TL;DR: Create a Stock Project. Let Premiere Index it. Use the new Search Panel to find old gems.
Welcome to Tool Tip Tuesday for Adobe Premiere Pro on ProVideo Coalition
I have years of stock footage sitting on drives. YEARS.
While preparing for NAB in April – digging up footage for a series of several classes on AI – I realized Adobe’s new visual search panel could be the solution to my perpetual “I should catalog this footage someday” problem, since I don’t have a MAM (yet.)
I built a “Stock Footage” project, imported my assets, and let Premiere Pro analyze them. Within minutes, all my footage was cataloged. These are video and stills.
To turn this on/off, go to Settings > Media Intelligence.
The index gets built in the background. In the top right of your Main Premiere window, look for these two icons – Progress Panel and the new Search Panel :
You can start searching before Adobe finishes the entire analysis.
A note on AI analysis: AI systems aren’t perfect – they can misidentify content and provide inaccurate results. But when it comes to organizing footage, I don’t need perfection. Adobe’s visual search – any AI visual search – will not be flawless, but it’s certainly better than my previous system: nothing at all.
Time to use the new search panel!
Key notes that I think are important:
- This searches all open projects. So close any projects you don’t want when you’re digging.
- Changing the drop-down to Visuals is better than Everything – I don’t want to be searching through speech here.
- Limiting it to Source means that if it finds something in a timeline, it doesn’t use it.
It would have been nice if I could also search metadata along with visuals (visuals + metadata) Some companies include great metadata. Some not so much.
One cool wrinkle as I was writing this: You could limit it to just Sequences. If you did stringouts in your Stock Footage project (or any project!) based on a specific topic (backgrounds, exteriors, etc), you could get Premiere to only visually search a Timeline around those specific narrowed topics.
Now I have instant access to Stock Footage based on my search terms. Instead of thinking “I wish I knew where that stock clip was,” I get AI’s best guess in seconds.
Suddenly, I’m saving money by rediscovering and using assets I already own rather than purchasing new ones.
This series is courtesy of Adobe.
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