ok, im new to video editing. i have a video with a guy in front of a blue screen, how would i remove the blue screen? i have Premiere Pro 2.0/After Effects 7.0
i found a thread in this forum that told you how to, but i dont have another video as my backround. does the program come with any backrounds? and another question, im 15, how long would it take to learn premiere/after effects basics?

I would normally at this point simply point you to the right page number in the user manual but as I'm at work and don't have them with me... Dive into the help and look up 'keying'. Plenty of 'video effects' in Premiere Pro covering this area. Not done this for a while but isnmmtp; there one called 'blue screen'.

Well, that's the realt trick isn't it. You need to replace the blue with something don't you.

From the looks of the cover the latest issue of 'Digital Video techniques' includes some virtual sets on the cover disk. Might be worth a look. They looked sort of TV News settings.

Also, as I recall Premiere PRo comes with some examples of this I thought. have you looked through your installation disk?

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

I would use AE. Check Effect->Keying for the available keying options. If you want something basic then try Effect->Keying->Color Key. Use the picker to choose the blue screen and then fiddle with the settings until you have a clean alpha channel (no blue screen). There are more (and better) options depending on your needs and which version of AE you have and which plugins you have available.

I don't know what you need for a background. It could be a photo, another video or you can use one of the background animation presets.

Premiere is easy to learn. We used to run classes 3 x 3 hours each and at the end the students would come out being quite competent - after having little or no editing experience previously. Learning by yourself you can probably do the basics after a couple of days. There are lots of online tutes to check out.

AE is harder but still relatively easy to learn. Particularly basic text manipulation and motion graphics. However, AE is hard to master. It's a very powerful program (especially when the scripting elements are fully utilised) and there's a lot to learn. But for me that's part of the attraction.

Open the effects-pannel in Premiere Pro 2, open the folder Keying and apply the Blue Screen key to your clip.

You will have to tweak the settings of the key and the results you will get depends on how low the variation of blue is in your clip. It can be a lot of work to get things wright.

Good luck.