The Media Panel
- Adding Media from Your Hard Drive
- Adding Media from Removable Media or a Removable Drive
- Switching Views
- Viewing Media Information
- Adding Comments and Descriptions to Media
- Cleaning Up the Media Panel in Icon View
- Using the Preview Area for a Quick Look at a Clip
- Setting the Clips Poster Frame
- Organizing Clips on the Media Panel
- Creating Folders and Subfolders in the Media Panel
- Adding Standard TV Media to the Media Panel
- Searching for a Media File
- Assembling Clips on the Timeline for a Rough Cut Edit
The Premiere Elements Media panel is the place where you add and store the various clips you plan to use in your production. The Media panel is a sophisticated panel that has numerous features to help you stay organized, gather your media, analyze your media’s properties, and quickly get to work creating your video. The Premiere Elements Media panel is intended to be customized, but you can work with it exactly as shipped, without ever customizing a single thing. When you capture video from a camcorder (see Part 2, “The Capture Panel”), the clip or clips you capture are added to the Media panel automatically and they can optionally be added to the Timeline as well.
You can add any type of clip that is supported by Premiere Elements from your hard drive or DVD drive, including video clips, still images, titles, music files, sound effects, and more. Premiere Elements’ Media panel supports the following file formats:
Video:
AVI, MPEG/MPE/MPG, MOV, and WMV
Pictures:
BMP, EPS, GIF, ICO, JPEG, JPG, PDD, PDF, PNG, PSD, and TIFF
Audio:
AIFF, AVI, MOV, MP3, WAV, and WMA
This list of file formats might not mean a whole lot to you right now, but after you’ve spent a little time working with your media clips you’ll find it very useful to know with which formats Premiere Elements can and can’t work.
Collect, Organize, and Track Your ClipsThe Media panel is a painter’s palette of media clips, awaiting your creative inspiration.
Adding Media from Your Hard Drive
You can add any type of media supported by Premiere Elements to your production that you have available on your hard drive.
Click the Add Media button (you can also select File, Add Media) and select From Files or Folders.
By default, Premiere Elements is set to recognize any and all of its supported file types, but you can narrow your search by selecting from the drop-down list in the Files of Type field.
Browse through other folders by clicking the drop-down arrow next to the Look In field.
Click to select the file (or Ctrl+click to select multiple files) you want to add to the Media panel and click Open.