Adobe Premiere 5: Digital Video Editing (Against the Clock) (Spiral-bound)

The book seems to be based on a US multimedia college course and comes complete with homework assignments and various exercises to do away from the computer. I immediately liked the spiral binding which turned out to be extremely practical for working with the book open at the computer screen.

The book is totally based on practical exercises. Each chapter is a different project and all the required clips are on the accompanying CD-ROM. You quickly gain confidence by the results you achieve.

The early chapters cover the basics of putting together a few video clips with some sound, and quickly move onto adding transitions and filters. There is not a great deal of in-depth reference text to accompany these sections, but the results gained in the examples do inspire you to start playing with the other transitions and filters available within Premiere.

Sections followed on still images and alpha channels. I found that these chapters started opening my eyes to the creative opportunities within Premiere. All the time, these new concepts were being underpinned with repetition of the basics as all projects begin with Project Settings and run through to Final Cross Platform Output.

The Sections on AddingTitles were comprehensive and showed a great range of styles and effects which could be used to create very professional results.

An introduction to Superimposing clips followed. Again the quick results gained inspired me to want to be out there doing this for myself. This was a very strong area of the book for me - by showing you quickly how to achieve something you can immediately start thinking of how you can apply the technique to your own footage.

For the more creative of us there is a section on working at frame level in Photoshop and a further chapter on integrating with Illustrator. Whilst I would not be likely to immediately start working with individual frames in Photoshop the possibilities have been opened up for future reference and I would never have got such an appreciation without working through these chapters.

Further sections follow on using filters and advanced editing techniques. The exercises help to consolidate everything you are shown. Again you are learning by example and I found it a very effective way to learn. "Monkey see Monkey do" is the philosophy and it works.

The final chapter explains about video capture as well as some advice gained in the field about all sorts of things that can go wrong when working on projects.

In amongst the individual chapters are some detailed Topics to try out. As well as learning about Premiere I can now tame a tiger then prepare it some spaghetti!! The projects were informative, good fun and provided a firm basis for consolidating what had been shown earlier.

I enjoyed this book enormously. If you want a detailed technical reference then this is definitely not the book for you, but if you want an excellent practical introduction to using Premiere backed up with lots of worked examples this is the one! It covers all the basics comprehensively and opens the door to the further creative opportunities available. It does everything by worked example so you quickly feel very confident with the software. The author's obvious enthusiasm for the subject also shone through and it made me want to shed about 30 years and see if I could go back to college to study the subject properly!