The Premiere Pro CC default preference settings are a good starting point for most uses, but there are times when you want to change those defaults. Let’s take a look at the preference settings by going to the Premiere Pro window and then choosing Preferences and then General. The Preferences window will open and you can see all the preference categories along the left side. As we click through each of them, starting at the top, you can see the customizable options for each one.

Let’s take a closer look at the general preferences as these preferences control the bulk of the items you may want to customize. Under the At Startup pulldown menu you can stick with the default Show Welcome Screen or you can choose the Open Most Recent option, which will automatically open the last project you were working on. You can change the default duration of video transitions, audio transitions and still images. And for each of these you can choose Seconds or Frames. You can change the way your timeline scrolls when you’re playing it back and mouse scrolling in the timeline. If you check this box, each time you insert or override a clip into your timeline, the timeline panel will automatically be selected. Checking this box will snap the playhead in the timeline to nearby edit points when the snap function is enabled. This is a very useful one and we recommend checking this box. You can choose to always have your timeline playhead play back again from the beginning after you’ve played to the end of your sequence when you press the spacebar.

Checking this box will display out of sync indicators even when the video and audio are unlinked. You can choose to play your work area after rendering your previews and to automatically default scale to frame size. This area gives you the various options for how your bins open and additional key modifiers so that you can open your bins differently depending on what you prefer as you are editing. If you check this box, your audio will always render whenever you render the video. You can uncheck this box to stop seeing the clip sequence mismatch warning when you edit your first clip into a new sequence but we recommend keeping it checked.

We also recommend that you keep the Fit Clip dialog opens for edit range mismatches box checked. And finally, you can turn off the Show Tool Tips option that shows you what each button does when you hover your mouse cursor over it. The other preferences include Appearance where you can change the brightness of the interface background, audio where you can make changes to various advanced audio options and audio hardware, where you can choose your input and output sources and output mapping. The Auto Save preferences are set by default to always automatically save projects and we recommend that you keep this box checked. Premiere Pro CC is set up to automatically save your project every 15 minutes. Which means that if your computer crashes, you’ll only lose the last fifteen minutes of your editing work. But you can change that to save more or less often. The Maximum Project Versions preference is set to twenty, which is a pretty good number but you can raise or lower it. And finally, you can check this box to save a backup of your project to the Adobe Creative Cloud, which gives you extra protection in case something happens to your local hard drive where your project backups are located. Going down the preference list, you can change the default preferences for capturing, add a control device, customize your label colors and names and change your project list view clip label colors. The media preferences let you choose where and how you want to save your media cache files, your media time base options and XMP options.

The memory preferences display how much RAM your computer has along with how much is being made available to the Premiere Pro CC application. You can also choose how you want to optimize your rendering. The playback settings allow you to customize how long you want your preroll and postrolls to be. How many frames you want to step forward or back. Whether you want to enable Mercury Transmit, your audio playback device and video playback device.

If you check this box, you can also disable video output when in the background and lastly, there are the Sync Settings, Titler and Trim preferences. Whenever you make any changes to the preferences, be sure to click OK to save them.

© Michael Rosenblum & Lisa Lambden 2015