If you want to prove you have the skills and knowledge of using Premiere Pro to its full potential, obtaining the Adobe Certified Professional badge helps make a difference. Along with a good video reel, the Adobe Certification increases your chances of greater visibility and more credibility in the eyes of employers or clients seeking creative talent. So, how can you pass the Adobe Certified Professional exam? Here are a few tips on how to prepare for it and pass it on the first try, landing you your Adobe Certification.
Previous Premiere Pro experience highly recommended
The exam objectives mention that an individual earning the Adobe certification has approximately 150 hours of instructions and hands-on experience with Premiere Pro and relevant career concepts. Without this experience, you may find the exam harder and could potentially fail it. It is not recommended to attempt the Adobe certification if you have never used Premiere Pro or are just starting in the video industry.
Premiere Pro is a very complex software, and to pass the certification exam with ease, you need to know where everything is in Premiere Pro. When you get a question on the exam asking you how to do a Premiere Pro task — in the second half of the exam — you should know at least two or three ways to achieve the result. With lots of practice and editing hours and hours of videos in Premiere, you will quickly get to this point. Once you have that experience, the next step is to prepare for the exam.
Understanding the principles of the video industry
The first part of the exam will have multiple choices questions about the video industry and basic design principles. The questions relate to:
- Determine target audience
- Understanding client goals
- Pre-production
- Production
- Post-Production
- Copyright and licensing requirements to use content
- Creative commons symbols
- Video terminology
- Color terminology
- Audio terminology
- Video and Audio Production
- Film and video techniques
- Editing video
- Type of shots
This multiple-choice aims to demonstrate your understanding of the industry, as well as technical and design-related knowledge. The articles linked in the list above can be your study guide and will give you a complete understanding of the concepts to score the highest at this part of the exam.
Working in Premiere Pro
The second part of the exam presents you with a Premiere Pro simulation and a few video editing tasks for you to complete. For example, a scenario could apply the transition “Dip to Black” to clip “Abc_01.” Another prevalent scenario is moving clips to specific times in the timeline.
How to prepare for part two
So, how can you best prepare for this part? A great resource is signup to Linkedin Learning (previously Lynda.com) and complete the Premiere Pro essential course. As for this writing, the most up-to-date course available is the “Premiere Pro 2020 Essential Traning.” This course is 7 hours and 40 minutes long, and it teaches you everything you need to know about Premiere Pro.
Even if you have used Premiere for many years, it is still highly recommended you review the entire course because you will find new features or techniques you probably didn’t know about. The training includes chapter quizzes. Try taking them and passing them without reviewing any content. After completing the most recent training version, go back to Premiere’s other essential training and watch the videos of new features added to that version. In each training, do the quizzes for all the chapters, even if you don’t view the entire course. The quizzes serve as tremendous practice for the exam.
Understanding the interface
After completing the essential training, you should understand how to work with the Premiere Pro interface and program settings with ease. Pay special attention to:
- Setting appropriate project settings for video
- Navigate, organize and customize Premiere Pro workspace
- Use timeline markers
- Importing assets into the project
- Manage video and audio tracks in the timeline
- Modify track visibility and audio levels
- Understand title properties
- Understand effects and effects controls
- Be familiar with export settings
After finishing the training on Linkedin Learning, head back to Videomaker and practice each one of the following Premiere Pro tricks:
- 13 tips to speed up your Premiere Pro workflow
- 10 tips every Premiere Pro user should know
- 6 keyboard shortcuts you can’t live without in Premiere Pro
It is strongly recommended to get very familiar with keyboard shortcuts (especially Q and W for ripple deleting towards the beginning or end of the clip). Also, learn how to navigate the timeline using the timecode (allowing you to input a specific timecode time and go there).
What does the Adobe Certified Professional exam look like?
The exam will be delivered online with remote proctoring and is available exclusively from Adobe Partnership with Future Media Concepts. The exam will be 50 minutes long, and as mentioned before, the first part is multiple-choice, and it will look something like this:
Some of the questions’ wording can be confusing, so make sure to read them carefully and answer correctly. It is recommended to finish the multiple questions as fast as possible because you will need the extra time for the second part of the test.
The second part of the exam is a Premiere Pro simulation asking you to perform a specific video editing task. Some of the tasks can be confusing. If you don’t know how to do them, it is best to continue to the next problem. You will see a Certiport window with instructions on the tasks you need to do. All you need to do is following the instructions step-by-step until you complete the task. It looks something like this:
For more exam details, check out the Certiport Premiere Pro exam tutorial.
For practice purposes, here are three examples of task you could see in the exam:
Task #1 – Modify the text “Awesome World!” in Title 02 by setting the following options:
- Tracking: 4.0
- Opacity: 80%
- Rotation: 4.0 degrees
Task #2 – Apply “Lumetri Color” to the clip “Movie_002.” Place current-time indicator to 03:00 and set the white balance to match the white paper shown at the right of the sequence
Task #3 – Render only the audio for Sequence01
What to do after passing the exam?
Congratulations on passing your exam and achieving your Adobe certification. You will be awarded a certificate and a digital badge to highlight your portfolio’s achievements and online profiles. Your certificate will be available on Credly.com and will look something like this.
Now that you have your certificate make sure to add it to your Linkedin profile, and from here on, start looking for new gigs and career opportunities in the video world.
Good luck!
PS: If you have specific questions about the exam or something you don’t understand about Premiere Pro, please leave a comment below.