Premiere® Elements 8 For Dummies®

Chapter 7. Making Movies with the Timeline

In This Chapter

• Doing simple edits by using the Sceneline

• Adding audio and video tracks to the Timeline

• Editing clips into the Timeline

• Moving clips and deleting blank spaces in the Timeline

• Splitting clips

• Creating DVD chapter references and other markers

• Going back in time and undoing mistakes

Consider all the tools of the trade for a painter: brushes, scrapers, a palette, containers of paint, and cleaning supplies. All these tools are necessary, but ultimately the painter's entire work centers around the canvas, where the tools are put to use to create a work of art.

The Timeline is your canvas in Premiere Elements. The other parts of Premiere Elements — the Task pane, the Monitor, the Capture window, and others — all serve crucial purposes, and that purpose is to put together movies in the Timeline. This chapter shows you how to turn your clips into movies worth watching, using the Premiere Elements Timeline. Here I show you how to insert clips in the Timeline, move clips around and modify them, and how to insert DVD chapter references and other markers in the Timeline. I also show you how to undo mistakes that you make in the Timeline — don't feel bad; it happens to all of us — or even revert to previous versions of a project.

The Premiere Elements Timeline is indeed a powerful canvas, but sometimes you may find that you don't need all that power. If you just want to throw some clips together and output a basic movie fast, Premiere Elements ...