Setting Preferences

Setting Preferences

As is true for most other complex software, Premiere Elements has a litany of preferences you can set to optimize your work with the program. To access the Preferences window, choose Edit, Preferences , and then choose the category of preferences with which you want to work. If you don't know where to start, click the General category; you can easily access any category after the Preferences window is open by clicking the category name in the list on the left side of the Preferences window.

Open the Preferences window and select a category by making a selection from the Edit menu.

Using the History Panel

One of the great features in Premiere Elements is the History panel. This is where a complete history of your project is kept. As you add media, drop items on the Timeline , add effects, add transitions, and make edits, the History panel keeps track of all these activities. You can revert back to any point in time just by clicking on that point in the History panel. As you work through your project, keep an eye on the History panel to see that everything you do is recorded there. Whereas the Undo and Redo buttons on the taskbar take you forward or backward through the project history one step at a time, the History panel allows you to jump backward and forward in leaps. By clicking a history item early in the project, you can revert back to what everything looked like at that point; then you can jump forward in time again. You also have the ability to delete a history item and clear the history by right-clicking the History panel or by clicking the More button in the panel's title bar.

The History panel.

Understanding the DV-AVI Workflow

When working with Premiere Elements, as with any video-editing software, it's important to understand the difference between digital and analog video. In simple terms, it's the difference between a clock and a digital watch or between a record album and a CD.

In the old days (actually more like 10 years ago), consumer camcorders recorded video the way tape recorders record sound. Impulses of light and sound were translated into electronic pulses that were recorded magnetically onto a moving tape. Naturally, the quality of those pulses was limited by the camera's optics, the quality of the recording head, and the quality of tape. But the biggest liability was that every time a copy was made of the video, it was merely an analog attempt to reproduce an analog signal. With each copy, the quality of the recording diminished. Every generation of the video was a continually degraded approximation of the generation before.

Digital video was a major step forward for video quality. Rather than simply capturing electronic impulses of light and sound, digital video takes approximately 25 or 30 snapshots of more than 450,000 pixels of light and thousands of samplings of sound every second and records them not as electronic pulses but as binary codeexactly the same binary code your computer uses. The quality of this data is limited only by the camera's light and sound sensors. More importantly, when a copy is made, rather than simply approximating the original recording, the data itself is transferred from one source to anothermeaning that each copy of the digital data is identical to the original recording!

KEY TERMS

Digital video Also called DV, it is video that records sound and motion as computer data, or chains of 1s and 0s.

Pixel The basic building block of digital images. Although they seem to be painted with continuous color , digital imageson television, on your computer, or in your digital cameraare actually composed of tiny rectangles (pixels) of various settings of red, green, and blue color. In most cases, pixels are so small that they blend into a smooth flow of color. However, when an image is stretched beyond its intended resolution, or over-rezzed , the pixels become visible, and the image appears jagged or pixelated .