The Welcome Screen

This course was created based on Premiere Elements 8, but 95% of it can be understood if you have Premiere Elements 7, or even Premiere Elements 4.

After starting Adobe Premiere Elements 8, we get to see the following Welcome screen.
On the left, we have three options:

1. Organize
2. New Project
3. Open Project

The first option “Organize” opens the “Elements Organizer” that we can use to take pictures and import videos, organize them, and add tags. This will be familiar for those of you who have also worked with Photoshop Elements. For those who do not know, please refer Lesson 3 t / m Lesson 5 of the Photoshop elements course.

With the “New Project” option, we start a new project, (obviously).
And the third option which is “Open Project”, we open a  project that was saved earlier.

On the right, we find several buttons that makes us more explanations about certain options in Premiere Elements. Frankly, I think they are not very useful.

In the upper right corner, we have two buttons. The one on the right is to close the welcome window, and the left button opens a dialog box with three options that are all quite clear.

We haven’t done anything so far, so we click the “New Project” button.
This opens a dialog box where we enter the name of our project in the box on top, or rather, give the file a name.
In the second box, “Save in:”, select a folder in which you want to save this project. Just click the “Browse” button and navigate to the folder in which you want to save the new project.
Click the OK button when you’re done.

When we start a new project, Premiere Elements fits a preset date to this project. A setting for a project is a collection of pre-configured project settings such as frame rate, frame rate and frame size.
Premiere will use the standard settings that were set during the installation of Premiere Elements.
You can still change this by clicking on the “Change Settings” button.
This opens a dialog box with a number of available settings.

Attention! 

You can change the setting of a project but it does not change after you’ve started the project.

 

The Stage:

On top, we find the application menu bar and the work area below it.
In the menu we find various command buttons.
Clicking on one of these buttons opens a drop-down menu with more commands.
When we move the mouse pointer over a command a black arrow appears behind it, and a submenu is opened. Most of these command buttons are found in the Task pane of the Stage.

The work area is divided into three parts.
On the left pane we have the Monitor (1), we have the Task pane on the right (2) and at the bottom, we find the “Project” (3).
We use “Monitor” pane to perform various tasks. For example, we collect files and preview movies, trim and split clips and apply other effects.
The “Tasks” pane has 4 main menus, “Organize”, “Edit” “Slide Menus” and “Share”.
We use the “Tasks” pane for adding and organizing media, using and adapting effects and transitions.
The “Project” pane has 2 tabs, the Timeline and Scene Line.
In the Timeline and Sceneline we add the various media together and we can edit these clips.

In the next lesson, I will try to explain most of these options and the various sub-options.
When you have finished going through all the lessons, I expect that you’ll be as proficient as Spielberg.

 

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