Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Classroom in a Book
Some Great Features :
Those creative professionals seeking the fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 choose Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Classroom in a Book from the Adobe Creative Team at Adobe Press.The 22 project-based lessons in this book show readers step-by-step the key techniques for working in Premiere Pro CS5. Readers learn the basics on things like using audio, creating transitions, producing titles, and adding effects. Once they have the basics down, they'll learn how to take their projects further by sweetening and mixing sound, compositing the footage, adjusting color, authoring DVDs, and much more.
This completely revised CS5 edition covers new features such as Ultra, the new high-performance keyer. New workflows for creative collaboration are also explored, from the script all the way to the screen using Adobe Story, OnLocation, Speech Search, and other Adobe tools that are right at users' fingertips. Best of all, the companion DVD includes lesson files so readers can work step-by-step along with the book.
This completely revised CS5 edition covers new features such as Ultra, the new high-performance keyer. New workflows for creative collaboration are also explored, from the script all the way to the screen using Adobe Story, OnLocation, Speech Search, and other Adobe tools that are right at users' fingertips. Best of all, the companion DVD includes lesson files so readers can work step-by-step along with the book.
All of Peachpit's eBooks contain the same content as the print edition. You will find a link in the last few pages of your eBook that directs you to the media files.
Helpful tips:- If you are able to search the book, search for "Where are the lesson files?"
- Go to the very last page of the book and scroll backwards.
- You will need a web-enabled device or computer in order to access the media files that accompany this ebook. Entering the URL supplied into a computer with web access will allow you to get to the files.
- Depending on your device, it is possible that your display settings will cut off part of the URL. To make sure this is not the case, try reducing your font size and turning your device to a landscape view. This should cause the full URL to appear.
Customer Reviews
50 of 51 people found the following review helpful  An easy-to-follow hands-on guide to what's possible with Premiere Pro CS5,September 14, 2010 |
This review is from: Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)
I've used Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express for several years now, and while I can't claim to be an expert I know them fairly well. I decided to learn Premiere Pro as an alternative - primarily because you can edit natively with several formats that Final Cut requires you to convert before editing. Since then, and after working through this book and getting to know how it works and what it can do, I've decided to stick with Premiere Pro for most of my editing projects because I find it much easier to work with for a number of advanced editing problems.This book (which is really the only book available that focuses on teaching how to use Premiere Pro CS5 ) is very clear and straightforward. It would be helpful both for experienced editors ready to try out Premiere Pro (who might decide to skim through a few of the chapters on basics, that are fairly similar to how things work on other editing platforms), and also for those just starting out. This isn't really an introduction to editing, per se - though the authors do include some scattered but helpful advice for beginners. (One of the best and most accessible general introductions to editing principles that is platform neutral is Grammar of the Edit). This book is more an introduction to the range of features available in Premiere Pro CS5 - and it's a pretty impressive range of features, and they are clearly outlined here. The basic approach of this book - like all of the books in the Classroom in a Book series - is to lead you through a series of exercises that show you what's possible with the program. There's not a lot of explanation, but the advantage of this approach is that you get a fairly quick hands-on introduction to the range of what's possible. (I own and have worked through a few of the other books in the series, and found that apart from a few issues mentioned below this was the clearest and easiest to follow - and gave me the quickest introduction to the program.)
The lessons are easy to follow. In each case there is a quick introduction to the basic concepts of the lesson, then there are several hands-on tutorials, that make use of project and asset files on the included CD to lead the reader through a number of practical applications of the concepts. To get the most out of this book, you do need to have Premiere Pro installed and download the files on the CD and follow along. For the most part that's easy, and the CD works fine both for PC and Mac users (a few caveats below).
Lessons start with the basics, getting used to the interface and how to modify it for different kinds of projects and individualize it for personal tastes. It covers importing and managing assets, both from tapes and tapeless formats. Then cutting and fine tuning an edit, adding transitions, creating and animating titles, adding effects, applying motion and slow and fast motion, and messing with sound and compositing and color correcting. It also shows how to use Premiere in conjunction with other CS5 programs, like Soundbooth, OnLocation, Photoshop, After Effects and Encore, and how to export files and author dvd and Blu-Ray discs.
Each lesson is clear and straightforward, and they do a good job with starting out basic and moving forward to show just enough that you can see what could be done with each technique. Most lessons have "before" and "after" timelines so you can see what you were supposed to do and reverse engineer it for guidance in case you didn't follow instructions exactly.
I did notice a few problems, easy to work around, but still problems that could have been fixed. While it claims to be applicable both for Macs and PCs, it does seem that it was written by a PC user, and occasionally things they suggest aren't possible on a Mac or work differently on a Mac.
In one lesson they asked me to upload an .avi file - which is a Windows format and won't play on Macs without special codecs. In the case of this one, even though I can usually play .avi files on my Mac, this one wouldn't play. It turns out that I had a codec installed (3divx) that interfered with playback of this file - and I only figured that out after a search on Adobe's help website which revealed that a few people had the same problem with the previous edition of this book, and an author of that edition was part of that conversation. It would have been nice if they'd included a footnote explaining that the same problem was...
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful
Become a Video Editing Professional in 3 or 4 Days,December 27, 2010
By
M. Media Studios Inc. "M2 Media Studios, Inc." (Northern Virginia (West of DC)) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)
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...
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21 of 28 people found the following review helpful
CIB strikes again,September 8, 2010
By
This review is from: Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)
There is oodles of references for After Effects; but it seems like Premiere got overlooked after CS3, which is the last version of Premiere who's sole source for written reference wasn't CIB.I have CIB for Premiere CS5... It's a typical CIB. Lots of how... very little why, which makes retention difficult. I'm having flashbacks of the Dreamweaver CS3 CIB... which I buried in a box after the 2nd chapter, never to be seen again. At least with this book, I'm learning the gist, but I can't say I really know how to apply what I've learned in the real world.
Don't get me wrong... I've learned some cool stuff from the Premiere CS5 CIB (which is more than I can say for the Dreamweaver CS3 CIB), but the majority of it is just "Do: 1, 2, 3"... even going so far as to tell you exactly where to set In/Out points in the clips and other such nonsense. It's like learning algebra by having someone tell you what letters and numbers to write down to solve the equation and then saying... "there you go... now you know algebra". Memorizing the steps doesn't equate to understanding. The way this book is formatted also makes it a less-than-optimal reference book... Want to know how to save a custom transition for use in other projects? Good luck finding that in the the index.
I have used a few different tutorial/reference books for Adobe products: CIB, Missing Manual, Dummies, etc. CIB had always been my least favorite for their lack of flexibility. The others serve well as tutorials for the initial learning curve, and later, as references when I need a quick answer. CIB's are terrible as references and marginal as tutorials -- only working for a certain type of learning style (which really isn't mine).
Bottom Line: if you can learn, retain, and apply knowledge gained from a "click the buttons I tell you to and see what happens" teaching technique, you will do fine with this book. However... if you need a handy reference, or need to know the WHY behind such instructions as: "Dragging the viewing area bar handle in the Program Manger so its current-time indicator is roughly centered will make it easier to set In and Out points"... I'd say: Look Elsewhere (that is, if you can find somewhere else to look).
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