From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2021

An introduction to the interface

From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2021

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An introduction to the interface

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- [Instructor] Premiere Elements includes a number of tools and workspaces for editing your video in. And in this session, I just want to give you an overview of the program, we're going to explore the various workspaces, we're going to look at where the tools are, and then I'm going to show you some ways to customize the interface for your specific needs. And then later in the course, we're going to take a look at each of these workspaces in greater detail. When you first launch the program, you launch into this welcome screen officially known as the elements hub. We're going to take a look at the elements hub in another one of our videos in this course. But from the elements hub, we can of course launch the photo editor, which is Photoshop Elements, the organizer, which is the file management tool we'll look at later in this course, and the video editor. So let's launch Premiere Elements. In expert view, Premiere Elements resembles a professional video editor. It's simplified, a lot of things are kind of packed away until you click on them and open them up. But you can combined multi tracks of video and audio. As opposed to the Expert workspace, there's a quick view workspace. And this is a simple workspace for editing your video. It's only got one track of video and audio, but you can add music to it and you can add titles to your video. So quick assembly for simple videos, we're going to spend most of our course here in expert mode, or expert view. Guided edits is a library of step by step edits that take you through creating a number of special effects. Along the right hand side of the program, you'll see the toolbar. This is where most of the tools that you're going to use to edit your video are. And I'm just going to select a clip because you have to have a clip selected to see some of these options. But alongside here we can make adjustments to the video, fix and correct color. We have tools for everything from creating motion tracking and timeshift effects, to creating things like movie menus for our DVDs. There is a huge library of special effects in a number of categories. A large library of transitions, title templates, both animated motion titles and traditional titles. Scores which is a workspace for generating custom music clips for your movies, and even a huge library of over 350 graphics. Great, many of these are animated. Speech bubbles and thought bubbles, graphics that you can use to overlay your videos. There are also options up here for creating a video story and instant movie in a video collage, and tools for ultimately outputting and sharing your movies. Now this workspace can be customized if you just grab on any of the seams here, for instance, as seam between the timeline and the monitor panel. If I just hover there you see I get that little two-headed arrow, I can drag on that scene and make for instance the timeline larger or smaller. I can toggle, open or closed some of these tracks here to save myself some vertical space. And some of the panels like the project assets panel where all of our media are stored as we create our movie can be custom sized, also by dragging on the corners here. If you've got a dual monitor system to computer monitors, you can also go up here to the Window menu and select the option for dual monitor workspace. This breaks the program in 1/2, you have a floating timeline, which you can move to a second monitor. And then all of the other panels remain together here in the main interface. You can't break them off into individual floating panels as you can with some programs. But you can separate the timeline, and move that to a separate monitor where you can stretch it out and have room to stack several video and audio tracks on top of each other. To restore the workspace, just go up to the Window menu and select restore. So Premiere Elements, the interface is designed to be kind of clean and uncluttered. And whether you're working on a big production or just a quick movie for YouTube, whether you're assembling your video, designing a title sequence or creating a DVD menu structure, there's a custom workspace for doing the job. And the tools you need to do practically any of those things are usually only a clicker tool away.

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