Get some practice in.

[Vince Becquiot]

Many cities have community media centers who can loan you a camera often for free. I would start there. You could also check with your local college to see if they offer editing classes.

After Effects doesn’t need any footage to learn, and the Cow has plenty of tutorials.

If you are new at editing, then learning the technical functions of Premiere is the easy part. I guess I could really summarize this by saying, read the manual.

As for editing itself, you will indeed at least need a camera, and some guidance from both online tutorials, and really world experience.

Vince

[Will Johnston]

If you’re just practicing, you could use footage from a digital camera (or borrow a friends). Istockphoto.com has one free video clip per month that you could download and edit (although this month’s wouldn’t work well). You could also just find a website with some downloadable video clips and download and edit those. So long as you don’t distribute the end result, I don’t think you’d be violating copyright (although I’m no lawyer, and you’d have to check on that first).

Also, any footage of the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives or U.S. Senate, and any coverage of committee hearings produced by C-Span or the committees themselves can be used with virtually no restrictions, so you could edit those. You can find short clips on many websites of members of Congress and full hearings on some committee websites. I realize they may not be the most dynamic clips but at least you’d have something.

Will

DemWork – Jobs for Dems, jobs with progressive organizations, liberal campaigns, and Democratic Capitol Hill offices, including quite a few new media jobs.

[Hhv_pro]

Another best way of learning is buying Adobe’s classroom in a book series book. It not only has footage but start you up in right direction.

Google Adobe Premiere/AE Classroom in a Book and you can get some good deals on the Internet…