Chapter 2. Source Material: Getting It into Premiere

This is where it all begins. If you can't get your audio, video, graphics, and other source material into Premiere, it will be an awfully quick edit session. You can pack up and go home now. This chapter tries to help make sure that this scenario doesn't happen to you. Bringing source material into Premiere is fairly easy. There are several different ways to start getting your source materials into the system. It just depends on what type of source material you want to use and what type of hardware you have in your system. Also, several factors determine the quality of your final image when you output from Premiere. Because you cannot increase the quality of your image without introducing image artifacts, your source files must be of the highest quality your system allows. Therefore, the settings you select during the digitizing process are the overall deciding factors. The controls you have available on your system partially depend on the type of video and audio capture card installed in your computer. These controls are designed to be integrated within Premiere (because many video capture cards come bundled with a copy of Premiere). I'll cover several different ways that video editors get their source material into Premiere.