Adobe Premiere Pro is one of the most popular video editing programs on the market. Its lineage stretches back a number of decades to when the program was given away free with a FireWire or analogue to digital converter card. Since then the program has gone through a number of radical overhauls, not least being CS6, which changed a number of key workflows and altered the main layout to create a very clean looking interface. If you are new to Premiere Pro, or if you have just started to explore the program, or indeed you are coming from a previous version, this book will detail everything you need to know in order to get you up and running as a Hotshot video editor. Take a look at the eight project areas to get an idea of the skills you will be learning. Here you can see that pretty much every aspect of video editing with Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 is covered, often more than once in order for you to practice those new found editing skills. From automatically creating a movie montage, through to editing a short film, a news article, all the way to adding special effects to your Timeline, this book really will make a Hotshot editor out of you.
Project 1, Creating a Movie Montage – The Easy Way, shows you how to take the hard work out of adding many hundreds of clips to a Timeline, and create a montage to the beat of a music track.
Project 2, Cutting a Short Film Without Getting Stung, builds on workflows learned in Project 1, but uses those skills to cut a short film using a variety of techniques including three and four-point edits.
Project 3, Protect the Innocent – Interview Edit Techniques, looks at various techniques you will find useful when editing news or documentary footage, such as the J- and L-cuts, and the Extract and Lift functions.
Project 4, See the Bigger Picture – Edit Multiple Cameras, shows you how to synchronize footage that was recorded on nine different cameras, as well as demonstrating a Picture-in-Picture (PiP) effect.
Project 5, Visual Effects – Muzzle Flashes, Laser Beams, and Clones, takes you through the steps necessary to create these effects using only the filters and effects found in a standard install of Premiere Pro CS6.
Project 6, Visual FX Using Real Media, builds on Project 5, but shows you how to replace the effects with real explosions sourced free from the Internet.
Project 7, The Ultimate Do-over – Correcting Visual and Audio Problems, takes a look at just what's involved when someone says, "We'll fix it in post"!
Project 8, Reach the World – Export to DVD, the Internet, and Beyond, looks at the practical steps needed to get your finished project out onto YouTube, or DVD, or wherever else you want to send it.
This book assumes that you have some familiarity with how PC and Mac programs work. For example you should be comfortable with how to drag-and-drop using the mouse, and how to activate secondary options by holding down the Shift, Alt (PC) or option (Mac), and Ctrl (PC) or command (Mac) keys. If you are using a Mac with a single button mouse, you should also be aware of the alternative to right-clicking. If you have any doubts about these conventions, you should take a look at your PC or Mac handbook, or if you lack one of those, make a few well-informed searches for some basic "computer usage" tutorials using the search engine of your choice.
This book also assumes that you have installed Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to your computer and that you are at least capable of launching the program and understanding how to access some of the basic menus. You won't need to know anything further about Premiere Pro CS6, as this book develops along a gentle learning curve, with lots of help and hand holding occurring in the first two projects, and then slightly less help in each of the following ones. Eventually, as you reach the last few projects, you should be able to tackle each task without referring to any of the hints or tips given throughout this book.
Finally, this book also assumes that you have a computer capable of video editing. The minimum specifications for Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 can be found on the Adobe website; however, you should also have at least one extra hard drive attached to your system that is dedicated to storing your video source files. This dedicated video drive can be an internal hard drive, or it can be an external USB or FireWire drive. Whatever it is, it should be as big and as fast as you can afford in order to cope with the large amount of space that video clips demand. All of the source clips that you will download from the Packt Publishing website for use with this book should be stored on your dedicated video drive using the instructions given in each project.
Editing on a computer with just a single drive (a laptop for example) is not recommended as you will experience dropped frames, which appear on screen as a juddering, stuttering playback. If you are undecided about the capabilities of your system, then it's best to ask one of the various dedicated nonlinear video editing dealers for their advice. A good example of a firm with a great deal of knowledge on this subject is DVC based in the UK (www.dvc.uk.com). Take a look at their site even if you are not in the UK, as this is the sort of firm you should be looking for where you live.
This book is aimed at anyone who wants to edit with Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. You might know very little about the program, or you might have the basic skills and are looking to take them to the next level, or you may be a more experienced user looking to learn how the new workflows in CS6 can be easily accessed. Using these projects, and the sample footage that you can download from the Packt Publishing website, you will learn techniques that can be adapted for use on any type of video project. Using this system it's possible to complete this book in just under a day, assuming you drink plenty of coffee and don't get distracted. Whoever you are, whatever your motives are for learning Premiere Pro CS6, this book will teach you all you need to know in order to improve your workflows. In turn, this will allow you to deliver a accurate frame edit that will really make your projects stand out.
In this book, you will find several headings appearing frequently.
To give clear instructions of how to complete a procedure or task, we use:
This section explains what you will build, with a screenshot of the completed project.
This section explains why the project is cool, unique, exciting, and interesting. It describes what advantage the project will give you.
This section explains the major tasks required to complete your project.
Task 1
Task 2
Task 3
Task 4, and so on
This section explains any pre-requisites for the project, such as resources or libraries that need to be downloaded, and so on.
This section explains any preliminary work that you may need to do before beginning work on the task.
This section explains how the steps performed in the previous section allow us to complete the task. This section is mandatory.
The extra information in this section is relevant to the task.
You will also find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
Code words in text are shown as follows: "Browse to your Images folder on your designated video drive and import your images."
New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "Once Premiere Pro CS6 has finished launching, the Recent Projects splash screen appears."
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