See “‘Undoing Mistakes” if you’re not sure you like what you’ve done to your clip.
Undoing Mistakes
Don’t feel bad; everyone makes a mistake once in a while. For some of us, making mistakes is a way of life! Adobe programmers understand that you might make a goof occasionally — so they built Premiere Elements to be forgiving.
Premiere Elements incorporates the Undo feature beloved by computer users the world over. If you make a mistake, you can quickly undo it by choosing Edit➪Undo. The Edit menu lists the last action that was performed next to Undo so you know exactly what it is you’re undoing. If you don’t like using the Edit menu, you can also quickly undo an action using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Z.
Did you change your mind again? Perhaps that “mistake” wasn’t such a bad thing after all. If you want to redo the mistake that you just undid, choose Edit➪Redo (or press Ctrl+Shift+Z).
Figure 7-7:
Changing the playback speed of your clips
is easy.
One of the more useful features in Premiere Elements is the History palette, shown in Figure 7-8. The History palette is hidden by default, but you can display it at any time by choosing Window➪History.
The Premiere Elements History palette is even more forgiving than the Undo/
Redo features that come with most other computer programs. It shows you a list of the last 100 edits you’ve made, in order, with the most recent edit at the bottom of the list. To move back in history, simply click an item in the list and then click the Trash bin icon at the bottom of the palette. When you click OK to confirm the action, you undo the selected item — and all actions following it.
If you want to clear the history, click the right-facing arrow in the upper-right corner of the History palette and then choose Clear History.
Figure 7-8:
The History palette keeps a running record of your last
100 edits.
Chapter 8
Making Movies with the Timeline
In This Chapter
Getting comfortable with the Timeline
Adding audio and video tracks to the Timeline Editing clips into the Timeline
Moving clips and deleting blank spaces in the Timeline Splitting clips
Changing the playback speed of clips in the Timeline Creating DVD chapter references and other markers
Consider all of the tools of the trade for a painter. These tools include brushes, scrapers, a palette, containers of paint, and cleaning supplies.
All of these tools are necessary, but ultimately all of the painter’s work centers around the canvas. The painter’s canvas is where all of the tools are put to use to create a work of art.
The Timeline window is the canvas in Premiere Elements. The other parts of Premiere Elements — the Media window, the Monitor, the Capture window, the History palette, and others — all serve crucial purposes, and that purpose is to put together movies in the Timeline. This chapter shows you how to turn your clips into movies worth watching using the Premiere Elements Timeline.
Here I show you how to insert clips in the Timeline, move clips around and modify them, and how to insert DVD chapter references and other markers in the Timeline.
Making Sense of the Timeline
As I mention in Chapter 3, video is considered a linear medium because when you watch video, one scene follows another from start to finish. You can think of a movie as being laid out along a line through time. When you create a movie in Adobe Premiere Elements, the Timeline is the tool you use to assemble the various elements of your movie. Here you lay out all the different scenes and portions of the movie in order from start to finish (as shown in Figure 8-1).
As you can see in Figure 8-1, the Timeline shows a lot of useful information and is easy to navigate. Key features of the Premiere Elements Timeline include
Track headers: Video tracks appear on the upper half of the Timeline, and audio tracks appear on the lower half. Scroll bars on the right side of the Timeline allow you to scroll sequentially through the various tracks. Each video and audio track has a header on the left side of the Timeline. The track headers remain visible even as you scroll the Timeline. Track head- ers contain important controls (described in the following section). The Premiere Elements Timeline can have up to 99 separate video tracks, as well as 99 unique audio tracks. I show how to add tracks to the Timeline later in this chapter.
Ruler, timecode, and CTI: Your current location in the Timeline is indi- cated by the timecode (shown in the upper-left corner), ruler, and CTI (Current Timecode Indicator). When you play the Timeline, the CTI moves to show your exact location.
Work Area bar: The yellowish bar just below the Timeline ruler is the Work Area bar. This bar covers your entire project by default, but you can resize the Work Area bar so that it only covers part of your project.
I show how to do this — and give some examples for why you might do this — later in this chapter.
Zoom and scroll controls: Use the zoom slider near the top of the Timeline to zoom the view in or out. You can also use the plus (+) and minus (–) keys on your keyboard to zoom in or out. Use the scroll bar at the bottom of the Timeline to scroll left or right.
Video tracks
Track headers Audio tracks
Scroll bar
Current timecode Zoom slider CTI
Timeline ruler
Work Area bar
Figure 8-1:
The Timeline is where you assemble your movies.
Adding and renaming Timeline tracks
Tracks are perhaps the most important feature of the Premiere Elements Timeline because they allow tremendous versatility and control over the sound and pictures in your project. For example, one audio track might contain the sound that goes with a certain video clip, a second audio track may contain background music, and a third may contain voice-over narration. With multiple video tracks, you can perform special compositing effects, picture-in-picture effects, overlay titles, and more.
Adobe Premiere Elements allows you to have up to 99 separate video tracks, as well as 99 audio tracks. Although it is difficult to imagine what you might do with that many, I think it’s definitely better to have too many tracks than not enough. Compare this number to many other affordable video-editing programs, which often only give you one or two tracks to work with, severely limiting your creative control over movie projects.
If you need more tracks in your Timeline than those already present, you can add them by following these steps: