Re: Bin vs. Timeline Preference

if you are new to Premiere, beware some things you are accustomed to may not work.

For example, I used Media 100 for the 6 years prior to switching to Premiere. In Media 100, I would digitize the whole tape and chop it up on the timeline, then drag the clips to a bin, rename and trim them, then get editing.

In premiere you cannot drag anything from the timeline to a bin, so you have a few choices for this type of workflow, both of which I use:

Option 1
Capture a whole tape, drag to the timeline, chop up into usable pieces.
Repeat for each tape.
Use Project manager to create a new project. Each separate clip on the timeline will now appear in your bin, and you can manually rename these in the bin. However when you rename a clip in a bin, it does not rename the AVI files on your hard drive, so beware should you need to find an offline clip, it will not have the same name.
Also, you can rename clips on the timeline, but again, the new names are not reflected in the bin or the hard drive.

Option 2
Capture a whole tape, then open the movie in the editor, set in and out point, and create a subclip, which places a subclip in the bin based upon your in and out. You can do this for a whole tape and populate your bin with subclips. It is probably easier to do it this way, however depending upon your preferred comfortable workflow from your previous application, Option 1 may be a good exercise.

Option 3
The best thing to do is to log your tape and capture only the portions you need. I used to like capturing the whole tape and chopping it up afterwords because I have lots of other non-editing work i can do while tapes are being captured. However you then need to spend time logging the captured video, so the time savings is actually negligible.

Option 4
You can do option 1, that is capture the whole tape and chop it up on the timeline, and then create a separate timeline (sequence in premiere) for each tape. Then when you are editing you just find the clip you need, essentially using timelines in place of bins. I would never do this, however if I have captured some stock footage to fill in the holes in an edit, sometimes I lay these out on a timeline just to trim the clips, then copy and paste them where they are needed. But for more than a dozen or so clips this would be too difficult.

Premiere does not yet let you have multiple bins and sequeences open in separate windows, and there is no keyboard shortcut to toggle between open bins or sequences, so organization is the key.

Back in the tape days we liked to do a paper edit before the online session, either an EDL, or hand written time code notes on a script.

Good luck making your move.

Mike Cohen