Peachpit Press has often worked with Adobe Press to make great how-to books for Adobe Products. Well, now Peachpit is also distributing Adobe training materials for Lynda.com, an online training company. Because of it’s online presence, the Hands-On Training: Adobe Premiere Pro 2 includes, not just the training files necessary for the different lessons, but online-style video lessons for fifteen in-depth tutorials, like using garbage mattes and color correcting. This causes this book to really have one foot in the traditional media realm and other foot in the multimedia realm.
With that said, let’s take a look at this hybrid training in-depth.
Understandability
Writing the book and leading the video training is accredited Adobe instructor, Jeff Schell. His writing is cleanly easy to understand and is amplified highly by a large number of easy to follow pictures. His walk-throughs during the video training are easy to follow as well, moving at the right speed to neither bore you nor lose you.
Depth of Information
From alpha channels to track mapping to color correction, this book covers most of the issues you will be interested in. One thing that I really appreciated is that Jeff covered how to compress video for the web at a decent quality/decent size compromise. It may sound stupid, but many video editing training guides gloss over this or deal with additional programs to make an online useable video clip. Granted, I would have liked it if he had covered both Quicktime compression as well as .AVI, rather than just .AVI, but even just the one is very helpful.
Some other nifty things that he covers are garbage mattes—those clever, mobile ways of removing things you don’t want from your film, creating moving 1/3 graphics for things like documentaries and television programs, and creating nice looking DVDs straight from Premiere Pro 2.
