You'll probably note that you have two video tracks; 1 and 2. On the far left, each track has a little twirldown triangle. If you twirl both tracks down, Track 1 splits to Track 1A and Track 1B. What happens with track 2 is that you just see emptiness underneath. If you had a clip there, you would see an opacity rubberband.
Premiere can handle lots of tracks, up to 99 video tracks, I believe. Any track numbered 2 or higher is what's called a superimposition track, meaning, basically that track 1 is "real" footage and the stuff on the higher tracks will just be superimposed on the "real" track (my quotation marks).
Track 1 (or 1A/1B, if it's expanded) cannot do transaprency. It's just not highlighted and you can't do anything about it.
The superimposition tracks, however, are all about transparency.
In fact, there are just oodles of things you can do to a clip on a superimposition track that you can't do to a clip on Track 1.
Usually, when you open a Premiere project, you have (if memory serves) two video tracks and two audio tracks. For most projects, that's enough. For any really complicated thing, like a video bumper with lots of zooming around images and whatnot, you'll find that you need a lot more video tracks. You can increase the number of video tracks by clicking the slightly larger triangle along the right and upper corner of the timeline window. It's one of those triangles (there's a couple). The option you're looking for is either called "track options..." or "timeline options..." or something like that.
After that, it's obvious.
I tend to use the superimposition layers and the opacity rubberbands to do all my crossfades because I'm very ditzy and frequently lose track (hah - track!) of what I'm doing in the 1A/1B expanded track with the transitions and whatnot. My brother would probably just shake his head at my foolishness.
Hope that helps!
Cheers,
![[monkey] [monkey] [monkey]](/data/assets/smilies/monkey.gif)
Edward
"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door