Keeping all of your media (footage, music, voice over, stills, etc) organized is an important step before you even begin to create a project to start editing. Taking a few extra seconds during every step to clearly label folders and media in your folder structure as well as in Premiere can prevent huge headaches and missing media down the road.
This is a pretty basic and standard structure to keep things organized.

If you own an external hard drive, editing off that drive is extremely convenient.
Unless thumb drives have improved drastically in the last few years, it is unlikely that you’ll be able to edit off of one. The program will probably run super slow or crash. Of course I’d be happy if I could be proven wrong.
With a thumb drive or when using the cloud you can move from station to station by copying your entire folder (keeping the identical folder structure of all your media and files) onto the hard drive and copying the entire folder back onto your thumb drive or the cloud to move the project.

Launch and Login to Adobe Creative Cloud
Launch Premiere Pro
File-> New Project
Under General
- Leave default, but name your project
Under Scratch Disks
- Set all paths to “z_cache” except for Project Auto Save
- Set path for Project Auto Save to different hard drive or device than your working project file
Hit Okay

If you change stations, or someone else uses Premiere in between your sessions, you will have to reset your cache paths.
- FIle->Project Settings->Scratch Disks

While in History panel, click tab to bring up settings and change History Status to 100. This allows up to 100 undo’s by clicking command+z.

Drag any media folders you’d like to import EXCEPT 01_Premiere Files, Exports & z_cache from computer into Project panel.
You can also import clips by double clicking inside Project panel.

A standard and the most common HD sequence is 1920x1080 (pixels) with an audio sample rate at 48kHz audio.
FIle->New Sequence
Use the ARRI 1080p 23.976 default setting

Professional editors use the mouse as little as possible
Shuttle shortcuts JKL J=play backwards, K=stop and L=play forward (or spacebar)
You can press either J or L multiple times and that will fast-forward or rewind
You can hold down K while playing forwards and backwards and that will play one frame at a time
I and O= in and out

You can adjust the quality of the playback in the Program panel. At the bottom of the panel you can change it from Full, 1/2, 1/4. Using lower quality allows for smoother playback while editing.

Set in and out points (using i & o keys) of portion of timeline you’d like export.
With desired sequence selected, right click and choose Export Media.
Use H.264 Match Source - High bitrate default setting.
Selecting destination to export to Exports folder next to Output Name.
Click export

Michael T Vollmann

Director | Editor