Up until now, you've been saving your digital source materials in most of the folders we asked you to set up: Scanned and Sized Images, Voiceover, Soundtrack, Video. Now's the time to create a project file for your Project folder:
1. Open Premiere.
2. If you've already used Premiere to capture your video or record your voiceover, you've seen the New Projects Presets window. You hadn't needed it then, but now it is important. Since you've been saving your images in a 320 x 240 format, choose "Presentation 320 x 240" as your project type. All those other types of projects are good for other purposes, which you may become acquainted with as you gain experience in digital moviemaking, but for now let's ignore them.
3. With a new project you get a blank construction window and a Project window that's currently untitled. SAVE AS in your Project folder. Give the project whatever name you choose.
If you go back and look at the project file, even after you finish your movie, you'll see that it's not a very big file, usually no more than 50 or 100 K. Your finished movie may be much larger, maybe 50 or 100 MB. While it looks like the project file contains your entire movie, it only contains the information necessary to construct your movie from your various components: where do you keep that sized image, where's the soundtrack, what comes first, what comes last? Our next step will be to tell your project file where to find all the digital stuff you'll make into a movie.
