As an Adobe Certified Trainer for Premiere Pro and After Effects, I have to know the programs’ default settings, shortcuts, and behaviors to a T. So much so, that I rarely personally tweak and customize anything within the apps. Luckily, the defaults work well for a majority of users, but for the rest of you tinkerers out there, Adobe does a fantastic job making most of their apps incredibly flexible to look and act the way you want them to. In this post, I wanted to tackle many (but not all) of the ways you can tweak Premiere, ranging from some of the more obvious (Sequence presets) to some of the more obscure (Source Panel presets).

Sequence Presets

The New Sequence window in Premiere isn’t great, especially if you’re a newer user. It gives the wrong impression that Premiere gives a crap about what format or codecs you’re using when in reality all it really essentially cares about is resolution and frame rate. So, we use the New Sequence from Clip command and all is well. But what if you work a full-time gig where you are constantly tweaking your timeline properties the same way every time after creating it. Tired of always going to the Add Tracks window to get eight audio tracks, six video tracks and then naming each one?

Go to File-> New-> Sequence. Select the Sequence Preset that you think is closest to matching your source footage. Don’t worry if it’s not exact! Go to the Settings tabs and tweak anything that doesn't match the majority of your footage. The Video Previews section is not essential to tweak here and frankly, deserves an entire post unto itself (hey, that’s a good idea…). But for this post, we can leave it alone.

Lastly, go to the Tracks tab. Here’s the big one. Add however many and whatever kind of tracks you often have in a project. Name them, set the Track Type, etc. And if you’re wondering what the “Open” check mark box does, don’t get excited. It’s simply a setting to determine if the track opens expanded or minimized in height (more on that next!). Finally, hit that little Save Preset button in the bottom left! From now on, you will have your own preset sequence setting in the New Sequence window.