Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Touring the Premiere Pro workspace: Lesson 1-1

You'll dive into nonlinear editing in the next lesson. At this point I want to give you a brief tour of the video editing workspace. In this lesson you will use a Premiere Pro project from this book's companion DVD.

Note

It's best to copy all the lesson assets from this book's DVD to your hard drive and leave them there until you complete this book because some lessons refer back to previous lessons' assets.

The workspace layout

If you've never seen a nonlinear editor, this workspace might overwhelm you. Not to worry. A lot of careful consideration went into its design and layout. I've identified its principal elements in the next figure.

The Premiere Pro workspace might seem daunting to first-time NLE users, but you'll soon see the logic behind its layout.

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Premiere Pro 2.0 sports a revamped workspace with many new features that I cover in this lesson. With this update comes some new nomenclature. Gone are palettes and most windows. Added are panels, frames and floating panels.

Each workspace item appears in its own panel. And you can dock multiple panels in a single frame. Some items with common industry terms stand alone, such as Timeline, Audio Mixer, and Program Monitor. I list all the new (and some old) names in the following workspace descriptions.

• Timeline This is where you'll do most of your actual editing. You create sequences (Adobe's term for edited video segments or entire projects) in the Timeline. One strength of sequences is that you can nest themplace sequences in other sequences. In this way you can break up a production into manageable chunks.

More tracks than you can use

You can layercompositevideo clips, images, graphics, and titles in an unlimited number of tracks. Video clips in higher-numbered tracks cover whatever is directly below them on the timeline. Therefore, you need to give clips in higher-numbered tracks some kind of transparency or reduce their size if you want to let clips in lower tracks show through. I cover compositing in several upcoming lessons.

• Monitors You use the Source Monitor (on the left) to view and trim raw clips (your original footage). To place a clip in the Source Monitor, double-click Video 1a in the Project panel. The Program Monitor (on the right) is for viewing your project-in-progress.

Single or dual monitor view

Some editors prefer working with only one monitor screen. I prefer two and the lessons throughout this book will reflect that. You can change to a single monitor view if you choose. Click the little 'x' in the Source tab to close that monitor. In the Main Menu, select Window > Source Monitor to open it again.

• Project panel This is where you place links to your project's assets: video clips, audio files, graphics, still images and sequences. You use binsfile foldersto organize your assets.

• Effects panel Click the Effects tab at the top of the Project panel to open the Effects panel (on the left, below). Effects are organized by Presets, Audio Effects, Audio Transitions, Video Effects and Video Transitions. If you open the various effects bins you'll note that they include numerous audio effects to spice up your sound; two audio crossfade transitions; video scene transitions, such as dissolves and wipes; and many video effects to alter the appearance of your clips.

  Effects panel (left) and Audio Mixer (right).

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• Audio Mixer Click the Audio Mixer tab to the right of the Effects tab (on the right, above). This interface looks a lot like audio production studio hardware with its volume sliders and panning knobsone set of controls for each audio track in the Timeline plus a Master track.

• Tools panel Each icon in this panel (on the right, below) represents a tool that performs a specific function, typically a type of edit. Older versions of Premiere had many more tools but now the Selection tool () is context-sensitive. It changes appearance to indicate the function that matches the circumstances.

• Effect Controls panel Click the Effect Controls panel (on the left below) to open it and then click on any clip in the Timeline. That will display that clip's effect parameters in the Effect Controls panel. This will give you a small taste of many lessons to come. Two video effects are always present for every video, still or graphic: Motion and Opacity. Each effect parameter (in the case of Motion: Position, Scale Height and Width, Rotation and Anchor Point) is adjustable over time using keyframes. The Effect Controls panel is an immensely powerful tool that gives you incredible creative latitude. It comes up in many of this book's lessons.

  Effect Controls panel (left) and Tools panel (right).

  
  

  
  

• Info panel Click the Info tab (left of the Effect Controls tab). Info presents a data snapshot of any asset you've currently selected in the Project panel or any clip or transition selected in a sequence.

• History panel Click the History tab (left of the Info tab). History tracks every step you take in your video production and lets you back up if you don't like your latest efforts. When you back up to a previous condition, all steps that came after that point are also undone. You cannot extract a single misstep buried within the current list.

History panel (left) and Info panel (right).