34 of 34 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Very good, especially for a newbie, December 11, 2003
This review is from: Adobe Premiere Pro Classroom in a Book (Paperback)
The book does a good job of "hand holding" while you acquaint yourself with Adobe Premiere Pro.
The only complaint I have is that there are a few steps that are missing in some of the lessons. It isn't too hard to figure out what is supposed to happen, but still it would be nice for it to be a little more accurate in the details.
I would recommend to any newbies out there like myself that you begin by skipping "ahead" and doing Lessons 1 and 2 and then going back to the beginning of the book to do the "Tour". I did the Tour first and it involved some concepts that were a little beyond me and I think I would have benefitted from going over the basics that are covered in Lessons 1 and 2 instead of the sink or swim tour, if you know what I mean.
Anyway, all in all, it has been a very satisfying book.
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not as good as others in the series, June 26, 2004
This review is from: Adobe Premiere Pro Classroom in a Book (Paperback)
I was disappointed by this entry to the 'Classroom In A Book' series. I've used other members of the series, and I have generally found them to be a relatively quick and inexpensive way to climb up the learning curve for Adobe products.
Most of what the book teaches comes under the heading of 'Video Editing 101'-- what's a ripple edit, how do I lift frames, and so on. I can find most of this stuff pretty quickly in the User's Manual.
There is a lot of repetitive material in this book. I counted a half-dozen places where the book shows how to remove a gap in the timeline, even though it's a simple procedure.
Intermediate topics of the sort that I had hoped to find get less attention. Color correction only gets part of one chapter, and there's virtually nothing on Premiere's waveform monitor and vectorscope beyond how to open them. I'd really like to know how to read and use them!
Premiere's audio capabilities get their own chapter, but the Lesson on the CD-ROM doesn't match the chapter in the book. There were at least a half-dozen files needed by the chapter's project that Premiere couldn't find on the CD, rendering the chapter all but unusable.
When Premiere Pro comes out, I hope Adobe goes back to the drawing board on this volume. It needs a lot of work.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not quite the book I'd hoped, January 11, 2005
This review is from: Adobe Premiere Pro Classroom in a Book (Paperback)
Although I like this series and I enjoyed the example movie that's the basis for all the exercises in this book, I'm afraid this edition is unnecessarily confusing, particularly for beginners. It has an unforgivable number of errors in the text and lessons. And it's a bit wordy in its directions without, in some cases, explaining well enough for me why you are following a particular sequence of steps. And some of the lessons seem to have one too many things jammed into them. It's just not particularly user-friendly.
Apparently, what the editors of this series did was to take an earlier version of the book--I'm familiar with the Premiere 6.0 version and I can see the similarities to that-and update it to the Premiere Pro version of the program and a new movie that the user gradually assembles. Working on one related movie, rather than a series of short, unrelated little projects, might be a good idea although personally I didn't mind the fact that there wasn't one big project in the earlier book. That's just a matter of preference, as is the content of the project (which high school age students find somewhat silly.) What's unfortunate is that there are so many "stoppers" in the lessons.
Honestly, the editing borders on the unprofessional. There are lesson where you're asked to import random sound from the old book (in French, no less) that's totally unrelated to the current clips just to get in some pointers about putting video effects on a clip. In the lesson on effects, you're asked to put a zig-zag effect on an image; well, that worked fine on a cup of hot chocolate in the earlier version, but, unfortunately it's one of the effects no longer in the current program. There's a lesson on sound where you're asked to open a partially completed project; many of the clips necessary for the lesson are not in the lesson folder. I found all but one of them is other folders, eventually, but the process was time-consuming and, of course, you think you've made the error not the editors of the book. In the same lesson the effects workspace is inaccurately described. And there are other errors, I think. The problem seems to be just haste and sloppy editing. You lose confidence that you're being guided through these concepts correctly. I'd wished I'd waited for a second (corrected) edition of the book.
When I emailed the publisher asking for errata data, I didn't get a response for over a week and then just to let me know that they'd "been inundated with user queries," had forwarded my query to the errata editor, and that "Adobe is not always responsive to us in matters of errata." Over a month later, I have not heard more.
It's a shame because this could be an excellent book with just a few changes. Or at least a "heads-up" warning about problems.
Besides the errors, I'd suggest slightly more focused lessons. A couple of chapters are just too long for one sitting. And there are lessons where, in the interest of teaching one more thing or an alternative way of doing things, you do a step only to undo it immediately. To me, that's not beginner-friendly. The chapter on opacity is a bit short on transparency key but includes a lot of information on the waveform monitor, color management, and vectorscopes that really doesn't amount to much a beginner would find practical. It probably belongs in another chapter or an appendix. The chapter on integrating with other Adobe products is sort of confusing; you basically add a lot of cross-dissolve transitions the hard way to, apparently, get a feel for Adobe After Effects. I'd prefer the lessons streamlined and the "extras" in an additional chapter, glossary or appendix. Perhaps in an effort to highlight what's new in this version of Premiere, the editors have lost sight of what should be their primary focus: to get beginners up and running with the program quickly and confidently.
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