This tutorial is based on Adobe Premiere 5.1 for Apple Mac. The Windows version is very similar but newer versions of Premiere (version 6+) are slightly different.

Rendering is something which mystifies many people. All you really need to know is that your still images, effects, transitions and some other things, won't work unless you render them, and that this can be done by setting the work area (by placing the blue blob as shown on the left) to surround everything needing rendered, and pressing return.

If you are a bit more technically minded (or just interested) you may want to know what's actually going on...

Unless you have special hardware, your computer will be unable to generate transitions, captions and special effects in real time. Instead it has to create a new movie with the effect in it, which can be played in real time (which, you may notice, can take several minutes per second of footage for complicated effects). These movies are saved in a folder called "Adobe Premiere Preview Files" (usually saved in the same folder as your project) and will have long strings of alphanumeric gibberish as filenames. If you are having trouble getting your project to render properly, it can sometimes be helpful to delete all the preview files and render the whole project again.

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