You made it; welcome to the course. First thing we need to talk about is 'Getting Started'. First up, exercise files. So you need to download the exercise files. There'll be a link on the page here somewhere. Be warned though that they're pretty big, 1.4 Gigabytes. So if you are somewhere where you've got, like a limit on how much you can download, you might have to go to work, or go to school, the library, and download them. They'll take a little while but you need those first to get started. 

Next question is, what kind of computer? Do you need a Mac or a PC? Doesn't matter. Software runs the same on both of them, some of the shortcuts are different, and I'm going to explain those through the course, but I'll just point them out. I'm using a Mac myself, but it's not hard to follow along with a PC, and I'll just explain if there are any, small little differences along the way. 

So what software do you need? You need Premiere Pro. There's a couple of other different flavors of Premier, Premier Rush, Elements, but Premiere Pro is what we're going to be using in this course. It's the kind of main one that Adobe makes.
 
The other question I get is, can I use an older version of Premiere Pro? Not really. If you're using, say CS6 Premiere Pro, it's just going to be pretty frustrating doing this course. You're going to be able to do about 60% of what we're going do together, but when it gets to like-- so you'll be able to do basic editing, the same as the newer version, we're using 2020 in this course, 2021's just about to come out, so anything above or around that sort of time frame will work perfect. 

Anything that's pretty old, like CS6, you're just going to get to the bit where it says, 'Fix Audio', there's a button, and you're not going to be able to do it, you're going to have to figure out how to do it in older versions. So maybe an older course for CS6 might be better for you.

All right, let's talk about hardware. You're going to need some minimum requirements, in terms of your computer or desktop, to actually run Premiere Pro, it's quite stressful on computers. So the best way to do is-- it changes all the time, so Google the words 'Premiere Pro system requirements,’ and Adobe will tell you what the minimum and recommended requirements are, and the closer to recommended you are, the better, the faster it will run. 

The minimum will actually run, you won't have any problems, but it will be painfully slow. Now a question often asked is, "What happens if I'm below the minimum?,” "I've got a really old crappy laptop, what do I do?" It will probably still work, I don't know how old and crappy yours is, but I know I've got a PC back there, my Lenovo, it's really old, it's below the minimum requirements, but it still loads Premiere Pro just fine, okay, I'll take that back, not just fine, it loads, it works, it pops up with a warning saying "Hey, we do not support your video card", but you click 'OK' and it still works. 

The biggest problem is collecting it from downstairs, once I've thrown it at the window. It is painfully slow but it will work. So have a little look at the requirements, and don't skip any videos. I realize the irony of putting this at the end of this video, because the skippers have probably already skipped. I say it because there are some sections that you might think, "I'm just going to skip that because that doesn't relate to me," watch it because I've had to kind of, you know, stage all the different kind of bits that we're going to learn throughout the course, a different kind of, like learning levels. 

So even though it might say, something like Instagram, you're like, "Eh, I don't even watch that," I've got other bits that can be used, techniques and tools that can be used generally, amongst other different kinds of video editing. So try not to skip videos. This is the end of this one now, you can skip now. Yeah, let's get going.