Premiere 6 for Macintosh and Windows (Visual QuickStart Guide)

@SUMMARY= Adobe Premiere gives you all the tools you need to combine video, audio, still images, and text into near-broadcast-quality movies for video, film, multimedia, and the Web. Premiere X for Macintosh and Windows: Visual QuickStart Guide distills this complex software into concise, task-based instructions that will have you up and editing in no time. The book covers all the topics you're likely to encounter during a typical editing project: working with clips, editing the timeline, mixing audio, and creating output and captures. Tasks are broken down into easy-to-follow steps, supplemented with plenty of illustrations and helpful background material. For beginners, it's an indispensable guide to Premiere. And professionals upgrading to Premiere X will find all the information they need on its new features.

Adobe Premiere 6.0 is an impressive upgrade to a venerable digital video editing application, offering more professional features than ever. It can be intimidating for a novice, but Premiere 6: Visual QuickStart Guide for Macintosh and Windows eases the learning curve and helps new users get a handle on how Premiere works and how far it can take them.

Like other books in the Visual QuickStart series, this book is physically smaller and lighter than many computer books, which helps make it friendly and approachable. Every chapter is laid out in a clear two-column format, one for text and one for screen shots, and each tutorial is written in an easy-to-follow step-by-step format. (For a new user learning the basics of a program, there is no better series of books.)

The upgrade from Premiere 4 to Premiere 5 was a major leap, and not without problems. The transition from version 5 to 6 was much easier--the interface hasn't changed much, many features have been fixed, improved, and new features added, and the feel of the program overall is much more solid. Because there are fewer features that are entirely new and more aspects of the program have been improved and made more robust, the book is free to teach about not only the basics of Premiere 6, but also editing (chapters 4 through 7), using the title tool (chapter 12), using effects and motion settings (chapters 9, 11, and 14), and audio mixing (chapter 10).

Premiere 6: Visual QuickStart Guide for Macintosh and Windows makes learning this powerful tool seem more manageable. Hollywood may not be ready for your feature film, but at least you'll be ready for Hollywood. --Mike Caputo