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In this movie we are going to take a look at how to browse and import files
using Adobe Bridge. Adobe Bridge is a separate application, a standalone
application that comes with creative suite applications. Even if you've given
Bridge a chance in the past and maybe you didn't like what you saw, I invite
you to give Bridge another look. With every version they add more features and
a lot of those features are for video users specifically.
So let's go to the File menu, prepare a little room in your heart and select
Browse in Bridge. In older versions of After Effects this will just say Browse.
Go and click this to launch Abode Bridge. Mine popped up instantly because I
already had Bridge open. But more than likely the first time you launch Bridge,
it's going to be very slow to launch. That's okay though, just give it some
time and let it do its thing. Now I'm back here in the Media folder that
we used in the last movie when we were importing the files. Watch this, when
I go to the Graphics folder this time, instead of seeing a long list of Illustrator
files with just the Illustrator icon, I actually can see the graphics
contained in these Illustrator files. Adobe Bridge is one of
the very few applications that I know of that is for browsing that could actually
browse Illustrator files. Stick with our browsing; if you want to get
around with Adobe Bridge you can use these Favorites on the left hand side.
You can also click these buttons on the top which are actually live buttons; if
you want to get in your Exercise Files you can click Exercise Files, double-click
Media, works just as the Finder on the Mac or Explorer in Windows.
It's even complete with back and forward buttons up in the upper left hand
corner here. Now Bridge not only previews Illustrator files,
as if that wasn't cool enough, we can preview audio and video. If I have
these audio clips in the Audio folder, click once on them...
(Music plays.) And we can preview that file. We can pause
it; we can scrub the Timeline. We could adjust
the volume, and all that stuff from right here in Bridge.
Now this is all fine and good. We can go though and browse files all day, but
what really makes this useful for After Effects users is that if I like what I
see while I'm here in Bridge, Bridge remembers that After Effects opened it. So
if I know this chad guitar solo clip is pretty cool, I can just double-click it.
Boom! It pops into After Effects instantly. I'll go back in the Bridge.
I'm going to click on the Media button at the top to get back in the Media folder.
Another useful feature, if I go to Images, I click on, let's say this Monitor
file we will be looking at later on in the training, we get a preview here on
the right hand side. I can actually resize these windows similar to resizing
panels in After Effects to get a bigger preview. Notice that my cursor also
turns into a magnifying glass when it's over this thumbnail. I can click it to
get what's called a Loupe tool. This is a little close-up window that shows me
the image at 100% zoom. This is great for those digital photos or even maybe HD
still frames and I can just click in here and move this tool around and see
this in full resolution. Click this little X to close it again.
Alternatively, I can instead of increasing the size of the Preview window;
I can use this little slider down here towards the bottom to resize the
thumbnails in the folder that I happened to be looking at. You can see how
dynamic that is. At a glance you could also see Metadata, something that's
becoming increasingly important in the world of video. For photos I can see
things like the aperture and the shutter speed and the ISO value and the pixel
dimensions and all that kind of stuff. There is also additional information in
the IPTC Core area here. If I want to add a creator I could just click
in here and type Chad Perkins and hit Enter. In this way I can add extra information
about this file that's stored within the file. Later if I can't find
this file I can go to the Edit menu, select Find and locate this file. If
I couldn't remember that was called Monitor.jpg, all I would have to do is do
a search for Chad Perkins and this image would show up because I put this information
here. You could also change how images are sorted
from the Sort dropdown. You could also click on one of these dots here to give
this file a rating and then you can sort by that rating using the Star dropdown
up here. So again just a few of the uses of Adobe Bridge,
it previews video, which we haven't looked at yet, let me show you if
we go this Artbeats folder here, click on CAT104 and again we get a preview,
click Play and we can scrub in the Timeline just like with audio. This is so
helpful. A lot of times when I'm working in After Effects,
I want to bring in a folder, and sometimes I save low res and high res
versions of a file or maybe files with different codecs. I can't really tell
just from looking at the name, because sometimes my naming conventions aren't
the best, admittedly. But I don't know what I'm importing. By using
Bridge, I could actually see what I'm doing. So you don't have to use Adobe Bridge,
but for me personally, I actually use it and like it a lot.