This tutorial is written for those of you who have access to Adobe Premiere. The difference between making movies using an application like Adobe Premiere and for example VirtualDub is not as big as one might think. Sure, the end result will clearly look more professional since we have access to alot of nifty effects and transitions, but alot is the same. I will for example continue to refer to VirtualDub for video and audio compression. This tutorial also assumes that you are familiar with the approach used to convert a demo to a sequence of screenshots as well as how to record in-game audio. All of that has been described in this guide.

Ok, so the application you need for this tutorial is Adobe Premiere.

Start Adobe Premiere and when it is loaded a window with the title Load Project Settings should open up. As you will notice there is a wide variety of different presets to select from. I will however create a custom profile. Click the button labelled Custom, and a window like the one below will open up.

Under General we will see a summary of our selected settings. I have went ahead and made my selections, which probably means that the settings shown for you differ from those in the above image. Don't worry, I'll describe steb by step how to change the settings. The settings for Timebase and Time Display should match the setting you used for \cl_avidemo when you created your TGAs.

Now select Video from the top drop down list. The window should now look something like the one shown below.

The above values for Frame Size is substituted for the values used in each specific case. Also select the right value for Frame Rate (= cl_avidemo xx). If we would like to use a codec to compress our material as we save it to disc, we need to select a codec from the drop down menu under "Compressor." Then we'll select certain settings for the codec by clicking on the button labelled "Configure." Settings appropriate for specific codecs is not something I will describe here, partly because it requires alot of explanation suited for a guide of its own and partly because we're not going to compress the material at all in this tutorial. There is also a guide on how to use Gordian Knot for compression, and that guide can be found here. At the bottom of the page you will also find a tutorial describing how to code material sent from Adobe Premiere to an application like Gordian Knot.

Under Audio select the settings shown in the image below.

There is one more setting we need to adjust, which will allow us to preview our creation in real time. If we don't change this setting we need to render our entire timeline in order to preview it, and every alteration will require that we re-render that part of the timeline. Very time and disk space consuming. Under "Keyframe and Rendering" we should make sure to check the box labelled "Real Time Preview."

Now that we have chosen our project settings, it's time to import our image material. This could be a sequence of screenshots or an existing .avi-file.

Now we should be faced with a window looking something like the image below.

Open the File-menu and select Import/File...upon which a window prompting us to select what we'd like to import opens up. Browse your way to the screenshots folder and select the first screenshot. Adobe Premiere will automatically select the rest of the screenshots if we check the box labelled "Numbered Stills." Click OK. Now looking in the smaller window at the top left, we'll notice that a small folder or icon has appeared showing our imported screenshots. The image below shows what it might look like. I went ahead a little and already imported an MP3-file which is to be used as the soundtrack. The top-most icon, Untitled16.prtl, is a so-called title, which is basically some text I'm going to use. How to create titles is described further down.

Ok, now that we have imported our screenshots we need to move them over to the timeline. This is done by simply moving the pointer over the icon labelled shot0000.tga in the above image upon which the pointer turns into a little hand. Hold down the left mouse button and click-and-drag the clip to the timeline, more precisely to the field labelled Video 1B. Again I went ahead a little and moved music and images to the timeline as well as the title. My project now looks like what is shown in the image below.

What I have done is to add a completely normal image file, which also happens to be black, to the Video 1A field. (This is not required. The image can be left out and Adobe Premiere will still render empty parts of the timeline as solid black.) Then I dragged the screenshots to the Video 1B field in the timeline. In the field between Video 1A and Video 1B there is a field labelled Transitions. This field is used to create transitions between the two Video fields. As you can see I have added two transitions, one at the beginning and one at the end. Note that the video fields overlap each other. Also not the direction of the arrows in the transitions. The arrow simply shows the direction of the transition.
Transitions, along with other effects, can be found in the window looking like the one below.

To use a transition we will proceed exactly like we did when we moved the screenshots to the timeline - we click-and-drag. Try it out with one of the transitions. The one I've used is called Cross Dissolve, and it procudes a smooth transition between the video tracks.

The next step is to create some text, a so-called title. To do this we simply press F9 on our keyboard upon which a new window opens up looking something like the image below. As you can see I have chosen the extremely innovative text "My FragMovie." I'm quite confident you can come up with something considerably more witty. :)

What we do now is selecting the text tool (marked with a red circle), click anywhere in the "movie" field and type in the text we want to use. To the right there is a column containing a variety of settings, such as text size, font, etc. If we want to see the text background, i.e. the video track, we need to check the box labelled Show Video (marked with red circle). When we're satisfied with our text, we close the window by clicking the top-right cross. We're asked to save the title and naturally we do so.

Now being back in the Premiere main window we note that in the top-left window there has appeared a small icon with the extension .prtl. This is the text we just created. Same procedure as last time, which means that we click and drag the new icon to the timeline, with the only difference that we drag it to the field labelled Video 2. Move the title to where you want it. As you can see in the time-line image above, there is a red line in the title first going steadily upward and then levelling off only to stard going downward again. This means that the text will fade in, remain constant for a while and then fade out again. I have done the same thing with the audio track. To create the fade effect we simply click somewhere on the red line upon which a small box will appear where we clicked. This box can now be moved up or down in order to create fade effects.

If we want to see what our movie looks like, all we need to do is to press Enter on the numerical keyboard. This will start a real-time preview. We can also select to preview by clicking on Timeline in the top menu and then select Preview. If we are satisfied with our clip we can move on to saving it. This is done by clicking File/Export Timeline/Movie... A small window like the one shown below opens up and we chose the name we want our clip to be saved as. Also check that the settings for video and audio are correct.

If everything looks ok, we save the file by clicking on OK/Save.

This is basically what you need to know to be able to create a movie using Adobe Premiere. The clip just created is uncompressed however, and therefor very large. Before we share it with others we should compress the audio and video. How this is done is described in this guide in the Gordian Knot section.

There is also a short guide describing how to send material from Premiere to another application used to encode the material without first having to save it to disc. That guide can be found here.

This is the result of the above project (you'll need the DivX-decoder in order to watch the clip).