Adobe Premiere Elements 11 Part A

This is the 1st installment in my blog post series on Adobe Premiere Elements 11 which is based on what I learn doing the video training course by Infinite skills of the same name. This is a video editing program although it will also do slide shows and handle things like photos and audio.Adobe has now gone over to cloud computing with the Creative Cloud series which I think is excellent value but you need the latest hardware to work with it so I thought I'd have a go at learning an older piece of software and incidently there is a professional version of Premiere Elements called Premiere Pro CC. Aparently if you learn all the major keyboard shortcuts in Premiere Elements and you might know a lot of them already as a lot are the same in Windows you stand to save 1 hour in every 8 hours you are working according to a university study. There are hundreds of shortcuts in this program and many that you can self define but this is just the 20 or so most commonly used ones. There are 3 steps to using a video editing program which are input, processing and output. Input is often called importing which you will usually do from a camera or media card. Output is putting it on something like DVD or the web. There are video studios in most big cities that you can rent by the hour and are very expensive. You need to get as much as possible done in as little time as possible in these places. Another option is disused warehouses where if you want something like a stage you can probably rent these quite cheaply for a day. Adobe Elements Organizer is a part of Premiere Elements but functions as a separate program on your computer. It stores things that you import ready to go into your video editing program. You can get into Organizer by clicking Add Media/ Elements Organizer. In Premiere Elements there are quick and expert buttons and quick is for working quickly and has fewer features. Most of your work will be done in the expert mode where you have more control over your work. There is a clean button that clears out your cache of video on your hard drive and is especially important if the video becomes corrupted or you need the space. You can get into the settings with edit/ settings/ general and there are also other settings on the same menu like project settings. Having these settings set right can save you a lot of time. Within your video timeline if you click the video portion and select time stretch there is a nifty feature where you can slow video down slightly to fill a slot. You can use a dissolve with sound as well as video and normally set it for around 1-2 seconds. To open a project the quickest way is to select control+o then select new or existing project. Each file has a log file which shows the steps you have taken and this is refreshed each time you save it and obviously you want to save frequently to keep this file manageable as well as not lose loads of work. I will do another installment tomorrow.