Hi, I recently bought the Photoshop & Premiere Elements 7 combo and am trying to get my arms around the whole thing. I've been working with photoshop elements and have a good understanding of that. As far as Premiere is concerned, I have a question. I'm interested in creating a DVD of a recent vacation. I want it to contain photo slideshows as well as movie clips. My idea was to have a menu with 2 or 3 selections for photos and 2 or 3 selections for movie clips, with some scene selections for the movies. My question is will my project contain one timeline with several menu markers where all of the movies and photo's will be on or do the individual menu selections point to different files and different timelines on the DVD. Remember, I'm new at this. Thanks for your help.

Howard,
I will leave your specific question to other forum participants with more experience in this area.

However, since you are new to Premiere Elements, I recommend that you consider purchasing "the Muvipix.com Guide to Adobe Premiere Elements 7" by Steve Grisetti from amazon.com

I think that this book will help you through the Premiere Elements learning curve. I am making this recommendation because I also came to Premiere Elements from a background in Photoshop Elements. An earlier book on Premiere Elements, which Steve co-authored, gave me significant assistance.

Also, if you buy my book, the sun will shine brighter and you'll have less snow this winter.

Even if I didn't write the book, I'd agree with Barb. It's difficult to help you on this forum without your having at least a basic understanding of video editing.

Try some of the tutorials included with the program, or some of the tutorials available on our "sister" site, <http://www.muvipix.com>. (There are many free one there, in addition to the wealth of media, tutorials and articles available for a small membership fee.)

But the short answer to your question is, yes. It's very easy to include a mix of photos, video, music, titles, narration and everything else you can imagine in Premiere Elements. And the beauty of the program is that you do work on a single timeline, just lining up clips, or with as many as 99 layers of audio and video plus dozens of professional style effects, transitions and motion paths.

To paraphrase Bill Gates, where do you want to go with it?

Thanks Steve. I will order your book today. Is there another book I should also get to teach me the basics or is your book OK for the beginner? Thanks again

My book is great for a beginner.

It's a thorough walk-through of how to use virtually every tool in the program, plus a handful of tricks and tips I've picked up over the years.

The index and table of contents should direct you to any task you want to learn, from the basics of capturing and editing to authoring DVDs and using L-cuts and J-cuts.

On the Amazon listing for it, you'll be able to look at the index, table of contents and even inside to see if it's really what you need.

Just go to Amazon.com and search for my name or Muvipix.

Howard,

My answer to your question of -- is Steve's new book OK for the beginner ?

Yes, it has very specific examples using panels from Premiere Elements 7 for what to do as a beginner.

Sorry if I gave you any different impression with my previous post. Steve's earlier book to which I referred in my post was written for Premiere Elements v2. Now that Steve has published this v7 book, I would definitely say to choose this new book.