What you need for this book

This book assumes that you have some familiarity with how PC and Mac programs work. For example you should be comfortable with how to drag-and-drop using the mouse, and how to activate secondary options by holding down the Shift, Alt (PC) or option (Mac), and Ctrl (PC) or command (Mac) keys. If you are using a Mac with a single button mouse, you should also be aware of the alternative to right-clicking. If you have any doubts about these conventions, you should take a look at your PC or Mac handbook, or if you lack one of those, make a few well-informed searches for some basic "computer usage" tutorials using the search engine of your choice.

This book also assumes that you have installed Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 to your computer and that you are at least capable of launching the program and understanding how to access some of the basic menus. You won't need to know anything further about Premiere Pro CS6, as this book develops along a gentle learning curve, with lots of help and hand holding occurring in the first two projects, and then slightly less help in each of the following ones. Eventually, as you reach the last few projects, you should be able to tackle each task without referring to any of the hints or tips given throughout this book.

Finally, this book also assumes that you have a computer capable of video editing. The minimum specifications for Adobe Premiere Pro CS6 can be found on the Adobe website; however, you should also have at least one extra hard drive attached to your system that is dedicated to storing your video source files. This dedicated video drive can be an internal hard drive, or it can be an external USB or FireWire drive. Whatever it is, it should be as big and as fast as you can afford in order to cope with the large amount of space that video clips demand. All of the source clips that you will download from the Packt Publishing website for use with this book should be stored on your dedicated video drive using the instructions given in each project.

Editing on a computer with just a single drive (a laptop for example) is not recommended as you will experience dropped frames, which appear on screen as a juddering, stuttering playback. If you are undecided about the capabilities of your system, then it's best to ask one of the various dedicated nonlinear video editing dealers for their advice. A good example of a firm with a great deal of knowledge on this subject is DVC based in the UK (www.dvc.uk.com). Take a look at their site even if you are not in the UK, as this is the sort of firm you should be looking for where you live.