Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Classroom in a Book at Dominant Systems Book Store

Those creative professionals seeking the fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 choose Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 Classroom in a Book from the Adobe Creative Team at Adobe Press.

The 22 project-based lessons in this book show readers step-by-step the key techniques for working in Premiere Pro CS5. Readers learn the basics on things like using audio, creating transitions, producing titles, and adding effects. Once they have the basics down, they'll learn how to take their projects further by sweetening and mixing sound, compositing the footage, adjusting color, authoring DVDs, and much more.

This completely revised CS5 edition covers new features such as Ultra, the new high-performance keyer. New workflows for creative collaboration are also explored, from the script all the way to the screen using Adobe Story, OnLocation, Speech Search, and other Adobe tools that are right at users' fingertips. Best of all, the companion DVD includes lesson files so readers can work step-by-step along with the book.

Customer Reviews & Comments
I've used Final Cut Pro and Final Cut Express for several years now, and while I can't claim to be an expert I know them fairly well. I decided to learn Premiere Pro as an alternative - primarily because you can edit natively with several formats that Final Cut requires you to convert before editing. Since then, and after working through this book and getting to know how it works and what it can do, I've decided to stick with Premiere Pro for most of my editing projects because I find it much easier to work with for a number of advanced editing problems. This book (which is really the only book available that focuses on teaching how to use Premiere Pro CS5 ) is very clear and straightforward. It would be helpful both for experienced editors ready to try out Premiere Pro (who might decide to skim through a few of the chapters on basics, that are fairly similar to how things work on other editing platforms), and also for those just starting out. This isn't really an introduction to editing, per se - though the authors do include some scattered but helpful advice for beginners. (One of the best and most accessible general introductions to editing principles that is platform neutral is Grammar of the Edit). This book is more an introduction to the range of features available in Premiere Pro CS5 - and it's a pretty impressive range of features, and they are clearly outlined here. The basic approach of this book - like all of the books in the Classroom in a Book series - is to lead you through a series of exercises that show you what's possible with the program. There's not a lot of explanation, but the advantage of this approach is that you get a fairly quick hands-on introduction to the range of what's possible. (I own and have worked through a few of the other books in the series, and found that apart from a few issues mentioned below this was the clearest and easiest to follow - and gave me the quickest introduction to the program.) The lessons are easy to follow. In each case there is a quick introduction to the basic concepts of the lesson, then there are several hands-on tutorials, that make use of project and asset files on the included CD to lead the reader through a number of practical applications of the concepts. To get the most out of this book, you do need to have Premiere Pro installed and download the files on the CD and follow along. For the most part that's easy, and the CD works fine both for PC and Mac users (a few caveats below). Lessons start with the basics, getting used to the interface and how to modify it for different kinds of projects and individualize it for personal tastes. It covers importing and managing assets, both from tapes and tapeless formats. Then cutting and fine tuning an edit, adding transitions, creating and animating titles, adding effects, applying motion and slow and fast motion, and messing with sound and compositing and color correcting. It also shows how to use Premiere in conjunction with other CS5 programs, like Soundbooth, OnLocation, Photoshop, After Effects and Encore, and how to export files and author dvd and Blu-Ray discs. Each lesson is clear and straightforward, and they do a good job with starting out basic and moving forward to show just enough that you can see what could be done with each technique. Most lessons have "before" and "after" timelines so you can see what you were supposed to do and reverse engineer it for guidance in case you didn't follow instructions exactly. I did notice a few problems, easy to work around, but still problems that could have been fixed. While it claims to be applicable both for Macs and PCs, it does seem that it was written by a PC user, and occasionally things they suggest aren't possible on a Mac or work differently on a Mac. In one lesson they asked me to upload an .avi file - which is a Windows format and won't play on Macs without special codecs. In the case of this one, even though I can usually play .avi files on my Mac, this one wouldn't play. It turns out that I had a codec installed (3divx) that interfered with playback of this file - and I only figured that out after a search on Adobe's help website which revealed that a few people had the same problem with the previous edition of this book, and an author of that edition was part of that conversation. It would have been nice if they'd included a footnote explaining that the same problem was possible for users of this one. There were a few other issues like that. For example, there are effects that don't exist on the Mac version of Premiere Pro but do for the Windows/PC version. Sometimes the book mentions this, and sometimes it doesn't - e.g. they mention that the "Camera View" effect doesn't exist for Macs, but not that the "Cross Zoom" is also missing on the Mac edition. So, when, in the course of a lesson they asked me to apply a "Cross Zoom" it took me several minutes before I remembered reading somewhere that some of the effects don't exist on the Mac version, and realized that this must be one of them. In a couple of places they referred to something that sounded like it might have been in the previous edition - e.g. they mention a "bike sound" overlapping with an interview in chapter 12, where it's really the sound of a "medieval hero" threatening a sorcerer. I'm guessing the example that came with this chapter in the previous edition of the book wasn't from a fantasy realm, and they didn't adjust this minor reference to it. All of these issues are fairly minor - and there are easy workarounds for them - but I thought I'd mention them here in hopes of being helpful for Mac users who pick up this book and run into similar issues or confusions. Overall, this is an excellent intro, that I found to be quite useful. After working through its various lessons, I feel as confident working with Premiere Pro as I ever did with Final Cut. In fact, more so, because there are some very handy features (like the multi-camera editing feature) that are easier to use than anything I've seen on Final Cut (I have FCE 4 and have an older version of Final Cut Pro Studio - which I haven't upgraded to the latest, so there might be features I'm not aware of there). Additionally, working through this book helped clarify in my mind some concepts I learned a long time ago but that I haven't really used very often - for example I've always been confused by the differences between the ripple, roll, slip and slide tools, and so tend just to fine tune my cuts with the razor (which is precise but not very efficient). After working through this the differences are clear, and I'll use those tools much more often. I'm also glad to have worked through the audio chapters, because I tend to treat audio just like video, and here they make clear that with Premiere it can be treated with greater finesse - especially with Soundbooth, which is a pretty astonishing tool, as illustrated by one of the projects in this book that has you eliminating hum and even removing a phone ring from a voice clip. Highly recommended guide for those starting out editing on Premiere, or for those who want to switch over or are upgrading from an older version.

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