• Adobe Premiere Pro

  Freeform View – Happy… then Sad! Can Anyone Make Me Happy Again?

  Posted by Alex Kuzelicki on April 17, 2019 at 5:31 pm

  Hi,

  I’ve just been playing with the new Freeform view and, for the most part, I LOVE it!

  For years I’ve wanted something just like it, a ‘place’ where you could just ‘put stuff’ and move it around into little groups and make multiple versions of a rough edit visually. It’s an intuitive, actually fun, way to work.

  So, I was excited to try it out. And was getting more excited the more I played with it, until ‘one thing’.

  A lot of my work is doing live-action previz for action scenes in feature films. We have to work very fast and are constantly doing new, alternate or updated edits of a scene. Changes happen so much that it’s pretty easy for things to get messy. I’ll often just put different versions of a particular action at the tail end of a timeline for ‘the powers that be’ to choose from.

  I’ve tried other ways, having stacked timelines or bins with different versions, etc but the amount of changes we go through turns those ideas into management hell. So, in the end having versions on a single timeline, colour-coded seems to work the best.

  That said, I could see the potential for a beautiful workflow with the Freeform view. Basically, to drag a version of an edit from the timeline back into the view. Then do another version, drag that in and so on. Eventually having all my ‘versions’ neatly laid out in little stacks that I could access at any time. I did some tests and it seemed to work… BUT… on closer inspection the clips come back into the view in a completely random order.

  Weirdly, if you drag the same cut into the view again it comes in, in another completely different order (?)

  I’m hoping that maybe there’s just some setting somewhere, possibly in the metadata, that allows me to drag/copy clips back to the Freeform view from the timeline in order they are edited (which would make really good sense).

  Anyone have any ideas?

  Thanks so much,

  ALEX

  Alex Kuzelicki replied 7 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Oliver Peters

  April 17, 2019 at 6:32 pm

  Hmm… I’m not sure what the best answer is. However, I don’t really imagine that Adobe conceived of it being used this way. It’s simply another view other than grid-based thumbnails or list. It works just like Media Composer’s bin view, so I presume Adobe thought of it as working the way most Avid users would expect. But you should definitely put in a feature request.

  – Oliver

  Oliver Peters – oliverpeters.com
• 

  Alex Kuzelicki

  April 18, 2019 at 2:34 am

  Yeah, I didn’t think it would be a common workflow, haha, but for my particular job it would be amazing.

  I did play around a bit more and figured that if I Nest each each alternative edit and then drag them back in to the Freeform view, I get all my ‘versions’ neatly arranged and in the right order (inside each Nested Sequence). I suppose that’s something.

  I’ll definitely put in feature request, though I’m not sure how needed they’ll think it is. Though, it does make sense that copying a series of clips to ‘anywhere’ that they should paste in the same order.

  Thanks for the suggestion, Oliver. Appreciated. ☺

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