Premiere® Elements 8 For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Capturing and Organizing Your Media

In This Chapter

• Capturing video to edit

• Importing video, audio, and other media

• Organizing your multimedia files

If you have a word processing program like Microsoft Word, you simply launch the program and start typing to compose something new. Likewise, you can open most graphics programs and start drawing freehand to create a new picture. But Adobe Premiere Elements is different, because you can't just open the program and create a movie from nothing. To really put Premiere Elements to use, you must capture video from your camcorder and import other kinds of media such as music and photos.

This chapter guides you through the process of capturing audio and video, using Premiere Elements, whether you're capturing video from your digital camcorder or importing it from another source. This chapter also shows you how to organize your media. Organization becomes increasingly important as you build a collection of dozens or even hundreds of video clips, audio clips, still images, and more.

Capturing Video

Before you can make movies in Premiere Elements, you have to capture or import video from your camcorder. What's the difference between capturing and importing video? They're slightly different processes that depend on the type of camera you have:

• Capture: Capturing is what police do to fugitives from justice. It's also what you do with video that has been recorded onto a tape. Premiere Elements can capture video from DV camcorders that use MiniDV ...