Before you open Premiere, you’ll need to find some video files to work with. First, decide what formal element (or elements) you want to write about in this week’s response. Then find video footage that displays your chosen element. You have a list of films from your annotated bibliography – you might start by searching YouTube or Google for footage from them.

1. Open Premiere. Click on “New Project.”  This menu window will appear:

The general presets are fine for what we’ll be doing, but you should give your project a name and save it (via “Location”) in the same place that you’ve saved your collected source video. Keeping all these files together is important because Premiere projects link to video files rather than actually incorporating them. So, if you try to open your Premiere project on a different computer but don’t bring the source video with you, it won’t work.

Once you click “OK”, Premiere’s interface will appear.

2. Import your source files: go to File/Import in the top menu and select the file or files you want to bring in. (You can also double click in the top left frame of the interface to import.)

Now your source file is visible in the top middle frame. Here you can play through it and select the segments you want to bring to your editing timeline.

3. Create a sequence: in the top menu, go to File/New/Sequence. This will make a space in your timeline where you can work with footage. The long bottom box in the interface – the timeline – should now look like this:

4. Select pieces of your source file to bring into the timeline. Use the buttons that look like squiggly brackets – { and } – to set the in point (beginning) and out point (end) for your chosen clip.

Then click insert to move that clip into your timeline.

Repeat as necessary until you have all the footage you need in the timeline’s editing space.

5. In the timeline itself, edit and arrange your clips.

Use the razor tool to cut clips into smaller pieces and the slide tool to rearrange them – both tools are located in the tool menu at the top left of the screen. For Cut, Copy, and Paste, you can use the edit menu (Edit/…) or the keyboard shortcuts that correspond to these functions on your operating system.

The top right frame displays footage from your timeline, including any effects or transitions you’ve implemented.

6. If you want to find out how to make other editing moves, try typing them into “Help” in the top menu or googling “premiere cs5 tutorial [x].” Some things you might want to try out: unlinking audio and video within a clip, inserting a title, inserting a transition.

7. When you’re done editing, you’ll need to export your project in order to create a file playable on other computers. Go to File/Export/Media. This menu will appear:

You’ll want to choose File Format “H.264,” which exports as an .mp4 file, and name your project under “Output Name.” When you enter a name, you’ll also have the opportunity to choose a location for your exported file. Then click “Export.”