I _N _T _R _O __ T _O___ P _R _E _M _I _E_R _E_

S _t _o _r _y _b _o _a _r _d _i _n _g __ _I _I

Perhaps you've used Adobe Premiere earlier in your project to capture sound or video. With your source materials all digitized, it's time to take your story from the storyboard to a real movie. The Construction Window is Premiere's way to make that switch. You'll see many similarities between the storyboard template you learned to use earlier and the format of the Construction Window. Here's a portion of the Construction window for the "A Recipe" project:
Images go into the VIDEO portion at the top of the window. Individual images usually alternate between the A and B tracks. The track labelled 'T' between tracks A and B is the Transitions track, and it is here that you determine how the images will shift from one to another. Notice the bottom video track labelled'S1'; that's the superimposition track. If it wasn't there, Massimo couldn't sail on his swan [a superimposed image] across the sea of his painting [in the A track].

Sound goes into the AUDIO portion at the bottom of the window. Here, the soundtrack is in the A track, and the voiceover is in the X1 track. You can choose whatever tracks you want for audio, just as long as you know where you have things. Unlike the video tracks, which show you representations of the images, you'll only see a not very informative waveform for your sound files, so it pays to keep track of which is your voiceover and which is your soundtrack.

We'll explain the other features of the Construction Window as the tutorial continues.

Let's go back to our original storyboard and fill in the transitions and effects:
In the Construction Window's Transitions track, you can see a transition linking each two adjacent images. Just the icons (different variations of blue As and yellow Bs) represent the different types of transitions available. If you clicked on the icons, a window would pop up with the name of the transition and some controls to change its settings. In our storyboard, we've filled in the names of the transitions. "A Recipe" uses just four: Cross Dissolve, Cross Stretch, Zig-Zag Blocks, and Iris Round. Many movies look beautiful using only the Cross Dissolve transition. While you'll see later that there are more than 80 transitions from which to choose, using only a few yields better results than using many. A good analogy is in book design. Anybody with a word processor or desktop publishing program knows there are hundreds of fonts available, but a well-designed book uses only a few fonts that harmonize well.

"A Recipe" uses only the most common, most effective special effects. Motion is indicated with red bars under the image (see title image and Massimo in his swan). In the storyboard, we've marked the path of the swan with red arrows. You can plan motion this way on your storyboard. Image pans are indicated with teal bars over images (close up on a jiggly boy). We've added a red box to mark where we'd like the pan to end. Transparency is always necessary when the superimposition track is used.

You can investigate the links to transitions and effects whenever you like, but there are other important tasks to complete first. Follow these steps and your movie will be made before you know it: