From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2018

An introduction to the interface

From the course: Learning Premiere Elements 2018

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An introduction to the interface

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- [Instructor] Premiere Elements is not one workspace, but actually several, and in this session we're going to take a look at some of the various workspaces, what they do, and then how to customize them for your specific needs. When you first launch the program, you get to the Welcome screen, and the Welcome screen gives you access to the video editor, that is Premiere Elements, where you can select either a new project, open project, or your most recent projects. From this screen you can also launch the Organizer, which is a program for managing the media files on your computer, we'll take a look at it a little later in this course, and if you have Photoshop Elements installed, you can also launch Photoshop Elements from this screen. Let's launch Premiere Elements. The Premiere Elements editor has both an Expert workspace, and a Quick workspace. Now the Quick workspace, which we'll look at a little more in-depth a little later in this course, is a simple workspace for assembling your movie. Here you can do some basic editing, you can assemble your clips, you can trim your clips, but you notice you only have one track of video running through it. You have a track that you can lay titles over the video, you have a track where you can record narration, you have a track where you can lay in music, but it's a fairly simply editing workspace. Now the Expert view is much more like a professional video editor. In other words, it has a timeline in which you can stack many, many tracks of video and audio. By the way, if you hover on any of the seams between two panels, you can drag and make one panel smaller and other larger. I'm doing that here just to show you that you can add up to 99 tracks of video, and 99 tracks of audio. By the way, you notice that by default, some tracks are open, in other words Video 1 and Audio 1 as you can see, you can see the waveform for the audio, and you can see the picture on the video, some are collapsed, you can open them up like this, just by clicking on the little toggle, and you'll be able to see the tracks completely, but sometimes to save vertical space, you keep them collapsed. Widen that back out again. So you can do things. Many more things, many more professional things, if you layer audio and video tracks on top of each other. We're going to spend most of our time here in the program in the Expert workspace, because it's the more powerful of the two. Most of the tools for the program, most of the tools we'll be using, are accessible via the toolbar on the right-hand side of the program, running along the side. And let me just select a clip on the timeline, because otherwise you won't be able to see some of these tools, but if we click on some of the tools, you'll see we have the option to make adjustments to our video and our audio. We have a number of tools here, both video and audio tools. We'll explore these in-depth throughout this course. We have a list of many, many, many video and audio effects. We have an Applied Effects panel, where we can make adjustments to those effects, and create keyframed animations. We have many, many, many transitions. Title templates. Custom music tracks. And even hundreds of pieces of clip art we can use in our movies. The program even includes tools here for creating movie menus for your DVDs. Now if you have a dual monitor, that's two monitors on your computer system, you can go over here to Window and select Dual Monitor Workspace. That breaks the timeline off into a separate panel. It doesn't break any of the other pieces off, so you can't separate it into a number of floating windows, however it separates the timeline so you can widen the timeline on one monitor, and you can have all of the other tools on your second monitor. To restore to the single-piece workspace, you simply go up to the Window menu, and select Restore Workspace, and it becomes one panel again. So as you can see, the Premiere Elements interface is designed to be clean and uncluttered. Whether you're working on a big production, or 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 that job built right into the program. And the tools that you need are usually only a click or two away.

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