We go back to Premier 1.0 as well as having had a traditional video editing suite, in the days of tape. Admittedly, I had not kept up with all the Premier revisions. We used to have both Macs and Windows, because there was a time when we would need to translate incompatible file formats. However, we have not had a Windows machine for nearly six years. The revision history of Premier is a little difficult to figure out. Through August 2002 there was Adobe Premier on Macs and Windows. Then, a year later Adobe introduced Premier Pro, which was a Windows-only app. By July 2007, following the Macromedia merger, Premier Pro re-emerged as a Mac app with the introduction of CS3 and the Production Premium Suite and Master Collection.
We fully intend to master the entire set of key apps in the Master Collection. Since we're rusty on Premier Pro (Pr), we have chose three key solutions to improve our skills, dramatically. We, like many Adobe professionals, have been relying upon Classroom in a Book (CIB) to touch up our skills.
We have not messed around with tape in many years. Part of what has driven us back to Premier is the native support it offers DSLR (digital single lens reflex) camera users. Like ourselves, many professional photographers, we know, are diving into video, now. There's an imperative need to edit this footage. Most photographers, unlike ourselves, are going to need a great deal of hand-holding to get used to Premier Pro. The workspace bears a great deal of resemblance to Bridge, though what many of the panels do will be a brave new frontier. CIB smartly recognizes this and approaches Pr CS5 is if the reader knows nothing about the app. It starts you off with an overview of what each panel does and then makes a well, graphically documented tour of how to customize your workspace.
Adobe has designed many of the panels to act much like the components a traditional physical video editing suite. In CS5, Premier has become very much like a hardware editing suite. On both Mac and Windows Pr CS5 requires a 64-bit computer. This finally gives Premier Pro the muscle it has always needed to run multiple clips, simultaneously. Likewise, the author of this book approaches chapter two as if you have just un-boxed new hardware and now must show you how to set it up. This lesson carefully walks you through some of the essential Pr Pro skills. Getting comfortable with the panel for importing assets is necessary to the rest of your work in Premier. We go way back with CIB. Admittedly, we begin to take those DVDs, for granted. This is one of the most valuable uses of the DVD. It has all those assets you need if you are starting from square one with video editing. I was impressed with how the book also assumes you know very little about video technology. Though there is much that we do know about these basics, our presumption that this book will have a huge appeal to photographers is a good guess that all of these foundational elements are new to that audience. In the online video series that we are studying about Pr, none of these basics are ever mentioned. That's where CIB is ahead of the game. They know that if they don't clarify this to readers, the reader will never feel as if they fully understand Pr.
To take this further, lesson three is dedicated to tapeless media. Once again, CIB makes no assumption that you know anything about the various formats. We have contact with some of the best and the brightest Pr users on the planet. There have been times when I felt a few of these guys were speaking a foreign language. Pr CS5 CIB has built my understanding and confidence of this. Again, it's not directly relative to Premier. However, without it, you'll feel as if you are in a fog.
Much like a few chapters in our second book, "
Stoppees' Guide to Photography and Light: What Digital Photographers, Illustrators, and Creative Professionals Must Know" the fourth chapter of this CIB gets into other essentials which takes you from preproduction to postproduction. This is the first CIB, we recall, which has done this. There's a list of tips for shooting great video. Just a few days ago we published a feature story to the Online Learning section of our website on Divine Proportion, so we were pleased to see this chapter discussing and providing an example of the Rule of Thirds. This chapter even includes some conventions for naming clips. This results in your finished project will be inline with the top professional video editors.
A cornerstone of professional video preproduction is the storyboard, something of a visual game plan for a shoot. The storyboard has been an editing launchpad for Pr going back quite a few versions. Lesson 5 takes you through building a succession of rough cuts in the storyboard metaphor and provides a clear explanation. It jumps right into another essential in video editing, the Timeline. This could dump you into a foreign territory with Premier. There are a few intricacies to Pr which could cause you to lose footing. This is the most high-gear chapter, so far. You need a little time to catch your breath with this one. I suggest you take a break to let it all sink in.
The sixth chapter is less intense and filled with wise advise on keeping your editing style professional. A poor use of transitions makes a project look amateur. There's wise advise and quite a few sample situations as to how to keep it clean.
Being into type, and having an extensive library of it, I enjoyed the seventh chapter on dynamic titling. This is a feature set strength of Pr. The app includes five panels for type usage which is specifically intended for video. I find this portion of Pr to be unlike how type is handled in the familiar InDesign, Illustrator, and Photoshop, so I had to slow down and carefully study this lesson. In the end, I needed another breather, but I felt CIB throughly covered the topic. Type, in video, is powerful. When some CIB authors cover this, it's inspirational to see the cool things they've done in type. I would have liked to see that here.
As I started lesson 8, less than half way through the book, I felt like I had a a good grasp of Pr basics, enough to competently complete projects, yet, the author feels the reader is just now ready to delve into the productivity which allows you to work like a master. Two pages into lesson 8, the author imparts some more professional insider information on the different types of editing and how to use them to a project's advantage. That kind of insight is not important to learning the feature sets of Premier Pro, but unlike any Pr CS5 learning tools we have seen, to date. It's the difference from knowing the app's features, which the user's manual can do, and becoming a professional video editor.
The ninth lesson gets into video effects. This requires a great deal of technical know-how, and the author does an excellent job of helping the reader to understand how that's done in Pr CS5. Because of the amount of time (and pages) required to do this, I suppose the author could not allocate enough pages to advise of when these effects work, well, and when they look kind of crazy.
The tenth lesson teaches you how to put the clips into motion. These are the sort of effects, seen on cable news shows, where graphics fly all over the screen and attempt to entertain the viewer when there's a lack on compelling content. Creating these seem intimidating. These are a powerful set of features which I have never fully understood how to master. CIB made the complex seem easy.
Another complex aspect of video editing is all the time shifting capabilities. You know the ones: slow-motion, reverse-motion, speeding up a clip, etc. Chapter 11 does not have a large number of pages allocated to these complex tasks, which include time remapping. Yet, it provides all you need to master these powerful techniques.
Going into the twelfth lesson, it's obvious that CIB has been concentrating on video and holding off on the audio aspects. With chapter 12, the author took me back to my college voice and articulation class, again going beyond the call of Pr duty to provide an excellent bulleted list of professional voicing tips and setting up a good sound booth, along with microphone and headset tips. CIB then goes into the high-quality aural experience creation and offers an understanding audio characteristics. This is rarely discussed anywhere much less in Pr training, yet without that knowledge, it's not possible to produce professional quality audio tracks for your video. I must confess that there are a few discussions in this CIB chapter I knew nothing about, before.
Pr CS5 has a bunch of cool techniques which both improve and professionally punch up your audio. That's great news. The downside, to the novice, is that most of this stuff is like nothing they have ever encountered. The terminology is a foreign language and how you use the tools are unlike anything else in Pr. Amazingly, this author makes it all very understandable and approachable. CIB even goes into some audio mixing techniques and surround sound effects. All of this was concerning me until I got to page 256. As great as Premier's audio is, some of this is done better with Soundbooth CS5, which is included in the Master Collection and Production Premium Suite. At this point the author switches gears and provides a nice lesson in how to polish things using Soundbooth with which much of this chapter is applicable.
Adobe's new Story cloud app assists in collaborations between script and copywriters and the rest of a production team through Pr CS5. Lesson 14 takes you into the powerful, almost magical, feature of how Pr can transcribe speech into text.
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