Motion Graphics Templates in Essential Graphics panel are a great feature that allows you to use and edit After Effects level motion graphics without ever leaving Premiere Pro. However, there’s still much improvement to be done here. The panel gets messy very quickly. Especially if you have a lot of templates.
Today I’ll share with you the best way to install and organize the templates inside a panel. And though it may seem like a topic that has been covered million times already, in my observation not many people use this approach. Get onboard. You’ll thank me later 🙂
How to Import MOGRT files
Even though starting with Premiere Pro CC 2019.1 (April release) we can install templates super easy by just dragging and dropping in Essential Graphics panel, I wouldn’t recommend this method. It installs the templates in the default location and doesn't give you much control over it.
The installation method that I use is hidden in the panel menu. It’s called Manage Additional folders.
You simply choose a location of your folder with motion Graphics Templates and they will be installed automatically. There are two main advantages to this method:
We can add new templates to the folder anytime and they will be updated in Premiere Pro automatically.
We can choose a folder located on Dropbox (or alternative cloud-based storage system) which will let us access the files from anywhere, share the folder with our collaborators and protect us from data loss.
Motion Graphics Templates Organization
Now it’s time to organize our templates. The first thing we want to do in order to have full control over our templates is to disable all default templates that we’re probably not gonna use anyway. So just uncheck Libraries and chose only these local folder that you want to look at.
My approach to it goes as follows. I create separate folders in my Dropbox for each brand that I have templates for. Next, I only select these folders that I want to have access to at a given time.
Next setting we may want to tweak is sorting for the view settings. We choose between Sort By Title or Recent. The latter will change the order every time we use a template. Personally, I like to have alphabetical order (which lets us sort the templates by using a good naming convention) so I use Sort By Title.
And the last option I like to use is marking certain templates as favorites. You can then easily filter results to favorites only.
These 3 things allow us to have full control over templates in the panel and I strongly recommend implementing then into your Premiere Pro workflow.
Where to get Motion Graphics Templates from
First and foremost you can create your own Templates in After Effects. I encourage you to turn any existing animations you might have into MOGRT files and to start building your own library of these assets. That's what I do for Cut to the Point videos.
But of course, there are also many market places that offer ready-2-go templates like for example Envato Market of Envato Elements. Some of the packs are really packed with great animations. Definitely something worth considering.