Creative Cloud Journey: Adobe Premiere Pro

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As I ease you all back into my continued adventures through Adobe’s Creative Cloud, I’d like to make a brief detour
to talk about my map: Lynda.com, which houses thousands of video courses to help you develop skills, both
professional and otherwise. My purposes here are to professionally develop by making myself a more well-
rounded team member. But if you’re looking for some professional development, especially in the hopes of Deleted: ,
transitioning to a new role, Lynda.com is a great place to start looking. I elected to plan my own project as I went Deleted: but
through the course.

This turned out to be such a good idea, I’d recommend it to anyone else planning to learn any Adobe product: have
a project you’d like to do in mind as you begin. Adobe products are so robust, you can and will get lost just rolling
through features. Starting with a final product in mind led me to continually ask, “Can I do this in Premiere?” and Deleted: lead
the answer was inevitably, “Yes, and . . .” Deleted: …

To digress for a moment, know this about working with Adobe products: they are beasts, and your machine will
tell you so. While Premiere Pro is running, the fan in my MacBook quickly starts sounding like a jet engine. I can Deleted: ,
watch the battery drain, and while it’s a hyperbole to say it gets hot enough to burn, it’s not much of a hyperbole.
That’s fine, though, because using Premiere Pro with just a laptop screen is far less than ideal.

Premiere Pro utilizes a lot of panels, panels within panels even, depending on what you’re trying to do. It’s entirely
possible that you might have two separate videos on the screen at once, with all sorts of tiny, nuanced controls in
between, so you will need screen space as you learn. Away from my second monitor, I spent far too much time
trying and failing to grab the right edge of a panel in order to shrink it. Spare yourself the frustration.

Anyway—my project. Most Adobe products devote significant space to storage and organization, but given all the Deleted: ,
assets and sequences that go into a video, this is especially true of Premiere Pro, which lets you structure entire file
systems within it so you can keep track of all your assets. And setting things in order with Premiere Pro
emphasized to me that I needed to set them in order outside it as well. I needed to capture footage, plan shots,
record audio, the whole kit and nine yards, and in the process, I expanded my learning experience significantly. Deleted: 9

I also made use of a storyboard template that a colleague created with InDesign, which is my excuse to explain
some of the things you can do with that program. Working in InDesign enabled this colleague to set up the template Deleted: let
in such a way that the text fields cascaded to each other. We could copy entire scripts and then manipulate them Deleted: ,
within InDesign to pair specific lines with specific images. It’s quite cool and saves a great deal of time. It proved Deleted: so that we
crucial in identifying footage I still needed to meet my precious vision.
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Premiere Pro is based around building dubbed sequences, and building is simply a matter of dropping your clips
and footage in the right order. The interface looks imposing, but in actual use, it turns out to be very elegant. Users Deleted: ,
with all their clips perfectly prepared in advance could create a sequence as fast as their mouse could drag the Deleted: and
footage over. I am not that person. In fact, I’ve had to rerecord portions of audio. But I am proceeding apace, Deleted: what are
working my way through the Lynda.com course, backtracking, and reviewing as necessary to remind myself. I’m Deleted: A person
nowhere close to being done, so I can’t share the results. There is some language in the project that isn’t
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appropriate to the workplace anyway. The skills I’m building, though, very much are.
Deleted: in