Premiere® Elements 8 For Dummies®

Chapter 1. Feeling at Home with Premiere Elements

In This Chapter

• Introducing Adobe Premiere Elements

• Taking the grand tour

• Making your first movie

Home movies have been around for more than half a century. But until recently there wasn't much you could do with home movies except pop a tape in your VCR (or feed film into your projector) and watch raw, unedited footage. Movie editing was reserved for elite professionals with access to expensive studio hardware. But a revolution has taken place in recent years, a revolution that is putting the moviemaking arts within reach of almost anyone. The revolution has occurred in three phases:

1. Mega-powerful computers with huge hard drives have become both available and downright affordable. This has changed the rules of video editing, because almost any modern PC can edit video.

2. Affordable digital camcorders came onto the market, making it easy for anyone to collect high-quality video. New high definition (HD) camcorders deliver video quality that even the pros could only dream about just a few years ago.

3. High-end video-editing programs like Adobe Premiere Pro and Apple Final Cut Pro brought pro-caliber video editing to desktop computers, and simpler programs like Apple iMovie and Windows Movie Maker made editing software affordable.

I hesitate to call Adobe Premiere Elements the next step in the video-editing revolution, but it's definitely a step forward. Premiere Elements delivers about 90 percent of the power of high-end programs like Adobe Premiere ...