SMART BINS - Bins that automatically collect files based on asset type!

[Pierre Louis B.]

Imagine if every time you started a new Pr project, the Project window came pre-populated with intelligent Bins that automatically sort and organize media you import or create within Pr… Imagine all of your titles automatically going into a ‘Titles’ Bin and all of your nests appearing in a ‘Nests’ Bin rather than just randomly appearing all over the Project window. Imagine if you could spend more time actually editing and less time on menial tasks such as manually dragging files into relevant Bins to keep your project organized.

Thankfully, this already IS possible! One of the great features in Pr’s #1 plugin, Excalibur (https://knightsoftheeditingtable.com/excalibur), is the ability to have nests automatically appear in a ‘Nested Clips’ Bin. This Bin can be renamed and moved and the automatic connection remains. Unfortunately, Excalibur can’t organize all media types due to limitations with what 3rd party plugins can do.

This is where Adobe comes in. Please see the illustration to understand how a new ‘Smart Bins’ tab in the Preferences window could work.

A few things to point out:

1. Not all users will want all of their assets automatically organized. That is why my proposed solution would allow users to enable automatic sorting on an asset per asset basis. Should a user not want any automatic sorting whatsoever, they could easily turn it off completely.

2. Users could create sub-Bins inside of Smart Bins. For example, an ‘Audio’ Smart Bin could have 3 sub-Bins for ‘Music’, ‘SoundFX’ and ‘Voice Overs’. Any audio files automatically collected by the Audio Smart Bin would appear into that Bin’s root level. If a user later wants to move assets into one of the sub-Bins, or even outside the Smart Bin altogether, they would be free to do so.

3. If a user drags media directly into a Project window Bin to import it, it would appear in that Bin, disregarding any Smart Bin asset associations. Dragging media into the Project window’s root level however would automatically sort any media with an associated Smart Bin.

4. Smart Bins would be easy to recognize in the Project window since each one would have a user definable Label.

5. A single Smart Bin could collect 2 or more asset types. This would be handy, for example, to gather all titles (Source Graphics and Legacy Titler titles) or all video files (both with and without audio) into a single Bin.

6. Search Bins are NOT a substitute for Smart Bins! Search Bins don’t collect any files and therefore don’t help keep the Project window organized. Search Bins also can’t be automatically created with every new Pr project.

7. Humans have the technology to fly a drone on Mars. Isn’t it time we saw a little more intelligent tools in Premiere Pro to eliminate tedious tasks that could easily be automated?!

Smart Bins would help virtually all editors, so hopefully this idea gets attention before Adobe introduces any more niche tools that only serve some editors.