Once you've installed and opened Premiere Pro, you'll be presented with the following screen:

If you're a previous Premiere 6.x user, you can import your project by selecting open project and browsing to your appropriate file. Premiere Pro will the convert your existing project to the new format and you can carry on editing where you left off! For those new to Adobe Premiere, or wanting to start a new project, simply click on the new project icon in the bottom left. You'll also note that Premiere provides quick and easy access to recent projects - just click on the desired project to open and contine editing.

If you've started a new project, the next screen let's you choose the type of project you're going to create. Here, I'm choosing DV PAL Standard 48kHz. As a rough guide, those of us in Europe and ouyside North America will choose PAL, those in North America and Japan will need NTSC.

Note: The widescreen option is for those with a wide screen enabled camcorder shot in widescreen mode. Please note that although some camcorders offer a "cinema" mode, this is not widescreen and merely adds black bars to the top and bottom of your video. If in doubt, choose Standard. If your video seems "squashed" whilst editing, restart your video and choose Widescreen. Finally, if your "widescreen" video has been achieved by the above mentioned method, you can create an anamorphic video for playback by choosing the widescreen option, zooming each clip and outputing in a 16:9 ratio. This will be explained in greater detail later.

Once you've chosen your settings, Browse and select a location, then enter a project name in the bottom two boxes. Click OK to arrive at the main project workspace:

Previous Premiere users may recognise the layout, but there are a few significant changes that will become apparent as you start working. Before we start the project, let's take a look at the various windows I've labelled from one to 6:

Adobe have included 4 preset layouts that can be accessed through Window > Workspace from the top menu. You can also arrange the different windows as you feel fit and save the workspace through the same menu. If you close a window, select Window and then chose a window from the list. You'll also see here the audio mixer window which is hidden by default.

Now we've familiarised ourselves with the interface, let's start using Premiere Pro! The first task is to capture and import files into our project. So let's start with the DV capture. (Note: Premiere Pro does not support analogue capture). To open up the capture window, select File > Capture or press F5:

Plug in your DV camera and set to Play.

Your digital camcorder should be recognised by both Adobe Premiere Pro and Windows XP automatically. You can change the settings of yoru capture by clicking the settings tab on the right window pane (this will look like the image displayed on the right). Here you can choose where to save your captured DV footage (these are save in the same folder as the project by default, and choose your camera vy clicking options. Don't worry if your camcorder isn't displayed as the generic settings should work fine - just try and choose the closest option:
	Figure 1: DV options - don't worry if your camcorder isn't there, just choose the closest settings
	Figure 2: make sure you set the capture locations to your scratch disk if this is different to your project location

The logging tab also provides for the option of Scene Detect. Simply click the box at the bottom of this tab and then click record (the round red button underneath the capture monitor). Premiere Pro will then attempt to automatically detect scene changes and create a series of video files on your hard drive accordingly. This option is new to Premiere and ideal for those who aren't fussed about manually creating clips and want the entire tape saved to disk.

I would always advise users to start the editing process at the capture stage. This not only saves hard drive space, but also gets you thinking about what can be done with your footage (if you don't already have a storyline!). You can do this by either by manually recording each clip (press play, record and then stop) and labeling seperately, or you can take advantage of batch capture.

The first step in batch capture is to log your clips. Fill in the following information in the logging tab:

Highlighting for batch capture

It's best to give the tape a recognisable name as you'll need to insert the correct tape in batch capture. If you suffix the clip with 001 and are not going to give each clip a more imaginative or descriptive name, each subsequent clip will be increased by 1 (eg 002, 003 etc). Once you've filled out as much information as you want, it's time to start logging the clips. Queue the tape to the start of your first clip using the backwords/forwards buttons. Log the start of the first clip by hitting the button, play or fast forward to the end of the clip and press the button. (note, allow a few seconds either side of the in and out points for transitions!). Finally click to log the clip and you'll be presented with a dialogue box similar to the "clip data" box on the left. Fill this is, click ok and then repeat the process for the next clip until you've built up a series of clips accross your tape(s). You'll now have a series of offline clips in your project.

To record these offline clips to your hard drive, close the capture window and highlight all your clips in the project window. (Tip: if you right click on a blank space in the project window and select new bin, you can create a seperate file for all selected video clips - move your files by draging and dropping onto this folder. Simply slecet all clips in the bin by highlighting the folder. You can do this before captire and log your files to this bin during capture in the capture window.) Once you've selected all your clips or bins, simply select File > Batch Capture (or press F6). If batch capture is greyed out, make sure you've highlighted your clips! Click OK and insert the correct tape(s) as prompted and the clips will then be saved to your hard drive.

You'll now have your captured clips ready to edit. If you have already have video or music you want to import into your project, select File > Import and browse to the desired file. You can then move this into a bin in your profect window. If you have a lot of clips, it's best to use the bins to group your videos, or at least use seperate bins for audio only files.

