How to Import & Export Videos in Adobe Premiere Pro (Pro CC)

Adobe Premiere Pro is powerful, customizable, and high-performance nonlinear editing software for video professionals. While, if you are new to Premiere Pro and have no idea how to import and export media with Adobe Premiere Pro, you're in the right place. This tutorial mainly discusses how to import and export videos in Adobe Premiere Pro (Premiere Pro CC).

Part I. How to Import Videos to Adobe Premiere Pro

The two simple ways to import footage/clips:

This one's easy:

File>Import..., or
Use the Media Browser

The first option is as simple as it gets, and Premiere Pro does whatever it has to do once you select your clip.

The second option is slightly more hands on. If you're having trouble with the first method, try the second one. Once you select the folder your footage rests in, you can import it (Windows - Right Click). The additional option you have is to choose the file type, under the heading: View As...

Most of the time, Adobe Premiere Pro will recognize the file type (codecs) automatically and will only give you limited options to choose from. If you're having trouble here, you might have inadvertently left out some files from your camera folder.

As a general rule of thumb: Copy ALL the files from the media folder (written to the media card while recording) to your source footage drive.

These files might not always be useful, but are hardly detrimental. And, they don't take up much space. Don't get lazy.

Tips: Can't Import video to Premiere Pro?

First look at the supported file formats of Adobe Premiere Pro:

If your media files does not meet the Premiere supported requirements, Premiere Pro CC will refuse to import it. Is there a solution to importing all video files to all versions of Premiere Pro? The answer is positive. There are two main ways to import media into Premiere, the media browser or the third-party components such as Brorsoft Video Converter.

Solution 1. Using Media Browser

The Media Browser gives you quick access to all your assets while you edit. Also, you can use the Media Browser to import clips copied from video storage media such as P2 cards, SxS cards, XDCAM disks, and DVDs.

Step 1. Select Window > Media Browser

Step 2. Select one or more files from the list of files. To select more than one non-contiguous file, Ctrl-click (Windows) or Command-click (Mac OS) the filenames. To select more than one contiguous file, Shift-click the filenames.

Step 3. Select File > Import From Browser, or right-click the file in the Media Browser and select Import. Alternatively, you can drag the file from the Media Browser into the Project panel, or drag the file from the Media Browser into a Timeline.

There are some exceptions to this, however, despite having a huge number of file types supported natively within Premiere, you will sometimes run into files that are not supported, FLV and MKV files being the most common ones. In this case, you'd better try the second solution.

Solution 2. Convert and Import Video to Premiere Pro with Brorsoft Video Converter

Brorsoft Video Converterr offers optimal preset for Premiere Pro. You can quickly and efficiently to convert multiple videos/footages like MTS, MXF, XAVC, XAVC S, MOV, VOB, MP4, WMV, MKV, TiVo, FLV, AVI, etc to Premiere Pro most compatible format for native editing. For Mac OS X users, Brorsoft Video Converter for Mac is the right choice.

Step 1. Load videos to the program

click the "Add File" to load video you plan to import to Premiere (Pro CC) the program from your computer. Or you can also directly drag the video files into the program.

Step 2. Choose Premiere as output format

Hit the "Format" bar and select "Adobe Premiere/Sony Vegas > MPEG-2 (*.mpg)" as output format on the drop-down menu. It ensures the smooth editing with Adobe Premiere Pro.

Tip: Click the "Settings" button and customize proper video/audio parameters including Video size, resolution, bitrate and fame rate and more.

Step 3. Start conversion

After all necessary settings, hit "Start" button to start transcoding videos to transfer to Premiere Pro for editing. Once the conversion process shows in 100%, click Open to get the output videos. Create a project and start editing in Premiere Pro with ease.

Part II. How to Export Videos from Adobe Premiere Pro

When you have your edit completed and ready for delivery, there is only one step left - exporting for delivery. Exporting a finished video with Premiere Pro is an absolute essential skill that is required to finish any edit.

To export a video in Premiere Pro go to "File > Export > Media." You could also press the shortcut key "control M" on PC, or "command M" on Mac. Make sure your sequence that you want to export is selected when you do this.

This will bring up your export settings window. In this window, you'll select your desired settings or presets for the video before sending it to Media Encoder for exporting.

The first thing to think about when exporting a video is to think about where the video will be delivered and how it will be viewed. Are you going to upload to Youtube and Vimeo? Are you going to burn it to a DVD? Are you going to give the client a highly compressed rough copy to watch on their phone? The delivery destination is very important on deciding what the settings need to be. There are loads of useful presets already pre-installed with Premiere Pro and Media Encoder. You can use these presets to quickly choose settings for your exported file.

If you want to bypass these custom settings and export with the EXACT settings of your sequence, you can select "match sequence settings" at the top. That will change your export settings to exactly match your sequence settings, although I don't recommend this because most delivery destinations require codecs other than your common editing or intermediate codec.

For this example, we'll be exporting from Premiere Pro to upload to Vimeo. Note, these video export settings for Vimeo are applicable for other online video services as well, such as YouTube. The best setting for web playback is the H.264 codec. So we'll select our format as H.264.

Click the output name to specify an output name for the exported video file. Make sure that "export video" and "export audio" are both checked so the file has both video and audio.

Now, you can select one of two Premiere Pro export options: "Queue" or "Export."

Selecting "Queue" will send you to Media Encoder with the sequence added to a queue. Then, all you have to do is press the green play button at the top to start the export. This is good if you want to add multiple Premiere Pro sequences to export at the same time. This also allows you to continue working in Premiere Pro while Media Encoder exports in the background. I usually use this method of exporting.

Selecting "Export" simply exports the sequence right from that window. You will not be able to use Premiere Pro while it is exporting this way.

That's it! You just exported your finished video.