Learning Premier Pro

Most of this past week has been spent either catching up on lost class time (due to snow)or working through the Premier Pro tutorials. The software is pretty amazing, and I know I am already well past the point where I will be using it in the fellowship, but I am having such fun learning how to use it I am hesitant to give up on it. I am using the Adobe Classroom in a Book series to learn the nuances of Premier Pro CS4 and I am about half-way through the book right now. This week I learned about the way to make titles for videos, and get them to scroll up the screen or across. I also learned how to apply more than 140 special effects. One of the coolest (although I know I will never use it) is when a video is entirely in black and white except for one color (typically the color of the product being sold). I have always thought that was a wonderful effect for getting people to focus on what you want them to see, and it turns our Premier Pro can do that effect. All I have to do is take the video I am working with, sample the color I want to keep (with a little eyedropper tool) and then set the tolerance for how close something has to be to that color before it turns into black and white. It is so COOL!!

I also learned this week about keyframes (which I already know a lot about from Flash) that allow me to apply a special effect over a certain amount of time. For example, if I want to slide a logo into the corner of the screen I can use keyframes to control the motion, size, and rotation of the logo as it appears and disappears over top of the video. This is similar to the advertisements that so many of the TV stations use to promote other shows in the middle of the show you are watching. I personally hate those little bugs (as they are called) but I was thinking I can use the effect to slide an image or screen shot onto the stage if I happen to be talking about one particular aspect of a Word or Excel. It is probably a lot easier to show the students what a 3-d chart looks like in Excel than try to explain it to them.

Even though I know I will not be using many of the effects in the tutorials (like multi camera action shots) just working through them is giving me ideas of what I can do with the videos that I do eventually create. Now the hard part is knowing when to put aside the books and get to actually making the movies (and building the rest of the site as well). I am planning on doing a lot of construction of the site during spring break since I will be in town and my wife has to work four of those five days. I'm guessing the videos will take longer so I will likely put those off until after I have most of the other parts built. That way I know how much time I have to devote to the videos versus the rest of the work of getting ready for a new semester.

John