Let's now move onto the timeline and monitor windows. First, drag and drop a captured file from your project window to the left hand montor window:

You can zoom in on the timeline in the montor window by moving either ends of the bar inwards below:

default view

Zoomed in - click and drage the bar to move along

Chances are you need to trim the clip (change the in and out points). You can either do this on the monitor window or on the timeline: to trim in the monitor window, move the timeline marker to your in point and click and then the button to mark the out point. Now grab the video from the monitor (left click and hold whilst dragging on the video) and place it on the timeline. You can also drop clips directly from the project window and edit as below:

Again, you can zoom in and out using the grey bar at the top (moving the ends in to zoom in, stretch the bar out to zoom out - move the whole bar along to move the view along). To move the in and out point of a clips, simply move the cursor to the in or out point of a clip, and drag it along:

To delete or move the in and outpoint of just the video or the audio, you need to unlink the audio and video - simply right click on the clip and select "unlink audio and video". After you've unlinked then video and audio, click on a blank area of the timeline before you can try and move the audio or video. You can mute a whole audio track by clicking on the button. Right clicking also brings up the option of increasing or decreasing the speed of the clip - right click and select "speed/duration".

Now you're familiar with the timeline, lets take a look at the effects window. Click on the effects tab on the project window and the effects control tab on the monitor window. Now select a clip in your timeline by clicking on it and you'll see the fixed effects in the effects controls tab. These effects are the "basic effects" that you'll probably use the most often and include zooming and moving. Lets start with the scale effect (this will zoom in or out on your clip). You can either click once on the number next to scale effect and enter a value, or click and drag left or right to increase or decrease from the default value of 100. Alternatively click on the arrow next to the effect to bring up further options, and then move the slider along:

The above is true for just about any effect. So lets try adjusting the scale of a clip to 49%. Change the scale to 49 and if you have the timeline marker on the clip on the timeline, you'll see the image zoom out in the right hand monitor window. You can also apply an effect over time by clicking on the stopwatch icon: . After clicking on this button, you'll see a key frame inserted as below (if you can't see the timeline as below in the effects control window, click on the button in the top right).

Now scroll along to where you want the effect to stop and click the button to add a new key frame or select a new value as above. if you select 100, your video will gradually zoom out to fill the screen over time. Again, you can do this on all video effects.

Now lets add a "non-fixed" effect. Go to the effects tab in the project window and open up the video effects tree to "brightness and contrast" as below:

You can the apply this effect to a clip by dragging it to the clip in the timeline and adjusting its properties in the same way as basic effects in the effects control tab.

You'll also an audio effects folder which contains a few (rather limited) audio effects which can be controlled in exactly the same was as the video effects. Also in the effects tab are the transitions. These are applied in the same way as video effects, but must be dropped either between or at the ends of clips. You can extend or shorten transitions by moving the start and end of the transition on the timeline. You can also adjust transitions in the effects contol tab by clicking on the transition in the timeline:

Timeline

A rather useful effect is the audio transitions which make audio fading in and out a much more simple task that using the audio mixer.

Now that we've applied our effects/transitions, you'll want to preview your video in the monitor window. Although this is done in real time, you'll need to render the timeline if you've applied few or complicated effects. To do this, move the work bar area to cover the area you want to preview and press enter:

Click and drag the center to move along the timeline or drag the ends to extend. The right hand preview window controls the timeline.

To add a title, select File > New > Title to bring up a basic but useful title editor. by default this will be transparent. Premiere also comes with several presets, which can be accessed by clicking Title > Templates with the Title Designer open. This is also a great way of adding a water mark or logo to your video - simply select Title > Logo > Insert Logo and browse to your image on your hard drive. You can then resize and move the image to postion by first selecting the black arrow tool. Save changes to the title using File > Save and the title will be added to the project window. You can then treat this as a normal video clip and place it on the timeline in a track above your video to overlay the title.

Another useful feature in Premiere Pro is the use of squences. An example of the use of this is appying an effect over mutiple clips. First right click in the project window and select new sequence:

Label the new sequence (eg sequence 02) and click ok. We can now drag and drop our first sequence (sequence 01) from our project window onto the new timeline (sequence 02) we created. This is now a "virtual clip" and any changes to sequence 01 with be reflected in the clip on the new timline. This is useful for applying an effect over accross all clips on a timeline.

Now that we've achieved the basics (captured, added clips to the timeline and used a few effects), let's output our video from the timeline. To start, let's output back to DV tape. Make sure your camcorder is connected, on and set to play with a blank tape, then Select File > Export > Export to Tape. Finally click record and your video on the selected timeline will be output to tape!

You can also output to standard AVI or quicktime files using File > Export Movie, then clicking on settings. I tend to output as DV AVI, then encode using external application to WMV (for the web) or MPEG2 (for DVD). However, Adobe Premiere Pro can do both of these using File > Export > Adobe Media Encoder:

You can change the from WMV to MPEG using the Format drop down box and then change the preset to suit your needs. Note: you can use Premiere to output to DVD, but I would strongly recommend using the media encoder to ouput to MPEG2, then using an external application to create a DVD with menus.

Now that we've finished with our project, let's use the project manager to tidy up any files we no longer need. Select Project > Project Manager from the menu to bring up the following screen:

The first option lets you reduce the size of your project by creating a completely new folder with trimmed clips, the second simply collates all files to a new location to ensure you don't accidently deleted required clips. Click calculate to see how much space you will save! Press OK once ready.