Premiere Pro’s Default Scale to Frame Size Preference

In this Premiere Pro tutorial we discuss the +’s and -‘s of using this setting. What is it good for?  How does it work?  Why it’s genius, but you may not ALWAYS want to use it.

After you watch the video, I wanted to make some notes about my workflow that might offer some clarity.

For instance, when recording these tutorials:

• I record my screen at a resolution 2560×1440
• Then I bring my footage into my Premiere Pro sequence set to 1920×1080.  I keep Default Scale to Frame size on.
• Whenever I am doing full shots of the monitor, I leave this setting on.
• When I want to zoom in, I cut up the section of the clip I’ll be zooming into.  Then right click on the clip and shut off the Scale to Frame Size on the portion of the clip.  (In other words, you don’t have to enable it or disable per clip, you can do it to a portion of a clip that has been cut.)
• In this way, I can maintain the convenience of the setting, and with a simple right click into the clip menu, have access to my full resolution.  It gives you all of the benefits of both resolutions, from one single source clip.

All in all, I think this preference is very intelligent and it works really well.  You just need to know when to use it and when not to.

Could I think of ways to improve it?  Sure I could.  Have it work like the After Effects Continuous Rasterize switch.  Where it will scale it to my sequence, but then when needed still be able to access the original resolution.  Of course, that might be hard to do without slowing down your system.  We’ll have to leave that one up to the engineers at Adobe to figure out.

Credits: Thanks to John Gumaer for doing the intro sound design.