How to Add Tags to Your Footage in Premiere Pro CC (2018)

Organization is one of those things that separates smooth editing sessions from frustrating ones. When you are working with dozens or hundreds of clips, finding the right footage fast matters. Premiere Pro lets you add custom metadata tags to your clips so you can search and filter by keywords instead of scrolling through filenames trying to remember which clip was which.

Today we are going to go over how to add custom tags to your footage in Premiere Pro CC.

How to Add Custom Metadata Tags

Creating a Tags Property

1. Import your footage into Premiere Pro.
2. Navigate to the Project panel where your footage is listed.
3. Click the hamburger menu icon (the three horizontal lines) at the top right corner of the Project panel, next to the project name.
4. Select Metadata Display from the dropdown.
5. In the dialog that opens, look at the top right corner for the blue Add Property text. Click on it.
6. In the Add Property dialog, give the property a name. I recommend calling it Tags.
7. Change the Type dropdown to Text. This lets you type freeform text into the field.
8. Click OK to create the property, then click OK again to close the Metadata Display dialog.

Tagging Your Footage

9. Back in the Project panel, expand the panel until you can see the new Tags column. It usually appears at the far right of the metadata columns.
10. To move it to a more convenient position, click on the Tags column header and drag it to the left.
11. Click in the Tags field next to a clip and type your keywords, separated by commas. For example: Day, Exterior, Wide Shot, Beach.
12. Repeat for each clip in your project. Be consistent with your naming. If you use “Wide” on one clip and “Wide Shot” on another, they won’t match in search results.

Searching by Tags

13. Click in the Search field at the top of the Project panel.
14. Type one of your tags. Every clip with that tag will appear in the filtered results.
15. To save the search as a bin, click the bin with magnifying glass icon next to the search field. This creates a smart bin that always shows clips matching your search.

Tag Ideas

Good tags describe things that are not obvious from the filename:

• Shot type: Wide, Medium, Close Up, Extreme Close Up
• Time of day: Morning, Golden Hour, Night
• Location: Indoor, Outdoor, Studio, Beach, City
• Subject: Interview, B-Roll, Product, Landscape
• Rating: Best, Good, Backup, Unused
• Audio: Clean Audio, Noisy, No Audio, Music

Tips

• Tag as you import. It is much easier to tag footage while the shoot is fresh in your mind than to go back later and try to remember what each clip contains.
• Use consistent keywords. Pick a set of standard tags and stick with them across projects. This makes searching predictable.
• Combine with color labels. Premiere Pro also lets you assign colored labels to clips. Use labels for broad categories (interviews are blue, B-roll is green) and tags for detailed descriptions.
• For more organization tips, check out how to collect files and share projects in Premiere Pro.

That is how you add tags to your footage. It takes a few extra minutes upfront but saves you a lot of time once you are deep into the edit.