Premiere Elements 8: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Edit Your Movie

Now that you’ve imported, organized, and tagged your clips, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and make something out of the bits and pieces of your project. Video editing is similar to other creative activities, like painting or playwriting. Every editor has his own technique. Along the way, you learn a craftsman’s tricks of the trade, and, more important, you learn what techniques work for you. At this point, the basic steps include reviewing and selecting clips, trimming them down to just the right frames, and arranging them to tell a story.

In this chapter, you’ll start to develop your editing style. For some projects, you may lean more toward an automated, quick-and-easy approach. You’ll be interested in Premiere’s InstantMovie and Smart Trim features and how you can take advantage of the information Premiere stores in smart tags. For other projects, you may choose a more meticulous, handcrafted approach, where you edit each audio and sound clip with a keen eye.

In either case, you need to know editing tools like the sceneline, timeline, the Monitor window, the Project View, and the Preview window.

Choose Your Editing Style

Premiere is a versatile tool. You can use its automated editing features, letting Premiere make a lot of decisions for you, or you can assemble your movie and fine-tune each clip and transition just as a Hollywood film editor would. The approach you choose depends on the project, your sensibilities, your patience, and the amount of ...