You'll find several guides to Premier in your local bookshop, but these aren't strictly necessary for the beginner. As with many windows programs the help files are extensive: once you've learned the basics, the rest will come with practice. The following guide is more than enough to get you up and running, and best of all, I don't charge! Our goal is to capture video footage, edit a video consisting of two scenes with a transition, add a soundtrack, then export the finished movie. I don't claim to give an in-depth workshop/guide, but this will give you all the basic tools needed to create your home movie.

Getting Started: Before we can start, ensure the camera is connected to the PC. Install all the relevant drivers that came with your camera or video card following the manufacturers instructions. If you're using a FireWire enabled camera under windows XP, the installation will be automatic

You'll have to reboot once Premier is installed but once opened you should be presented with the following screen:

Choose single track editing even if you are a beginner: despite what it says, it's far less complicated than A/B editing. Once chosen you should never be asked again. The following screen will be the Project Settings wizard. It's not important what we choose here as we'll only be using Adobe to edit and not encode the video. Choose the option that most closely resembles your camera input.

Rewind the tape to the beginning and press play in the open window. You should see the video playing. Queue the tape to where you want to start recording and press the round red button to start. When you've reached the end of the scene, press the square stop button and a save-as dialogue window will pop up. Enter a file name (and a comment if you wish) then click OK. The file is now saved in C:\lasvegas (or wherever you chose above). Repeat this process until you have all the material you want on your hard drive. Close the window and return to the project. Turn off the video camera.

It's worth pointing out at this point that you should always keep the recorded video on your hard drive until you've exported the finished movie. When a Premier project is saved, the project refers to ins and out points of the video stored on your hard drive. Deleting the video files will effectively delete your project!

Video Editing: Let's take this opportunity to save our project. Click File > Save as, and browse to the same folder as your video clips. Again call it something recognisable. The next time we open Premier and want to open the project select File > Open Recent Project, and the project should be listed.

The Project window should display a list of all our recorded clips. I assume that you have a story board or at least an idea of how the video will progress. I can't help you with this! To start editing, drop one of the items from the project window into the "source" window of the "monitor window":

To drop an item into the window, select it and drag it over (the mouse cursor will turn into a fist). Now we can trim the video. Play it by pressing the play button. As the video plays, a moving bar shows its progress. You can slide this bar backwards and forwards to reach a desired portion, and move the video frame by frame by using the two buttons to the left of the stop button. Once you have decided upon you want the video to start (the inpoint) click on the "Mark In" button. This is the fourth button from the right on the bottom row of buttons. Then slide the progress bar to where you want the clip to finish and mark this with the "Mark Out" button (to the right of the Mark In button). Once done, your selected area will be highlighted in green. We can the move this section to the timeline window by clicking into the Monitor window and holding the mouse button down as you drag is accross to the window to the right (the "program" window). Notice that as you do this, a box appears in the "Timeline" window with the original file name as a label. We can now preview our edited clip by pressing play in the Program window.

We could also have dropped our video straight into the timeline. We can do this now by using a black video as an example. You may wan to start your video with a blank portion at the start (if you are recording to VHS for example). In this case select File > New > Black Video from the menu. A file named "black video" will appear in our Project window. We want our video to start with this file, so select the clip and drag it down into the Timeline window. If you place the video over the start of the first box that we previously dropped here, a black arrow will appear. Drop the item, and the video will be shift over. You can insert a file like this anywhere on the timeline.

If you move your cursor down to the time line window then click in the section that looks like a ruler, a progress bar will appear. Sliding this bar along previews the movie in the Program window. This also acts as a marker for where you want to drop your video. So lets position this bar at the end of our first clip. Select the your second clip from the Project window and drop it into the monitor window as before. Trim the clip and drop the trimmed video into either the program window ir directly into the timeline.

Timeline editing: We should now have a blank video, then two "scenes" in the timeline. We can edit these clips directly on the timeline if we are not happy with the results. To cut a portion of video move the progress bar to the desired frame and right click on it: select "razor at edit line". Now move the progress bar to along and repeat the process. You should now have a new "portion" of video. Right click on this and select "Ripple Delete" to erase this from the timeline. We can also change the duration of a clip by placing the cursor at either an in or out point, left clicking and sliding it along. Or right clicking on the clip, selecting duration and adding a new value. We can also change the speed of a clip by right clicking and selecting speed.

Adding transitions: You may wish to add a transition between your clips. First lets fade in from the black video at the start into our first clip. 

Double click on dissolve in the transitions menu and then drag the "cross disolve" icon over to the timeline. Drop the transition at the point where the black video and the first clip meet. We can now preview our transition. Double click on the uppermost part of the timeline, above the ruler. It should now turn yellow.

You can slide this bar along or move the in and out points by moving the white markers. Position the bar so that it extends either side of our transition, right click on it and select preview. We should now see a preview in the monitor window.

Experiment with the transitions, but I always feel that the cross dislove works best in most situations. Adobe is a powerful program and ships with a multitude of transitions; although they are powerful tools, they can look decidedly unprofessional if over-used. The overuse of transitions can look just as bad as no transitions whatsoever. Again, experimentation is the key, but I tend to avoid transitions when cutting within scenes, or when cutting to another scene with a lot of motion. There's no hard and fast rules, and it all boils down to personal preference really. Next time you watch TV or a film, consider how they make use of transitions... it may give you a few ideas.

Adding Layers: Our home movie is starting to take shape, and you may wish to add a soundtrack and tittles. With Premier, this couldn't be easier. Let's start with adding a title.

Select File > New > Title from the menu and the title window will appear. Let's say that we want to enter a caption saying "our holiday" that appears over the top of the first clip for a few seconds. Select the text tool button (the button marked T) and then click into the window next to it to start typing your text:

Now we need to make the background transparent. Click on the triangle in the opacity box and drag the indicator along to the desired level. Save the title by clicking File > save as and naming the file. The file should then appear in the Project Window. Finally drag this file into the timeline and drop it into the Video 2 track above the clip. Tracks above Video 1 are "superimpose layers".

You may also wish to add an additional soundtrack and/or delete the original soundtrack. To delete the original soundtrack, right click on the video in the timeline and select "unlink video and audio". Now you can select the audio track and delete it.

If you have selection of mp3s on your hard drive, adding them to the video couldn't be easier. Select File > Import > File from the menu and browse to the mp3 you want. It will then appear in the Project window and can be edited in exactly the same way as the video clips. Drop the desired portion into the Audio 2 layer and treat as you would a video layer above (moving the in and out point, razoring, sliding etc).

This is the end of today's lesson as we have now accomplished what we set out to do. All that remains is to encode the video to our desired output file (mpeg, avi, etc). This is detailed under the encoding section...