How to Work With Project Panel in Adobe Premiere Pro

So now that we have imported a bunch of video clips, let's look at how these clips show up in the information associated with them in the Project Panel. The way that I have the Project Panel setup right now, is that it's displaying the icons for the individual clips, it's not displaying the thumbnail. The thumbnail would be a snapshot like this, an icon would be a movie frame for Video Only, a movie frame with a sound speaker on top of it, which is for an Audio/Video clip, or just a speaker for an Audio Only clip. So you have Video Only, Audio/Video and Audio Only.

When I have any of these files selected, I have what's called the thumbnail preview area at the top of the Project Panel. In that thumbnail preview area, you can scrub on the video, you can playback the video, or you can say "I want this frame here to be the thumbnail for the video." So you click on this Poster Frame and that actually becomes the new thumbnail.

So if was to go to my wing menu over here and change the Thumbnails from off to on, I would get to see a little preview of that thumbnail. Notice that the thumbnail is not the original thumbnail assigned to the clip but the newly assigned thumbnail that I updated in the thumbnail preview area. You will also notice that the audio, when viewing the thumbnail, remains as its original audio speaker icon. That file can be played back as well just by clicking it.

I am going to go ahead and turn the icons back on. I prefer to work that way because it just allows you to have more files within the project and there is no redraw updating when I am working through my Project Panel. If you have Thumbnails turned on, anytime you open Windows or you double-click Windows on top of it, the thumbnails will have to refresh. Sometimes if you have an excess number of files in your Project Panel, it will take a while or at least a couple of moments, which when you are working hard can be a little bit tedious to get them to update.

Continuing in this thumbnail area, when you have a file selected, you are going to get some of its attributes to show next to the thumbnail. So here you see the name of the file, it tells you the file type, it tells you the duration with samples and then it also tells you the sample rate and the bit depth and whether it's Stereo or Mono. If I select a Video Only clip, it says it's Video, 720X480 (0.9) is the pixel aspect ratio, this is the duration and this is the frame rate. Again, for an Audio/Video clip, it tells you the video size, video duration and frame rate as well as the audio information.