It's been a while since my last blog. I guess the excitment (hah) of something new like that has worn off a little lately. I'm toying with the idea of having a comments section at the bottom of each blog, as per others on the net. I just need to find out how to stop those annoying spammers from posting crap about Viagra. Besides, Ross (a pal also on the Thailand trip) reckons he's bringing back 200 from Thailand to flog, so I reckon he'll want to do a little advertising on here.

At the moment I've decided to get into video editing, mainly cos I want to have a play around with the Thailand recordings to make it look different than the clichéd holiday video. Some creative edits will make it interesting and funny. So I started using Adobe Premiere 6.5 (see Blog 4) to edit the limited footage I have thus far. After having a look around on the internet for some interesting editing technique it was clear that the tool of choice is now Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0. The tutorials are pretty decent on the net, but I fancied a little more substance. I didn't want to pay hundreds for a DVD with a guy from the States called Bret and have him patronise me in to telling me where the play button was.

My mind was made up... a book was in order. I took myself off to Waterstones and had a browse of the selection they have in Manchester. After walking up to the 2nd floor, I found out that the 3rd floor was now sectioned off as it was no longer used. Great. They'd shifted the computer section and other stuff to another store which luckily was only a few hundred yards away. Not sure why they've done it. Possibly just to irritate me. I wouldn't have been that bothered if my knee hadn't flared up giving me a bit of pain.

Off I went across 'town' to see if I could get hold of something slightly advanced than some of the other ridiculously easy ones I've purchased in the past. Typically the computer section is on the 2nd floor (rather than nice and easily accessible, save Matt's knee ground floor). Luckily there was an escalator to whizz me up to the 2nd floor in no time and with little stress to the ever persistent injury.

After getting lost twice, I managed to find the right section and established there were lots of books of Apple's Final Cut Pro and a little bit on Avid, too. Both of which I didn't have copies of. Well, in fact I didn't have Premiere Pro either, but I'll tell you about that in a min. The ones for Premiere Pro were limited to a few basic ones; an Adobe one, and one which stated that you could learn the package in 24 hours. Wow isn't that impressive?! Needless to say I skipped that one and had a nosey at the Adobe (Adobe Premiere Pro 2 - Classroom In A Book) one. Now, I don't normally go for proper 'branded' ones, but this one seemed pretty down to Earth. Apart from the start where it was banging on about the workspace everything else seemed as if it wasn't directed at children. Bingo! (No, I wasn't playing the 'game', instead it was a thought expressing my satisfaction at finding a suitable book). At the back of the book there was a DVD with the lesson files on there and an intro video in to each lesson. With any luck it would have a demo of the application on there too.

The book didn't turn out to be the cheapest compared with online ordering. But as I've said in other blogs, I don't really rate e-commerce that much. Don't get me wrong, it's great to just sit on your arse and click around without having to deal with moronic shoppers. My problem with it all is that you're buying from what generally is a small photo of the item provided by the manufacturers or taken by the marketing department. So whether you actually get what you are looking at is a different story. Also, you have to wait in for the item to be delivered if it is larger than your letter box. And my final whinge is that the returns idea can potentially be a nightmare with ever increasing courier charges.

Checking out the DVD shows me that it is just as I stated previously, apart from the fact that the demo isn't included. Not a problem, I would just download it from the Adobe website. 563MB in total. Problem was that the bleedin' thing would keep failing and (as far as I know) version 6.0 doesn't support the 'resume' function. In fact it's version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.05031-1519. How on Earth Microsoft managed to keep things going in their release management meetings is beyond me. "Right, this weekend, we'll be deploying the latest patch to upgrade our Internet Explorer users from version 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.05031-1519 to 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.05031-1520...any questions?" Hardly rolls off the tongue and doesn't format too well here either. :(

Any road after it failed for what was probably the 6th time, I decided to opt to use a program to assist with the resume functionality. I just went to download.com and downloaded the most popular. So I ended up with Download Accelerator Plus (DAP). Virus checked it and installed away. After installation, I did a spyware check, and had a look to see what processes or application it was going to start on Windows bootup. Nothing showed up. Good. I rebooted, and performed another spyware check, still no problems. The only reason why I was so cautious was I always get these popups which claim to increase the speed of your download, but it's actually a dirty trap.

With this program you plop the URL for the download in the address bar and hit download. It started to download from 4 different locations at the same time, which was nice. I'm not sure whether this was a feature of the program, or just that it was picking the 4 available Adobe mirrors. Either way it was done and dusted in just over an hour. Installation is as straight forward as any other Windows application - hit next, next and next again.

Loading it up for the first time I got asked whether I wanted to 'Buy' which I thought was a tad cheeky as I'd not even had a look at what it was like yet. With Premiere 6.5 it asked you which workspace you wanted to load:

• Single-Track Editing
• A/B Editing
• Effects
• Audio

I had previously picked A/B editing, which is an easy layout if you are just dragging a video from the project window to the timeline, type thing. However, in Premiere Pro it automatically picked Single-Track editing. This is chosen if you are going to use advanced editing techniques such as three-point or four-point editing. It occured to me that maybe the A/B Editing layout no longer existed as this is the Pro version. Yep, I was right. It has:

• Editing
• Effects
• Audio
• Color Correction

Fair enough, I kind of liked the multi-monitor look anyway. One monitor would preview the sequence, and the other would preview the selected video clip chosen for adding to the sequence timeline. It's a good way of viewing things are you are able to see how the current video you want to drag and drops fits in with the edit.

What is a nice feature is that if you click: Edit > Preferences > User Interface then you can drop the background colour of the workspace. Lowering it to dark grey/charcoal makes the text turn white. Basically this is if you are editing in a darkened room. Being darker made it look more professional and made it resemble combustion. I also get sick of the beige hell which Microsoft puts us through.

I'm not going to go into an online tutorial of Premiere Pro. For one I'm not skilled enough (at the moment), two because it would involve a lot of screen shots and three because I can't be bothered. I'll probably comment on the book and the associated qualification (ACE - Adobe Credited Expert) you can obtain in a later blog. I've decided that's going to be an on-going task so that I can see if I'm any good at both Photoshop and Premiere Pro. I very much doubt it will make any difference to my CV, but what the heck!