Hi, I just bought myself a camcorder last week and am planning on making a DVD of my friends and my summer. Kind of like a documentary. Anyways, I'm planning on doing pretty basic stuff for now, putting music over scenes, titles on some screens, add sound effects, just stuff like that. If anyone has ever seen any of the Pantera home videos, that is a lot like (but not exactly) what I have in mind.

I've always though of Adobe Premier as THE name in video editing (besides iMovie) so I was just wondering if all this is possible with Adobe Premier. I've heard a lot of After Effects. What is it exactly, and what does it do? It sounds cool, but maybe something I'd like to use down the road more.

Adobe Premiere comes in two flavours. There is the Pro version and there is the 'lite' version called 'Premiere Elements'. Wanna know the good news? They will both do what you want. At about £60 (UKP) Elements is really good value. With it you can not only doall you mention but you can create a DVD with menus to play your stuff too.

As for After Effecfts. That is a Motion Graphics and Compositing' application. You can sort of think of it as a special effect application if you like. It has a very significant learning curve (literally months to get anywhere up to speed on it) and respectfully you should spend some significant time editing video before you think about downloading the demo version to play with. It's a great tool but I suspecty at this stage for you it is definititely a case of running before you've learnt to walk.

Hope this helps

Alan

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I'm not young enough to know everything!

you can do all that and more in Premiere,

After Effects is for more advanced compositing, motion graphics and effects, things like adding 3d elements, advanced blue/green-screening and explosions and things.

I think I saw a Pantera Home-video once... and you can achieve that sort of thing no problem in Premiere.

EDIT: I took too long, didn't see that post, Mr Mills knows what he's talking about. sage advice.

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P4 1GB Ram 50+160GB, Win XP, Premiere 6, Encore+Photoshop, Lite-on 4x dvd rw.
Sony TRV-250, Panasonic NVGS-75, Canon MV600i

At least we gave the same answer. With someone giving the same answer as me you can consider it safer than usual that in this instance I'm NOT talking nosense.

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I'm not young enough to know everything!