Speaker 1: This video was brought to you by Studio Network Solutions, the shared storage choice of media professionals worldwide. What is this new production workflow about? Is it a game changer or just a nice-to-have feature that comes in handy only when you're working on a very big project? Let's find out. Hey, it's Piotr Stoszynski from Cut to the Point. I'm a freelance editor and Premiere Pro certified expert. Today, I will give you a quick overview of Premiere Pro 14.1 release that introduces a completely new workflow called Productions. Let's give it a quick overview. By the way, you can also read about other minor updates on my website. I will link it down in the description. Since I honestly believe this is quite a significant update, even for solo editors like me, I will also create a few additional videos about the various aspects of Productions, so subscribe, ring the bell, so you don't miss out. Let's cut to what Production actually is. At a high level, Production is a collection of Premiere Pro project files that are stored in a master folder on a disk. If it sounds trivial, well, that's because it is, but the implications are quite interesting. By the way, this is an additional approach to working on your edit. You can still use the traditional way. Actually, we now have three options to choose from when we are creating a project, a single traditional project file, a production, and a team project available to those with team license. To better understand this new feature, we will compare how a simple project will be organized as a production versus traditional project file. By the way, I used this new feature to edit this series of videos, so you know, first-hand experience. In the old paradigm, I have separate bins for different types of assets. Yes, I do keep things organized. If I get hit by a bus tomorrow, someone could replace me very easily. This is called a bus theory, and basically you should follow it more or less every single time. I also have a bin for sequences. I will have a sequence with raw footage, with selects, and finally with versions of the edit I'm working on. If I were to work on another video about productions, I would create the same type of project separately on the disk. And now let's see how it looks when I use productions. Okay, what used to be a bin in a traditional project is now a separate project file in production folder. And what used to be a project file is now a set of project files we call the production. You can see that inside that production, I have a project file for A-roll footage, for B-roll footage, for screen captured clips, for music, graphics, and so on. And finally, I have a folder with project files for separate videos. An interesting thing is that inside those projects, I only have sequences, no imported media at all. This is far the biggest change you need to get used to. Working in productions, you are dealing with a new way of clip referencing. To understand how this new model works, let's imagine that production consists of only two projects. A media project that has all imported clips, no sequences at all, and the timeline project with a sequence referencing those clips. Let me repeat it again. With just one sequence and no imported media at all. If you edit clips from a media project to a timeline project in this new model, there is no need of importing master files to this timeline project. No matter how many clips you have in the media project, you can still have a timeline project that consists of only one sequence, no imported media at all. Of course, this is a simplified example, but it illustrates this basic rule. In reality, you can have multiple timeline projects with thousands of sequences in them, or you can even mix it up and still import some clips to the timeline projects and so on. But this should give you an idea about the difference between the old way of thinking and the new one for productions. Basically, a production is the next step in the evolution of the project file. To be clear, this new way of clip referencing only works for projects inside the production. If you create the project in a regular way, all the rules still apply. I think it's pretty obvious now that it's especially valuable for very big and very complicated projects. For example, you can edit an entire season of a TV show in a single production, where you have individual project files with sequences and separate project files just for dailies for specific episodes. So yes, this feature is designed for collaboration, especially for those environments where a team of editors is working and using shared storage servers to access media files, which brings me to this episode's sponsor, a company I contacted because I thought this is a great match for this video. Studio Network Solutions helps editors around the globe by changing the way they store, organize, and share their media. They offer high-quality shared storage hardware and very reliable media management software, plus integrations with your NLE, including Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro X, Avid, and Resolve. What can I say? It's a great product. Otherwise, I would not contact them, so visit their website for more details. If you will be working with shared storage solution, there are a few preferences you might have to tweak. I plan to make a video about it as well, so stay tuned. By the way, I updated my Bulletproof Premiere Pro ebook with a chapter on productions, and it points out these preferences. This ebook is all about the best practices for stable editing workflow in Premiere Pro, so if that's something you struggle with, you can order your own copy. It's also worth pointing out that while you could potentially add media assets to a production folder on a disk, it's not recommended. And actually, these files would not be visible within a production panel. That's because even though there is a link between a production panel and your browser or finder, it actually looks for Premiere Pro files only. Let's now reiterate and have a look at the benefits of using productions over traditional single projects. It's another level of organization, so the benefit here is obvious. You may not appreciate it if you're working on a singular video for social media, but if you're working on a TV show or a narrative film with multiple scenes, it becomes a huge advantage, a game changer. In a traditional project, you need to have a master clip imported to a project before you can place that clip on a timeline. So when you open another project to copy a clip or a sequence from it, the master clip files you're dragging would have to be imported to that project as well. This means that quite often, you end up having duplicated clips in your project. In productions, however, clips in a sequence can refer back to a project they came from. So copying sequences between projects will no longer create duplicated clips. We can reuse project files very easily. For example, you may have a project file with graphics elements for a brand, organized into categories, prepared for different use cases, and so on. You can simply import that project for every production you're working on for that client and access these assets easily and quickly. Since only the clips and sequences that are open are using the processing power of your computer, you should experience faster open and save times. The larger the project, the more difference you will see. This is also, in my opinion, the most important benefit for solo editors. We can just open parts of productions that we're actually working on in a given time. Productions can be used on a local storage, but the real benefits come with using shared storage solutions. It makes collaboration between editors, producers, directors much easier and with more rapport in between. This new collaboration workflow keeps everyone on the same page and prevents any conflicts between files. Whoever opens a project in a production first gets a lock on it that others can see in the production panel. They can still open the project in read-only mode, but no changes can be made as long as the editor is working on that project. So again, this is the biggest benefits for those working on shared storage. These editors can work simultaneously in the same production, and project locking prevents any potential conflicts. By the way, check out my video about project locking for productions. By now, I've only used productions for a week, but there are some areas I feel that could be improved already. We need a new project that we create within the production panel to start as a template. It's a feature that is available in After Effects, and we need it in Premiere Pro as well, especially for this new workflow, where it's no longer about just copying and pasting our template project file. Right now, you have to open File menu to create a production. No such option on a recently opened screen. It's also not obvious that we now see both projects and productions available in that recently opened list. Would be nice to label it for visual differentiation. Or maybe it's just in my early release version, and when you're watching this video, it's not a concern anymore. I hope so. When you open a few projects, it makes up for a lot of new panels. Some way of keeping track on which timeline belongs to which project would be useful. I don't know, maybe color coding for timelines? By the way, the essential motion pack that I created with my friend Joel works on 14.1 with no issues. Importing essential motion was the first thing I've done after installing the new version. If you don't own your free copy yet, I don't know what you're doing. Go watch the video. Download the file. If you do have it already, you should watch my video about 10 things you should know when working with productions, or about project logging in productions. And if you found this video useful, please smash that like button to let YouTube know that it's worth showing it to people. It was Peter, see you in the next one.