How to Customize Your Workspace in Premiere Pro
Hey everyone, welcome to FilterGrade. Today we’re talking about custom workspaces in Premiere Pro, so you can optimize your workflow and finish your projects faster.
Adobe programs let you customize your workspace to make the software work for you. This is very important in Premiere Pro, because you want a vastly different layout depending on if you’re editing, color grading, working with audio, or doing something else.
Each Adobe app, including Premiere Pro, is made from panels that can be moved, removed, replaced, and resized. When you adjust the size or position of one panel, the others will automatically adjust to make everything fit.
Premiere Pro comes included with several workspaces by default such as for editing and for color. Clicking on one of them will switch the layout. To edit which workspaces show up, simply click on the menu next to any layout and click on Edit Workspaces. Here you can adjust the order of the workspaces or move them to the Do Not Show category to remove them. You can drag the bar on the right side of this section to change how many workspaces appear at the top of the screen.
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Importantly, you can customize workspaces and then save them. You can dock panels together, move them in and out of groups, or undock them so that they float above the main application. To move a panel, just click on a blank area in the panel, or directly on the name itself. Hold the mouse button, then drag the panel. As you do, docking zones will become highlighted. These blue areas are locations where the panel can be dropped. They are available on all sides of an existing panel. When you drop a panel in this way, it will split that panel’s space in two equal halves, not changing the overall size of that area. The rest of your panels will not be adjusted. In addition to dragging around panels like this, you can hold the Ctrl (or Command on Mac) key while dragging a panel around, and it will pop out as a window above Premiere Pro. This is great if you have a second monitor or want to easily be able to pop up this window over everything else. And of course you can add other tabs to this window if you like. When you save a workspace that has another window on a second monitor, that configuration will be saved in the workspace.
To instead add a panel as another tab rather than an entirely independent panel, you can drop it into the highlighted center area of any panel instead of on the sides. You can accomplish the same thing by dragging it to the tab area where all of the tabs are listed. When tabs are grouped together like this, you can also click and drag tabs around to re-order them.
Not every panel in Premiere Pro is active by default. To add one that isn’t currently visible, click on the Window menu and select the window you want to add. It will automatically add to your workspace then you can move it around however you prefer.
If you’re customizing your workspace, you’ll probably also want to resize your newly created panels. When you hover over the space between two panels you’ll see your mouse cursor change to a double-arrow symbol. and you can drag this space to adjust the size of the two panels. As this makes one panel larger, the other one will of course get smaller. If you position your cursor over the intersection of three or more panels, you can click and drag to adjust all of them at once.
If you want to close a window, click on its menu and click on Close Panel. If the closed panel was the only one in the group, the surrounding panels will readjust to fill in the space.
Once you’re happy with your new workspace layout, you can click on Window -> Workspace -> Save as New Workspace. Give the workspace a name and it will show up on the list of workspaces, which, once again, you can rearrange if you like. If you’ve ruined your saved workspace beyond belief and can’t figure out how to get back to it, click on the menu next to the desired workspace and click on Reset to Saved Layout.
What sort of workspace you end up creating with these tools is up to you, but Premiere Pro makes it very easy to customize your workspaces to have an optimal workflow for different tasks, and even create a sprawling workflow across multiple monitors.
If you learned something about Premiere Pro workspaces in this video, let us know with a like or a comment, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss our other Premiere Pro tutorials.
