Premiere Elements 8 For Dummies
by Keith Underdahl
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Book Summary Information
Author: Keith UnderdahlEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2009-12-09
ISBN: 0470453184
Number of pages: 360
Publisher: For Dummies
Book Reviews of Premiere Elements 8 For Dummies
Book Review: Adequate, but not outstanding
Summary: 3 Stars
When Adobe made the decision to no longer include any form of manual with its products, it strengthened the already existing industry of publishing "how to" books for Adobe products. Adobe has a long reputation of producing powerful applications with weak support.
Adobe Premiere Elements 8 is a very capable video editing application (with many other features as well). It is, however, not intuitive and many of its features are buried or otherwise obscured.
The first thing that's truck me about this book was the padding, the superfluous material. There's about a hundred pages on "moviemaking", what equipment you need, installing and configuring the program before you get to the first page describing how to actually use the program. Some people, particularly absolute beginners, may find some or even potentially all of this material useful. I did not and feel it could have been better handled as appendices.
The author's writing style is lackadaisical and often wanders from the subject. For example, "Consider all the tools of the trade for a painter: brushes, scrapers, a palette, containers of paint, and cleaning supplies. All these tools are necessary, but ultimately the painter's entire work centers around the canvas, where the tools are put to use to create a work of art". This is the opening paragraph to the chapter on "Making Movies with the Timeline". This is followed by two more even longer paragraphs of fluff and then twelve paragraphs on a somewhat related subject before you finally get to the timeline.
There are far too many instances of this kind of padding throughout the book. Ultimately the information on how to use the program's features are there, but it takes a long time to get there.
The book, I felt, didn't have enough illustrations. Adobe Premiere Elements 8 is all about being able to navigate its Graphical User Interface (GUI) and this book focuses more on textual descriptions of the GUI and navigating the menus than showing you the GUI itself.
Overall, if you are very patient, you will find the instructions you need for using Adobe Premiere Elements 8, so in that sense the book is not a failure. It is a slow and tedious process, though, and I found myself growing impatient as I read. This book is going back and I will try the "Missing Manuals" text on the same subject next.
Jerry
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