Adobe Premiere Elements for Dummies (Paperback)

by Keith Underdahl (Author) "A few years ago, video editing was only practical for people with a lot of fancy editing equipment and piles of cash..." (more)
Key Phrases: organizing your media, external video converter, conformed audio files, Premiere Elements, Adobe Title Designer, Premiere Pro (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
Adobe Premiere Elements offers amateur and home moviemakers the opportunity to work with editing tools as powerful as those packed into Adobe Premiere Pro, one of the top tools on the market. Adobe Premiere Elements For Dummies offers these same users not only a guide through all the how-to steps of using the software, but also a valuable reference on how to best apply the tools to a great video project.

Author Keith Underdahl, also author of Adobe Premiere Pro For Dummies, is an experienced video editor who understands what new Premiere users need to know and how to best explain the topics. In this book, Keith describes:

• Best practices for shooting quality video
• Picking the clips you want to keep and getting them into your computer
• How to use Premiere Elements’ editing tools to add an opening credits page, transitions between clips, sound, music, and ending credits.
• Adding special effects using only computer trickery
• Putting your finished project on a DVD, videotape, or the Internet

Covering more ground than the typical expanded users manuals you find in bookstores, Adobe Premiere Elements For Dummies is the book you need to get you through your first video-editing project as well as to return to whenever you hit rough spots and need instant help.

From the Back Cover
Once, only professionals with expensive tools could create digital videos. Now, with Adobe Premiere Elements and this book, you can create movies without a huge budget or a film school degree. This friendly guide shows you all the digital filmmaking steps from shooting video to getting it into your computer, editing your clips, adding music, and putting it all on a DVD to share with the world.

Discover How To:

• Shoot video like a pro director
• Get clips from your camera to your PC
• Edit out the bad stuff and keep the good
• Add in special effects, music, and credits
• Put your movie on DVD or the Web

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: For Dummies; 1 edition (November 5, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0764578812
• ISBN-13: 978-0764578816
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #20,551 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #3 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Digital Photography & Video > Adobe Premiere Elements
  #4 in	Books > Computers & Internet > Digital Photography & Video > Adobe Premiere
  #5 in	Books > Entertainment > Radio

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good indepth book with lots of useful feature info, November 7, 2004

By	Home Movie Buff "sinoue" (San Jose, CA United States) - See all my reviews

Keith's knowledge of Premiere really pays off in his "Adobe Premiere Elements" for Dummies book.

The book does a good job of going more indepth than the user manual that comes with the product. Capture, Edit, Effects, Titles, DVD and other export types like web, are all covered.

I really enjoyed the numerous examples & gotchas that folks just learning how to edit video would run into. The book has a good balance of tips on video editing, as well as going indepth on how to do specific special effects. Chapter 19 goes thru 10 specific examples: Making people disappear on video, seeing double (twins), freeze frames, old movie, star wars titles, Ken Burn pan & zooms, moving image mattes, lens flares, audio hums and zooming in on video.

20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Book Adobe should have Written!, August 4, 2005

By	Joe (Woodside, New York USA) - See all my reviews

I have been working with Adobe Elements for about 6 months now. I started with Adobe's tutorial and then their "Classroom in a Book" series and have created numerous multi hour DVD's from old VHS video I have. As with most books from the makers of software, they leave a lot of how too stuff out, so I started to look elsewhere for more info on how to use all of the great things in Elements. I saw this book and it's rating so I figured I'd give it a try. For the $16 it cost, even if I learned just two new helpful things it would be worth the money. Never having read any other ".... For Dummies" book I had no Idea what to expect.

I am currently half way through the book and I have to say I have learned not just two but a lot of new things. There are a lot of the basics in the book for people just starting out with Elements but it also goes into detail on how to use all of the fancy transitions and effects very clearly. Before this book I had no idea on how to use some of the more complex effects properly. It's is clear that the author is very familiar with Premere Elements and video editing. The book is worth three times the $16 it cost.

The only thing I felt should have been done, but was not, was that the pictures should be in color. Even if this drove the price up $5 a book it would be better. I say this because often the author refers to the color of an item (The yellow line) in the pictures and unless you are sitting in front of your PC with Elements up or you are very familiar with the Elements windows, all you are going to see is a black and white photo.

Bottom line - A great book, buy it, you won't be disappointed.

I will definitely be looking for other books by Keith Underdahl. Hopefully he knows Photoshop Elements too!

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Helpful book, but doesn't reflect Premiere Elements 2.0, January 16, 2006

By	P. Jenkins - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I bought this book because I found the Premiere Elements user guide less than helpful. Adobe Premiere Elements for Dummies does contain a lot of helpful information and tips, but my impression is that I'll need to read the book cover to cover rather than using it as a reference guide. Be aware that this book's screen shots do not reflect Premiere Elements 2.0. I don't know how different 2.0 is from previous versions, but this was a source of frustration for me when I was trying to find out how to "single step" through a clip.