going to do is create a sequence from scratch and save them as presets. If you hit command and it will generate a new window for us to create a sequence from, we aren't going to use any of these presets, but instead come over to the Settings tab. This will let us customize all of our sequence settings for our project. Make sure that when you come to this tab that you change your editing mode to custom so that it will let you manually adjust all of these settings. Now let's briefly go over what we're doing in this panel. When you're creating a sequence, you're trying to tell Premiere what media you are working with, so it best knows how to handle it. There are three main settings inside of this panel that control how Premier will view your media. Those are video settings which consists of your frame rate, resolution, and colorspace audio settings, which consists of audio channel and sample rate. And finally video preview files which tells Premiere what format you want your rendered timeline files to be in. So let's start with the video settings. First you need to choose your frame rate. All of the videos I make are always in 23.976. I never shoot anything in 30 FPS and I don't want my videos to be delivered in 60 FPS. So 23.976 is what I will be choosing. But if you are someone who makes gaming content then you will more than likely pick 60 FPS. Just make sure that you know the frame rate you want before you make your video. Next we need to decide on the resolution of our video. These days I shoot most things in 4K, so I'm going to set my resolution to 3840. By 2160, which is UHD 4K, you should be setting this resolution based on how you plan to deliver your video. If you're going to deliver a 1080P video, I suggest setting a 1080P resolution here. If you're going to deliver 4K, then set a 4K resolution. we have a bunch of settings that are going to look confusing, but 99.99% of the time you will be using the same settings for these Those will be square pixels, no fields, progressive scan and a color space of REC 709. All modern cameras are shooting with square pixels and progressive scan. So it's very rare that you're going to need to use any other settings other than these. The only time would be if you're working with an older camera that shoots interlaced footage. For color space, there are only three options, rec, 709, rec. 2100, HLG, and REC 2100 PQ. Again, the vast majority of you will be using REC 709 in less you are shooting and delivering HDR content. REC 2100 is all about HD R, So we're going to make sure we pick Rec. 709 There's also this display format checkbox. This is just telling Premier how you want to count. On your timeline, by default it should say 23.976 timecode. This means that on your timeline indicator this number will count in frames, then seconds, minutes and hours. So if I go frame by frame, you can see the frame number count up and then once we hit 24 frames it switches to one second and zero frames, then it repeats counting up from zero to 24 again before going up to 2 seconds This is the setting that I would recommend you use. Next up we have audio. First thing you want to do is come over to this tracks tab and tell Premiere whether or not you want your. Audio to be in stereo, 5.1, multi channel, or mono. We're going to choose stereo. Now come back to the Settings tab and change your audio sample rate to 48,000 and leave display format set to audio samples. Finally we have the preview files. These are the files that Premiere creates anytime you render your video on the timeline. What's actually happening is Premiere is rendering a separate video file for itself to reference so that it doesn't have to play back the original clip you had on the timeline with all the heavy affects on it. So all of these settings are asking what resolution and codec you want those files to be in. By default iFrame only MPEG is totally fine, but what you may notice is that the resolution of these preview files do not match my 4K settings that I set. This is because the format iFrame does not support 4K resolutions, so if you were to render your video on the timeline you would be looking at video files that are not in 4K. If you're working on a 4K timeline an want your render files to be in 4K as well, you can change the format to QuickTime. And then change the codec to Prores 422 HQ. Now the resolutions will match. Be warned though, it will take Premier longer to render your timeline if you're using 4K preview files instead of 1080P files like it normally uses The reason I mentioned this is because people often get confused why their video looks worse after rendering it, and this is the reason why because iFrame is always the default format which doesn't support high resolutions. So if seeing preview files in the highest resolution is important to you, go ahead and change it It's not going to use these render files for the final export at the bottom. Here you have maximum bit depth and maximum render quality. You can completely ignore these because these settings are not going to be important for 99.99% of you This only affects your video previews while rendering your timeline an not your final export. Enabling these will make your timeline renders take much longer an will not really be of any benefit to most of you. I'll leave a link down below to an Instagram video I made about this topic that explains what these buttons actually do. Alright we've made it through all of the sequence settings now instead of having to set this up every single time you make a project, we're going to save this as a preset. Now you can give it a name and a description if you want. I would highly recommend making presets for all of the common timelines that you use. This will prevent you from having to guess if you're using the correct settings for a project now in the future, anytime you want to make a new timeline, you can hit command N scroll to the bottom of the list where you'll see custom which has all of your presets. Alright, this is editing Chris here and I just wanted to add a small note. And that is, please name your sequences something meaningful when you make them. Name it after whatever the project is, but please don't let Premiere give it some generic name like sequence 01 or even worse, naming it after your clip. Now that you guys have watched this video, you know that you shouldn't just drag a clip to your sequence and let it generate one for you. But notice what happens when you do that. We now have two clips here that are named very similarly and a lot of people don't know the difference between these. This is the sequence. This is the clip. Well, how can you tell? There's a couple of ways. One this has .MOV at the end of it, but the other way is these little icons. This is a sequence because you can see all the little timeline editing blocks on it and you can tell this is a clip because it has a green audio waveform as well as a pink filmstrip in the background. This will tell you that this video file has audio and video. If this didn't have audio, this green block would be gone and you would only have the pink filmstrip. Similarly for audio it will only show you the green audio waveform if there's no video included. But what I see a lot of people do is they drag clip to the timeline. And then it generates this for them and it's named something that doesn't mean anything to them. So when I ask them, hey, can you go pull up this sequence or can you go pull up that revision Like I don't really know where that is and you should always know where your sequences are and what they are named. If you have it named something generic like one of your video clips, that doesn't mean anything and it's going to be very hard to find. Another thing is when you drag a video clip in, it puts the sequence wherever that video clip is and your sequences should not be in a random spot. They should be in a sequences folder. You'll notice up here that I have a folder for all my sequences and I would recommend that you make something similar. So that you can put them inside of there. So for example in this final folder here I have set up your sequence settings properly and I know that this is the final timeline that I was working with and if I double click this it will open up and I've got my project right here. So basically please just don't name your sequence setting something random like this you should have them in a proper bin and named something that means something to you. If I was going to do a revision on this timeline I would duplicate it and then I would erase this copy and name it V2. So now I know I'm working with a second copy of this and I know which one is which. Now with your timeline created, you can start bringing your footage in at the first clip you try to drag in doesn't match your sequence settings. For example, dragging in a 1080P clip to your 4K timeline premiere will only ask this one time and that is it. The first clip you drag in doesn't match your sequence settings. If you already had a 4K clip on your timeline premiere would not ask you to change the sequence settings because it assumes that you're already happy with the settings. Since you had the correct clips on the timeline. Since I already know I want this project to be in 4K, I'm No, I don't want it to change my settings. Now you'll see this 1080P clip has black bars all around it because it's so much smaller than a 4K file would be. So to fix this you can right click it and then choose set to frame size which on a side note never choose scale to frame size we’ll cover that in another video, but all you need to know for now is that you should always use set to frame size. An never scale to frame size. Also on that note, if you have a 1080P timeline and a 4K clip
and you drag the 4k clip clip onto the timeline, you'll notice that the video is really punched in. To fix this you can do exactly what we said to do for the 1080P clip. You just right click and set to frame size and Now it will zoom the video down so that it fits inside of your frame. So there you guys go. Now you know how to properly set up your sequences so they don't have black bars, choppy frame rates or low resolution previews. If you haven't already, make sure to smash that like button, and if you enjoyed the content and make sure to click subscribe to be notified of any other Premiere Pro content that I released in the future. Thanks for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video.
