Mike Gondek reviews Adobe Premiere 6.0 Classroom in a Book
A Creative COW "Real World" Book Review
Mike Gondek
Orland Park, IL USA
C2002 Mike Gondek and CreativeCOW.net. All rights reserved.
Article Focus:
CreativeCOW leader, Mike Gondek examines Premiere 6 Classroom in a Book published by Adobe Press. This is the book written by Adobe, that Adobe Certified Training Experts are supposed to use for teaching Premiere. Newcomers can learn a strong foundation or Premiere skills to build upon.
6.5 users
Premiere newcomers will still learn the most important skills for 6.5 except the new title designer, because this book is Premiere 6. Premiere trainers need to modify how to set type in chapter 8 for the new title designer. This is one of the weakest chapters anyhow, and they miss many important issues and oddities in titling using Premiere 6.
What you will learn
Though a training book, it has a good index, so you can quickly find your topic of interest and learn how to use it. Simple charts in lesson 6 explain 3 & 4 point editing very well, and you will learn how to do L-Cuts, extracting, lifting, slip tooling, slide tooling, Keying, A/B Editing, Single Track Editing.
Errors in an Adobe book!
Page 246 has an obvious error explaining the shift tracks tool. The tool can either shift all tracks, or single tracks. The legend is obviously flopped in the book showing the 2 modes of the tool. Try using the tool or looking at the icon, and you will easily figure out that A is B, and B is A.. They don't have spelling errors in the book, but screen-shots are not entirely correct and this was more confusing than an obvious mislabeled tool.
The blatant errors in the Adobe book make them look bad, but the book is well worth the investment of your time if you want to learn Premiere.
I give Premiere 6 CIB 3.5 out of 5 cows.
Examples used in Lessons
From a creative standpoint, half of the lessons are interesting from a creative standpoint. Lesson 5 is a black & white example, but the sound will hold the interest of your class. The 11th lesson uses the most filters such as ripple and making a duotone, but the book concentrates more on non-linear editing, as the effects and transitions are pretty much self explanatory.
Final Thoughts
Though the CIB loses a cow for having so many errors, it will teach you how to use Premiere and I still recommend it to be used in classroom or by an individual trying to learn Premiere. If you are already familiar with Premiere, there will be some material for you in here to learn, but experts will get a good book when Creative Cow's Mike Velte's Special Edition Using Premiere 6.5 becomes available.
