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DV 101 : A Hands-On Guide for Business, Government and Educators

Produce and distribute better video, faster and more efficiently

Take the Quiz:

Rather than ply you with marketing jabber, we decided to propose a quiz. If you know all the answers, you don't need the workbook. If you don't, well, you get the idea. Answers are presented at the bottom of the page.

1.  When rendering files from Premiere Pro for display on computers, how do you make sure your videos look like the clip on the right (and not the clip on the left)?

2.  What Premiere Pro filter do you use to correct backlighting like that shown below?

3.  If you have Adobe After Effects, you'll be able to produce much better chromakey results. What's the easiest way to get your clips from Premiere Pro to Adobe After Effects?

4.  What's wrong with this picture and how do you correct it?

5.  In Adobe Encore, if you have less than 60 minutes of video in your project, what data rate does Encore use to encode the video when the Automatic transcode setting is selected (and why is this a potential problem)?

6.  Where do you adjust video resolution when producing Windows Media files in the Adobe Media Encoder?

Workbook Contents:

Fail the quiz and still not convinced?  Well read on for a description of the workbook contents.

Chapter 1: Includes a shot list for use when planning your shoots and storyboards for an executive briefing, a formal interview and a group discussion. The storyboards ensure the optimal camera placement and framing and remind you of the B-roll and other shots necessary to create a professional looking video. 

This image is the first shot from the executive broadcast storyboard. On the left is camera placement, while the image on the right shows the framing of the executive in the camera for this opening establishing shot. You can download the complete storyboard for the executive broadcast (in PDF format) by clicking here. With only five shots, the executive briefing is the simplest of storyboards. In contrast, the interview has 15 potential shots, while the training video has eight.

Chapter 2: Capturing High Quality Audio:  The workbook contains embedded audio files for all microphones shown in Figure 2.3, allowing you to hear the difference between the various microphone alternatives. Listen to Candidates A and B below and you'll hear how much a difference a good microphone can make.

Finally, the workbook describes how to apply Adobe Audition's noise-removal effect, which worked quite well in our tests. 

Chapter 5:  The workbook details all operations shown in Chapter 5, including how to get started in Premiere Pro, how to perform split edits like L-cuts and J-cuts and add and adjust logos to your videos. This image shows how to use Premiere's motion controls to resize and place your image.

Also included is very simple advice for optimizing the quality of still images imported into Premiere Pro; if you're working with high resolution documents with lots of detail, you'll get better results faster and easier. The workbook also includes style guides for each title type discussed in the chapter and Premiere-specific instructions for editing steps 1-7 as outlined in this chapter.

Chapter 6:  The workbook illustrates how to apply Premiere Pro’s chromakey effect, and also how to copy and paste video files from Premiere Pro to After Effects, apply the Keylight chromakey filter and output a DV file for inputting back into Premiere Pro. If you're producing chromakey videos in Premiere Pro, you'll find this information very, very useful. 

Chapter 7: The workbook devotes 16 pages to working with the Adobe Media Encoder, with separate sections on QuickTime, Windows Media, MPEG and RealVideo output. This is more detail than any full length book on the market. Why so much attention to output? Because if you don't render well, it can seriously degrade the quality of your editing work. Since Jan Ozer wrote Video Compression for Multimedia back in 1995, he's particularly well qualified for this workbook chapter.

Chapter 8: Authoring in Encore can be tricky; this 14 page chapter works through all production steps for the DVD discussed in Chapter 8 in the main book, and should be a great introduction to the general operation of the program. This image shows how to link chapter points to menu buttons via drag and drop.

Chapter 11: This workbook details the most efficient workflow for creating closed captions in Microsoft Word, formatting them for DVD display and then copying and pasting them into Encore. If you have a project that includes closed captions, this chapter could save you hours of production time.

Quiz Answers:

1.  By de-interlacing on the timeline, not in the rendering window (see workbook page 49 for details).

2.  Using the Shadow/Highlight filter (this isn't actually in the workbook, but it's so cool that I just had to share).

3.  You can copy and paste the files from Premiere Pro to After Effects, but there are a couple of critical steps you should take to smooth the workflow (like unlinking audio and video first in Premiere Pro).  See pages 45-48 in the workbook.

4. Be careful when you use After Effect's Keylight plug-in, which can darken the video slightly (as you can see on the right).  Page 46 of the workbook describes how to adjust the effect to eliminate this issue.

5.  In our tests, Encore produced files at 8.6 mbps in automatic mode, which is too high for many older DVD players (note that the chart on page 158 of DV 101 describes the data rates to use when burning DVDs).

6.  In the Audience window (of all places).

Well, I could go on and on, but hopefully I've made my point. There really is a lot of information in this 82 page workbook, some, like the answer to question number 2, that you literally can't find anywhere else. I think you'll find it well worth the $10.00 investment.

Download the Adobe Workbook