Digital Home Thoughts: Total Training for Adobe Premiere Pro Reviewed

Who Is This For?
Some of the changes from Premiere 6.5 to Premiere Pro are so significant that I think that everyone would find at least some of the training material useful. Of particular interest to me, as a self-taught just-above-novice user was the way that the trainer, Jacob Rosenberg, used his experience as a filmmaker to convey his thoughts on best practice for workflow.

For example, when working through his real world example of putting together an advertisement for the Ocean Futures Society, he showed how to come up with the voiceover script first, then put the video clips into the right order (but without transitions or worrying about clip length), recording a rough voiceover track, adjusting the clip lengths & transitions to pull the video into a better shape and then adding the professional voiceover track and making final adjustments. By approaching the workflow in that manner, you can make sure that you've got the right video material to go with the script before you start worrying too much about the end result.

Another real world example that I was particularly interested in was the three multi-cam projects. This did not involve any special multi-cam software – it was all about having multiple camera shots and synchronising them together with a soundtrack. I'm working on a wedding video at the moment that involves multiple cameras and the tips I've picked up from Jacob's training will certainly help me to get the editing done faster and more neatly.

Pricing
If you just want to buy this training product on its own, it will cost you $199 … which may be a bit steep if you've just spent a whole load of money on upgrading all of your Adobe software. :(

If you are a previous owner of Total Training for Premiere 6.5, you can upgrade for $119.

Alternatively, if you think you might want to buy more than one TT product, you might want to look at some of their value bundles as they do offer considerable savings. For example, the DV Creators Pack (Professional) costs $599 and consists of training for After Effects 6 Pro ($499 value), Premiere Pro ($199 value), Audition ($99 value) and Encore DVD ($99 value).

Conclusions
I really enjoyed watching this training material and going through the projects myself at the same time. The use of DVD as a delivery medium means that you can watch the material on computer or TV, and easily rewind and re-watch bits if you need to. The lessons are well laid out and divide up the material into sensible segments. Potentially the biggest stumbling block to buying this is the cost.