Conducting a Clip Notes review: Lesson 15-3
Anyone who has sought feedback on a project from a client will embrace Clip Notes. It resolves the headaches and miscommunication common to collaboration.You use Premiere Pro Clip Notes to create an Adobe Acrobat PDF (portable document format) file. PDFs have become the de-facto standard in multi-platform document exchange. Clip Notes PDFs contain either a video of yourselected sequence or a link to a video on a server.A reviewer opens the PDF, plays the video and enters comments into the PDF, which automatically tags them directly to the timecode. You import those comments into Premiere Pro and they appear as markers in the Timeline.You don't need a copy of Adobe Acrobat to create a Clip Notes PDF, since the engine is built into Premiere Pro 2.0. To make comments you do need Acrobat (Standard or Professional) or the Adobe Reader (available as a free download at http://www.adobe.com/reader).This is not a Project Menu line item. The purpose is to review a single sequence. So you will find this command in the Sequence Menu.
1. | Check that the Lesson 15 Practice sequence is open and selected. |
2. | Select Sequence > Export for Clip Notes. You have three Export Settings options:
![]() |
3. | Click OK to accept the default settings: Windows Media, Entire Sequence, Low Quality Preset and Embed Video. |
4. | Navigate to an appropriate file folder, give this Clip Notes PDF a name and click Save. Premiere Pro will display a Rendering information window that shows its progress as it converts the clips andeffects into a Windows Media file. |
Review your Clip Notes PDF
You can email the PDF file to a client or circulate it in-house. In either case, anyone with access to the file can view its associated rendered sequence and make comments.
1. | Minimize Premiere Pro by clicking the dash in the upper rightcorner. |
2. | Open Adobe Acrobat or the Adobe Reader, select File > Open, navigate to the newly created PDF and click Open. |
Lesson 15 folder.
3. | Make a selection that suits you in the Manage Trust for Multimedia Content dialog box. |
4. | Read the Instructions (you can access them at any time by clicking the button in the reviewing area) and click OK.![]() |
5. | Enter your name in the Reviewer Name text box. |
6. | Click the Play button in the movie viewer. |
7. | Click Pause when you want to enter a comment (clicking Stop will put the CTI back to the beginning of the video).Premiere Pro automatically enters a timestamp in the comment box. |
8. | Type in your comment. |
9. | Click Play to continue reviewing the movie and adding more comments. |
10. | Click the Go To drop-down list to jump to any of your comments.![]() |
11. | Click the Comments tab (on the left side of the interface) to open the comments list.[View full size image]![]() |
12. | When you're done entering comments, click the Export button (in the lower right corner below the screen), give your comments a name (the default is [original PDF file name ]_data) and file folder location, and click Save. |
That creates an XFDF (extensible markup language forms data format) file.
View the Comments in Premiere Pro
Lesson 15 folder. [View full size image]

4. | Double click a marker to view the comments.Alternatively, select Marker > Go To Sequence Marker to move from one marker to another.[View full size image]![]() |