Adobe Premiere Pro: Complete Course

Rating:
Summary: This may not be the book for you.
Review: At first glance the book looked pretty well written but you can't judge until you work through the tutorials. After going through the first few of them I decided to switch to another book due to the following problems.

The projects do not load correctly from the CD since some of the media files are in the wrong place and there are mistakes in the tutorials as well. The most recent mistake was when a clip was moved out of the way on one page since it was not to be used until later, and then referred to on the next page as though it was not moved. Not only that, the space on the timeline where it was suposed to be was occupied by another clip.

It is discouraging to follow a tutorial for quite a while only to get lost. I tried it several times to make sure it wasn't I who was the problem.

The book does contain some fine examples including the Confidence Builder at the beginning but more time should have been taken to test all of the tutorials.

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Tool
Review: I found this book to be better than any others that I have tried. The technique of providing step-by-step, numbered instructions and showing the relevent screen-shots (also numbered) so that you can see on the page what you should see on your screen is very much like having a one-on-one tutor.
For anyone just learning the product, this book is a good as it gets.

Rating:
Summary: Best I tried
Review: I purchased both Adobe's Classroom in a Book and this one. By far, this is the best book for someone getting started with what is a high learning curve piece of software. Based solely on this book, I was able to produce a 28 minutes promotional video for a group trip to Portugal.

Once having finished this book, it would then be worthwhile to go ahead an work with Adobe's Classroom in a Book. I certain do not recommend the CIB as the place to start.

Working through this book was a pleasure. I say that as a retired teacher who during my career authored three marketing textbooks. If you are getting started with Premiere Pro--this is the place to start.

Rating:
Summary: A good idea, but sloppy implementation
Review: The idea is good; teach the use of the functional capabilities of Premiere Pro for artistic expression; the execution is lamentable, starting with the initial creation of a project, where apparently the author had a beta test product which doesn't correspond to the final release.
If you're giving step-by-step instructions, then get them right; as it is, the projects implemented by the student get way out of sync with the baseline projects provided on the CD-ROM (which doesn't install correctly).

Jan 31, 2005

I reread the book in case I had been unjust in my original review. I entirely confirm what I said, but the problem is deeper than the fact that the examples are inaccurate; books with examples which don't work can force you into a more active state of mind than the somnolent passivity they tend to induce, and the examples finish up working, even if they often don't illustrate anything very important.
If you wish to use Premiere Pro well you have to understand it; that, for instance, you can edit audio for a complete track, or for an individual clip; nowhere is this explicit, and the level of presentation (click here, click there, press Control D, etc etc etc) tends to obscure it.
Sometimes I have the impression that the author doesn't understand the concepts; with numbering of frames in a clip starting at zero, the duration is the number of the last frame + 1, right ? Try reading the 4-color lavishly-illustrated sidebar on page 67, with excursions into whether the duration occurs before or after the frame is played and other irrelevant considerations; you end up doubting your intuition.
Same thing for the Clip Editing Options on page 91, where the illustrations simply obscure the issue.
At $45 list price the publisher should edit the book and check the examples.
One final point; only someone who hasn't read the book can give it 5 stars. There should be an explicit obligation to read in detail at least half a book before submitting a review.