A tour of the interface

In this movie we are going to take a quick look at the interface for Adobe Premiere Pro 6. Now first off, your screen may look different than my screen for a couple of reasons. First of all, the resolution of my screen is pretty low so you can actually see everything in this movie, it's 1280x720. And your screen maybe a lot larger, so the icons may appear smaller, and you actually may see more detail. But don't worry about that, if you want you can just sit back and watch and see where everything is.

If you've played with Premiere Pro prior to watching this movie, you may have moved some things around already, and it may not match. In that case, you may want to go up to the Window dropdown menu under Workspace and select Reset Current Workspace. This is really useful if you've moved things around anyway, and you want to get back to the default setting. Now that we've gotten that all cleared up, let's take a look at the interface for Adobe Premiere Pro 6.

Let me quickly go through the four main areas of the interface. In the upper left-hand corner is your Source Monitor, and this is where you'll decide the in points and out points of your clip, for instance where a clip may start and end, because you'll probably be shooting a lot more video than you'll be putting into your Timeline. As you move over to the right is your Program Monitor. Now this is exactly what your viewer sees. This is your finished show.

So if you've done any kind of compositing-- in this case the narrator, which we've put over a generic background because she was shot on green screen. And as I play my video in my Timeline, this will update. Now the Timeline is directly underneath the Source Monitor, and as you see, there is a variety of colored clips here: lines that say Video 1, 2, and 3 and Audio 1 and 2. The Timeline--or it's sometimes referred to as your sequence--is basically a graphical view of your program from beginning to end, where everything on the left is the beginning of the show and everything on the right is the end of the show.

And if I press the Spacebar to play the Timeline, you'll see that the Program Monitor will update and show me exactly what my viewer will see. (female speaker: --the sun, and it's literally lighting up their lives.) (music playing) Now as we continue clockwise around the interface, on the far left corner is your Project Pane, and this is where all your media is stored as well as copies of your sequences, or your Timeline.

Now you also maybe noticing that in each of these four primary areas there is additional tabs. This one as you can see it says Project Interface, Media Browser, Info, Effects, and then I start running out of space. If you are using a higher resolution monitor, you may not be running out of space, but I want to point out something that's very useful. Right above each of the tabs and each of the quadrants is a little Slider Bar, and I can move this slider left and right to see more areas that may be obscured because my resolution is smaller.

And you'll notice this is available not only in the lower left pane, but in every pane that has a variety of tabs. Now we'll look at customizing the Adobe Premiere Pro 6 interface in a later movie, but this gives you an idea of the four main areas. There is a couple of other things I just want to point out before we get started, and we'll go into a lot more detail as we cover each one of these locations as we are learning to edit. On the far right are your audio meters, and you'll notice when I play by hitting the Spacebar... (video playing) ...I can actually see the volume levels or the decibel levels of the program that I am creating.

To the left of the sequence are a variety of icons which are your tools. Now if you've ever worked in almost any other piece of software--even word processing programs--you know you can switch to different tools to accomplish different tasks. And as we learn to edit, we'll go over what each tool means. You'll also notice underneath the source and the program windows are a series of buttons, and this is just like working a DVD player where you can play, stop, rewind, go to the beginning of the show, and we'll go over these buttons throughout the course.

But for now, you should have a general sense of navigating and what each of these windows do in Adobe Premiere Pro 6.