Adobe Premiere Pro – Importing Footage to Premiere Pro

An important thing to remember about your footage and Premiere Pro is that Premiere Pro never actually imports it to the app, it simply references it’s location. So if you were to ‘import’ footage from an external hard drive, for example, then you unplugged that hard drive. Premiere wouldn’t be able to do anything as your footage would be “missing”.

It can be hard to back-track and find the cause of a clip going missing if we don’t adhere to the suggested best practise, by first putting our clips onto the V:\ Drive. Click here to find out more about this.

Now that we’ve got our clips together, we can bring them into Premiere.

Select “New Project” from the startup window in Premiere.

If you can’t find it, or the Start dialog hasn’t shown up, you can do the same by going to File -> New -> Project.


Premiere will want to know a couple of things about your Project before you can add footage.

The most important thing to tell Premiere is where you would like to save your project – as this can determine how well Premiere Pro will perform.

You guessed right, you’ll need to hit “Browse” and navigate your way to the V:\ Drive, and into the folder you set up earlier.

Once you’ve set the Saving location for your Project, click where it says ‘Scratch Disks’ to just double check something – all of the listed headings should show “Same as Project” – this in particular is the bit that dictates whether or not Premiere will behave during your edits – if it doesn’t look right; ask your teacher or contact IT for a bit of guidance.

Hit ‘OK’ to start your project!

In the bottom left of Premiere’s interface is the Projects pane. This is the area that you will be dragging your audio, Video and Image assets into.

When you’ve dragged your assets into the Project pane, Premiere will give you some information about what they are.

Make a mental note here – Premiere hasn’t made a copy of your files – it’s simply looking at them where they are. If you were to remove them from the V:\ Drive folder now, they’d disappear or show up as broken inside of Premiere.

By default the timeline [right of the Project pane] will be empty – because your project does not have a Sequence yet.

Drag one of your files from the Projects pane to the next pane on the right, and Premiere will create a sequence for you.