Read more about the article The One Thing

The One Thing

Editing is about making decisions, thousands and thousands of them. Everything from whether to use a one-frame audio dissolve that will ultimately go unnoticed to how to arrange the scenes of your story in order to create the most powerful dramatic arc—the kind of choice that will ultimately determine the success of your work. Decisions lead to other options which lead to other decisions and on and on, seemingly forever. It’s easy to get lost in trying to predict how a single choice will affect the rest of your work when you arrive downstream. It can feel overwhelming. And Lord knows, I’ve done my share of fretting. When I think about the work to be done on my current project, part of me wants to crawl under a bed with a bag of candy and a stack of comic books. But I don’t because I have two weapons in that fight. I…

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Read more about the article MediaStorm Announces Post-production Workflow for Premiere Pro

MediaStorm Announces Post-production Workflow for Premiere Pro

Here it is: a year-and-a-half after our big switch from Final Cut 7 to Premiere Pro, we are proud to announce the release of MediaStorm’s Post-production Workflow for Adobe Premiere Pro. In more than 150 steps, you’ll learn to organize and edit your projects with the same proven efficiency we’ve used time and again–we focus on organizing first so that creativity is not hampered once editing begins. This workflow is a complete guide to working in Premiere Pro: from importing material through final output and archiving. The underlying principal of the MediaStorm process is elimination. Whether it be pictures, interviews or b-roll, our guiding rationale is to save the good stuff and take away the rest. These steps emphasize the importance of making a copy of your work at each stage so that should you need to access previously discarded material, you have a clear and quick path back to needed material.…

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Read more about the article MediaStorm Guide to Auto Saving Premiere Backups to the Cloud

MediaStorm Guide to Auto Saving Premiere Backups to the Cloud

This article is part of a series of posts with tips and tricks from our producers’ experience working with Adobe Premiere Pro CC after years of working in Final Cut Pro. To read more about why we made the switch, check out this post.

When it comes to backups, you can never have enough.

Fortunately, Premiere Pro’s Auto Save vault (File > Project Settings > Scratch Disks…) allows you to backup your project file at user-specified intervals.

I’ve written previously about how to enhance this functionality with Noodlesoft’s $25 Hazel. Hazel essentially watches your vault for updated versions and then copies them to a secondary destination of your choice, all automated and in real time.

The reason for this added protection is that even if you backup your work every evening, what happens if your drive dies in the middle of the afternoon? You could potentially lose hours of work.

With the advent of  Premiere Pro CC, Adobe now offers users 20GB of free online storage. This makes for another great location to store automated backups. With the assistance of Hazel, you can think of this storage as an Auto Save vault in the cloud.

Setting Up Creative Cloud

To set up your online storage, log in to creative.adobe.com, select Download Center on the menu bar and choose the Creative Cloud application.

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Read more about the article MediaStorm Guide to Creating Smart Quotes in Premiere Pro’s Title Tool

MediaStorm Guide to Creating Smart Quotes in Premiere Pro’s Title Tool

This article is part of a series of posts with tips and tricks from our producers' experience working with Adobe Premiere Pro CC after years of working in Final Cut Pro. To read more about why we made the switch, check out this post. I've noticed that Premiere Pro’s title tool (Command-T) does not automatically convert quotation mark to smart quotes, sometimes called curly quotes. By default quotation marks look like this: To create smart quotes on a Mac simply use the keystroke Option-[ (Option-Open Bracket) for an open smart quote and Option-Shift-[ (Option-Shift-Open Bracket) for a closed smart quote. Much nicer.

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Read more about the article MediaStorm Guide to Changing File Names with Automator

MediaStorm Guide to Changing File Names with Automator

Sometimes when organizing assets you may want to add a word or two to a group of files. Fortunately, you don’t need to do this manually as OS X provides powerful built-in automation tools.

In the Applications folder, open Automator.

When you open Automator, you’ll be presented with several options. Double-click Service.

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