Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is a real-time, timeline-based video editing software application. It has gained acceptance within the film and video industry and has been used in part in such films as Dust to Glory by Dana Brown and Superman Returns for the video capture process and so, as the name implies, it is a professional-level editing package.

In Premier Pro CS3 Essential Training, you will learn about each aspect of Premier Pro CS3, as well as standard film and video editing techniques. Covered here is how to create Web video, record directly to disc with OnLocation, key with Ultra, browse files with Bridge, export to mobile devices with Device Central, and author professional DVDs with Encore (all of these products are included with Premier Pro CS3; Ultra is available in Production Premium). Your trainer for this library is Chad Perkins, who is an Adobe Certified Video Specialist. This library is divided into 15 lessons and runs 6.5 hours.

Lesson 1, "Introduction" begins with describing what Premier Pro is, why you should use it, a brief welcome to Mac users since once again it is back on the Mac platform, and you will also find out what is new with the CS3 version. One other thing that is noted here is that the movies that you will be working with from the example files are from the public domain; i.e., movies whose copyrights have expired. One of those is the horror classic movie Night of the Living Dead. That’s right, you will get to work with clips from this and other real movies.

Lesson 2, "Getting Started with Premier Pro Projects" begins by setting you up with a basic summary of the entire Premier workflow. This is primarily to get used to your new environment. Here you will learn how to begin a project, walk through and understand the interface, customize your workspace and set up your preferences.

Lesson 3, "Importing and Organizing Footage" starts you off by showing you how to get all of your clips and footage into where Premier Pro can get to it and you can begin to put it together. Here you will see how to import, sort and organize files, storyboard your film, work with video layers and sequences, navigate the timeline, and work with the history panel and shortcuts.

Lesson 4, "Basic Editing" examines the fundamentals of video editing, the chopping up and getting into a usable form. This lesson works with the techniques of trim, overlay, and insert edits. You will see how to use the razor tool, how to replace clips, and work with ripple edit and ripple delete.