Does Premiere have a collections/smart collections feature similar to Lightroom?

Forum|Forum|2 years ago
January 21, 2024
2 replies
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I find the collections/smart collections feature in Lightroom to be very useful, and I am wondering if there is a way to explore that functionality in Premiere Pro. While I have many reasons that I seek this functionality (and am praying that it exists somewhere in Premiere), I will explain this particular use case that has driven me to make this post:

I am currently working through a big chunk of footage that was shot over a 6+ month period. Some was short vertically, some wide. Some 4k, some 1080. Its kind of a mess in that regard. So what i'd like to do is, rather than have to manually move the footage around into different bins in the project panel, have some collections set up so that I can easily click into one and say, for example, see all the widescreen 4k clips, or all the vertical 4k clips, etc.

I'm crossing my fingers here, and greatly appreciate the adobe employees and super users who are so helpful in this forum! Thank you for what you all do!

Editing

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R Neil Haugen

Legend

Search bins may do what you need. Especially if you add metadata in the metadata Workspace to a field. But framesize or rate should be searchable to start.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...

J

Jeena22389650a1hoAuthor

Known Participant

Thanks for your idea @R Neil Haugen !

At your suggestion, I spent some time playing around with the search bin feature to try to get it to do what I need. While I am making some progress towards my goal, I am hitting a functionally roadblock that hopefully you can help with.

I am sorry in advance for what might be a frustratingly detailed post…

What I am trying to achieve:

I would like to lay all of the 4k wide and fullHD wide aspect ratio source clips that exist in my project panel onto a timeline, in chronological order.

These clips are basically two groups: one is drone footage, the other is phone footage.

Ideally I could narrow this down and create one sequence which encompasses everything (drone and phone), another which is just the drone footage, and another which is just the phone footage. Each sequence would show the clips in chronological order. I’m thinking that either the sequences should be 4k, and the full HD clips will just be scaled up to fit the sequence size, or the other way around, full HD sequences with the 4k clips scaled down. (I have Default Media Scaling set to Set To Frame Size in Preferences to achieve this)

It seems that search bins only allow for one or two searches, along with an and/or qualifier. Is this right? Or is there some other way to add further searches in order to further refine my results? And it seems like search bins search the entire project. Is there a way to set one up that only does a search in a specific folder that I indicate?

As it stands the best I was able to figure out was to create a single search bin that includes two searches:

The first “Search:” is for “Video Info”, and the “Find:” is for “3840 x 2160”

The second “Search:” is for “Video Info”, and the “Find:” is for “1920 x 1080”

There are a few problems with this, that I see. Firstly, it is returning results for any file that meets those “Find:” parameters. I see sequences, images, adjustment layers etc. in the search bin. But I only want to see camera footage.

Secondly, the search bin is returning results for vertical clips too, even though I typed in only widescreen resolutions.

Also, the search bin has returned, in one case, a search result for a sequence that has a frame size of 1215 x 2160! In this particular case, this sequence has one clip in it, whose dimensions are 3840 x 2160. I can only assume that the search bin has returned this result because the sequence has a clip that meets the “Find:” of “3840 x 2160”. This seems to be overly inclusive and is hindering my ability to really zone in on the results that I am after.

I’ll stop now because frankly my own head already hurts. Hopefully you can provide some enlightening insights that can help me achieve what I am after. Thank you.

R Neil Haugen

Legend

In the Notes metadata field add camera names. You can of course, and SHOULD modify the fields and order of them in the List view, and save your preferred display.

Then your search could be this and that camera.

Everyone's mileage always varies ...