Easy Adobe Premiere Elements 2 [Paperback]

Carl Plumer (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0789734079 | ISBN-13: 978-0789734075 | Publication Date: October 29, 2005 | Edition: 1

Turn your home movies into professional-looking, edited DVDs with the help of Easy Adobe Premiere Elements 2. Over one hundred visual tasks will show you how to create, edit and share digital videos using Adobe Premiere Elements. This full-color, visual, step-by-step guide will walk you through digital video basics and common video editing tasks. You'll also learn how to take advantage of exciting features such as creating pages for a video DVD, adding transition effects, creating a title page and correcting common audio and video glitches. Show off your movie-making talents with the help of Easy Adobe Premiere Elements 2.  

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Carl Plumer is the Desktop Video Guide for About.com, a division of the New York Times. He writes regularly about desktop video editing in general and Adobe Premiere Elements in particular. His site is consistently ranked among the top sites for desktop video and is one of the few websites where you can view video clips on the subject of video editing. Carl's website can be found at http://desktopvideo.about.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Easy Adobe® Premiere® Elements 2

Introduction

When you write a story, you make a number of creative decisions as you go: what and who to write about; which scene should come first and which scenes next; and what, ultimately, has to be cut. Each decision you make helps your story flow and makes it a more satisfying experience for the reader.

Making a movie is the visual equivalent of that process. Like writing, your goal when making a movie is to tell a story. But this time, instead of using the written word, you're using images and sounds. And because the best video editors share something in common with the best writers—they don't get in the way of the story—the video editor knows that less is more, and that understatement, subtlety, and simplicity are best.

The tools that Premiere Elements provides to help you assemble your story pieces (the video clips) into a finished story (your movie) are some of the best available for the home video editor. After you have mastered Premiere Elements, you will find its working environment fits your video-editing tasks as nicely as your word processor fits your writing tasks. You can do virtually anything you have the creative vision for. And this book will teach you how.

Easy Adobe Premiere Elements 2 shows you the Easy way to make a movie using Premiere Elements 2. You'll discover how to bring your video clips into Premiere Elements and how to add photographs, titles, and music to your production. You'll learn how to add a special effect and toss in a transition. And don't worry if words such as special effect and transition sound foreign—they won't be for long.

So, congratulations: You're on your way to becoming a great movie editor in your own right. Step one was purchasing Adobe Premiere Elements. Step two was picking up Easy Adobe Premiere Elements 2!

© Copyright Pearson Education. All rights reserved.

Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Que; 1 edition (October 29, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0789734079
• ISBN-13: 978-0789734075
• Product Dimensions: 10 x 8.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,127,808 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #31 in Books > Computers & Technology > Digital Photography & Video > Adobe Premiere Elements

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A great book for beginners like me!, December 3, 2005

By 

alicepaget (Long Island, New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Easy Adobe Premiere Elements 2 (Paperback)

I bought the Premiere Elements software because I already had Photoshop Elements (they are both by Adobe) and I really liked it. I think Photoshop Elements is the best program to work with when it comes to digital pictures. I just started creating videos (in October), so I thought Premiere Elements would be the perfect complement. Was I ever wrong! Premiere Elements is pretty hard to use and totally confusing (at least to me). This book really does make it seem "easy" and the pictures are really cute. It helped me to get started really quickly. I still have a lot to learn, but I would recommend this book to anyone who has tried to use Premiere Elements and then totally freaked out when they saw the software for the first time. I was so frustrated! Now I can edit my videos easily after the holidays (I'm sure everyone in them will be happy)! Adobe should give this book away with their software!

10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The "premiere" beginner's guide, January 2, 2006

By 

a reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: Easy Adobe Premiere Elements 2 (Paperback)

I am pretty much a novice video enthusiast. I had used Ulead's video editor (versions 7 and 9) because, despite its limitations, I found it the most intuitive to use.

Then at a friend's suggestion I tried Premiere Elements. It was not easy going. Adobe's online help and tutorials gave me a sense that it is indeed powerful and versatile, but also gave too little guidance on how to actually use it. Perhaps they were rushing to market, confident that 3rd parties would write books to fill the documentation gap.

Fortunately, one of the books to emerge is this one. The layout -- relying on extremely clear screenshots with step-by- step annotations -- suddenly made things much more accessible. Plumer knows his stuff and has a gift for simple, effective explanations. After applying things learned from just 40 minutes of browsing selected parts of the book, I've converted to Premiere.

Be aware that Premiere Elements has a lot under the hood, and this book doesn't try to cover everything. But the other books I've browsed which do, seem to inundate you in detail -- which might be good for intermediate and above users with lots of time on their hands. For the rest of us, who want to do cool, even amazing things without a lot of struggle, this book looks like the premiere starting point.

6 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars More than just a beginner's book, January 17, 2006

By 

Video Guy "Steve" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Easy Adobe Premiere Elements 2 (Paperback)

I read the other posts and I really agree with the reviewers who say this book is great for beginners. It walks you step by step through every feature and function, with cool full-color illustrations. It takes the fear out of a fairly intimidating program. I learned an amazing amount about the program in less than an hour. The book shows you all of the special effects for audio and video, as well as all of the transitions in a way that's easy to understand. It also shows you how to use all of the panels, which initially I found really confusing. The book is the perfect primer to help you get started with this software. Adobe should hire Plumer to write their books. It actually makes using the software seem fun!