Customer Reviews

Adobe Premiere For Dummies

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If you are just entering the digital video world, and you don't know what a codec is, you need this book. The author explains everything and creates a foundation to build the concepts of video editing.

If you're already familiar with digital video, and you just want to know where all the buttons are in Premiere, simply to skip to the chapter on Video Editing and you're there.

The first half of the book drones on a bit about every possible preference and setting. This gets a bit dry. Be prepared to read the book twice, as much of the terms you won't understand until you experiment. Some things were glazed over e.g. I found 3-point editing to be an amazing feature.

Like other books I've read, the author really pushes single-track editing. I think single-track editing may be easier to explain, but A/B editing is much easier to visualize and work with. If you are familiar with other Adobe products, such as Photoshop, A/B editing works just like blending layers of a photograph.

This book covers version 6 as well as 6.5 - there's not a big difference between the two, unless you are really big on 'Titles'. There is a lot of great information getting your feet wet as a small-time movie producer - patents, royalties, and where to go for more information. I was left with the ability to do just about everything I wanted to do with my movies, but was left with some questions. This will not be the only book you buy on Premiere, but it should probably be the first.

I'm a 'dummie' when it comes to PremierPro, and I found this book hopeless. It is long on chatty asides and advice, and gets you lost in all sorts of tangents. I JUST WANT TO LEARN HOW TO EDIT!! My suggestion (beyond a new author) is to restructure the book so that it works through basic tutorials first and then more advanced editing later in the book. As it is now structured, all 'editing' info gets lumped into one chapter, from basic to advanced, and you can easily lose track of your objective as a student. Even then, basic questions are hard to find. Like 'how do I break up a long clip that I've uploaded into smaller clip files'? I also found the index sucks. Want to find out about the 'trim' window? Looking for info on 'cutting'? Want to know how to turn on/off the timeline? Good luck on all these. In the end I found the Adobe online tutorials were far more clear and to the point. Don't waste your money on this one. PremierPro is complex, and this book confuses and frustrates more than it helps. I suspect it wasn't really written with dummies like me in mind: check out the mind boggling chapter on color correction...

You want a book that really packs in some substance? If so, this book is for you. This author didn't waste time on stuff you already know. Rather, he clearly knows Premiere 6.5 and knows all of the inside info Adobe won't tell you. This book offers a concise primer of video editing terms and technology, giving us just the info we need to produce great movies for the Web or video. I highly recommend buying this book first, because you probably won't need any of the others.