Combining printed text and audio

Question

I have a custom-made PC with a 146 gig hard drive and 3.25 gigs of ram, and am using Premiere Pro as part of CS4 Extended Master Collection. I hooked up with an audio techie on a Mac and purchased Premiere Pro for him. We are hoping to issue dvds of spoken word performances, like Paradise Lost, where viewers will be able to listen to a reading and follow it along on a screen. We would use a format similar to the ones they use for the Bible, where there is a book with the text on the pages and the pages turn or something like that as the audio goes on. I would design the text in ID, which I've done before with a prize-winning book of my own. A few Qs:
1. Is Premiere Pro the right program to do this in? If it isn't, what, hopefully in the Adobe family, is?
2. Assuming that it is, we want to do a short dry run with a single page or two just for the sake of practicing the coordinating of text and audio. Can this be done with my giving him the text in MS Word or Word Perfect, or must I typeset it for him?
Thanks,
Karla

Answer 1

One possible way - not the only way:
Decide what font size/how many lines per page will work for the screen sizes you want to use. Remember resolution will vary.
Reformat your Word doc to these settings.
Turn off as many toolbars as possible.
Use alt printscreen to capture the displayed page.
Open Accessories\Paint and press ctrl V to paste the screen capture. (Note: there will be a dialog box to the effect that the capture is larger. Click OK.)
There will be unwanted stuff on the edges and top, etc. Do not try to crop anything at this stage!
Save the file as a jpg as this will make for a smaller file size.
Be careful in your filenaming convention, e.g., if you think there will be 1000 pages, call the first one "Page_000001.jpg." This will allow the pages to sort in the proper order.
Just create a small sample of 20 or so pages to begin with to test your workflow.
Open Premiere, set up your project for whatever output you want to use, like DV at 720x480 or ....? You'll have to do some testing to see what works best.
Import your audio file and place it on the timeline. Play it to see if there are any problems.
Import your 20 files, but do not check the sequential files checkbox - you do not want to automatically create a movie. You just want individual files.
Select the first page and drag it onto the video timeline. Play the timeline and mark where the first page's audio ends. Now drag the left edge of the video clip to the marker.
This should give you a page of "text" that matches the length of the audio.
Move the current time cursor to the mark and drag your second page into position so it starts there. Play the audio, mark the endpoint, drag video clip to match. Repeat until done. (Or until exhausted!!)
SAVE FREQUENTLY using sequential numbers in the filenames so you always have a (somewhat) recent backup version.
There may be better ways to do all of this, but at least this will give you some starting points to work with.
Once you are ready to export the video, you can use the crop function (up at the top of the export page dialog) to trim off all the unwanted borders. You can switch between input & output to see how it will look. If you tried cropping in Paint, you would have to do each page individually, and this job will be hard enough as it is!!
Best of Luck!!
HTH,:-)