For this lesson, I'm working with the Premiere Pro CC project file 07_01 Add transition effects.prproj. You'll find that project file with the media associated with this lesson. Double-click on it to open it in Premiere Pro CC. Whenever a shot changes to another shot it's called a Transition. The most common Transition is a Cut where one clip ends and the next clip begins immediately after it. You also might choose to use Special Effect Transitions and there are lots to choose from including the most popular for video the Dissolve and the Crossfade for sound. And let's try this. I've got a cut here between the Kids rolling a tire.mp4 shot and this Forest Timelapse.mp4 Let's take a quick look at that cut. I'm going to click back on the Timeline and play. To the people of the corn who built… It looks okay as a cut but I think it'd be interesting to put a Cross Dissolve in. I'm going to just resize the Project panel slightly so we can see the tab for the Effects panel and I'm going to browse in to Video Transitions and Dissolve and now I'm going to drag this Cross Dissolve effect onto the joint between these two clips. And before I release the mouse you can see that I've got a highlight showing where the effect is going to be dropped. I can position this at the beginning of the second clip, in the middle or at the end of the first. And you'll notice that these durations differ slightly and that's because there's more leftover material for that Kids rolling a tire.mp4 shot than there is for the Forest Timelapse.mp4 shot and these Transition effects are applied by using the unused media. I'll release the mouse button and there's our Cross Dissolve. Let's take a look. To the people of the corn who built… Perfect. You can adjust the timing of a Transition effect by dragging the edges just as you would trim a clip. I can make this shorter. ...people of the corn. And I can move the timing. If I have the Transition effect selected when I look in the Effect Controls panel I get the settings for that Transition not for the clips but for the Transition itself and you can see the controls are pretty basic. I can turn on viewing the Actual Sources up here in the Preview. I can specify an Alignment and a specific Duration. I also get a preview in the right-hand side of the Effect Controls panel that I can use to modify the timing. More complex effects will have more advanced controls but this is all we need for the Cross-Dissolve. I'm going to make sure the Transition effect is selected in the Timeline panel and I'm going to press Delete to remove it. Now let's take another Transition effect, maybe a Wipe and I'm going to drag this on to the joint between the Arch far.mp4 and Timelapse sea.mp4 clips. And you'll notice that I can only drop the Transition effect on the beginning of the Timelapse sea.mp4 clip. And that's because there's no leftover media at all for that clip. I'm just going to undo for a second so I can show you something. You'll notice that the top left corner of the Timelapse sea.mp4 clip has a tiny white triangle. You can see here between the Fog Timelapse.mp4 and Kids rolling a tire.mp4 clip we've got a triangle on either side of the cut too. That triangle indicates that it's the last frame of the clip. There's no leftover media and so we can't apply a Transition effect that involves any kind of overlap. We could fix this by trimming the clip so there's some unused media but I'm not too worried for now. Let's put that Radial Wipe on and maybe I'll adjust the timing to make it a little shorter. As you can see in the Effect Controls panel now I've got the Radial Wipe selected we have a few more options. If you're happy with the timing of a Transition effect you can replace the effect and keep that setting. Here for example I'm going to go to the Iris category I'll get the Iris Diamond and drop it right on top of that Radial Wipe. I'm selecting the effect and you can see that Iris Diamond effect has inherited the duration and timing. Let's take a look. ...floating jungles… It's a good idea to experiment with the many Transition effects available though most professional editors will advise caution. If the Transitions begin to distract from the story you may want to keep things simple.

For this lesson, I'm working with the project file 07_02 Add visual effects.prproj You'll find this project file with the media associated with this lesson. Just double click on it to open it in Premiere Pro CC. As well as transition effects, there are many visual effects available, some with more practical and some with more creative results. You apply all standard effects in the same way. Let's find out how. I am working here with the Sequence called Going Home.mp4. We've got a lot of great visuals and in particular at the beginning of the Sequence we've got a simple title in the foreground and a shot of a forest in the background. I'll just play a little section of this so you can see what's going on. I think it'll be interesting if we could make the background shot behind the title a little blurry, that'll help to focus the audience's attention on the titles. I'm going to the Effects panel and I'm expanding Video Effects and Blur & Sharpen and I've got a number of Blur effects available. I want to draw your attention in particular to some of these markings next to the Effects. The first one on the left this go-faster arrow indicates that your graphics card can do the work of playing back the visual effect. The end result is that it's a little bit quicker and you won't need to pre-render or pre-process the effect to see it. If this icon is grayed out on your system it's because you don't have the kind of graphics card that can accelerate playback in that way. Don't worry, the result is the same but you'll need to press the Enter key on your keyboard to prepare the shot for playback if you want to see it on your computer screen. At the top of the Effects panel there's a Search box. And in fact, if I collapse this Video Effects category and click into the Search box and type the word blur, all of the effects that contain that name are displayed. It's a quick way to find an effect if you know the name and don't want to browse for it. I'm going to drag the Gaussian Blur onto this clip. And you can see the Effects badge lights up to show an effect has been applied and nothing's going to happen to the clip initially because like most effects the Gaussian Blur effect doesn't make changes until you set them. You may decide that you prefer to use a different blur and the only way to find out is to experiment with them. Anyway, for now I'm going to go to the Effects workspace and this is going to put the Effects panel over on the right along with number of other panels I might want to work with. And it's going to open up the Effect Controls panel on the left. The focus here is very much on the clips on the Timeline that I'm working with. With the clip selected on the Timeline I can see the Effect Controls for that clip including this Gaussian Blur I just applied. I'm going to drag on the number here for the blurriness and notice that every control here has a Reset button. If I click this goes back to 0.0. I'll just undo that with Ctrl+Z here on Windows that would be Command+Z on Mac OS. And you'll notice there's some darkening around the edges of the frame here. That's a consequence of the way blurs are calculated. I can get rid of that by turning on the Repeat Edge Pixels option. Of course, different effects have different options and these options are fairly simple. But whichever effect you apply you're going to find all of the controls here inside the Effect Controls panel. If I want to remove the effect I can select it and press Delete and of course I can restore that by undoing by pressing Ctrl+Z here on Windows or Command+Z on Mac OS. It's easy to remove Effects, so it's safe to try as many as you like before deciding on the final result. I'll play a little bit and I think that works. I'm going to go back to the Editing workspace and carry on working on my project. With so many effects to choose from and so many third-party effects you can install it might take time to decide on your favorites. Now that you know how to add, adjust, and remove effects the best thing to do is try others and decide if you like the results.

 

For this lesson, I'm working with the Premiere Pro CC Project file 07_03 Stabilizer clip.prproj. You'll find that project file with the media associated with this lesson. Double-click on it to open it in Premiere Pro CC. While many of the visual effects are creative some help you deal with problem footage. A classic example is shaky camerawork. Premiere Pro CC has an effect that will often solve this problem quickly and easily, the Warp Stabilizer effect. Let's check it out. I've got a shot in the Project panel here, Clock shakes.mp4 I'm going to double click to open it up. And let's take a look at this playing back. Well, it's a nice shot but it's definitely very shaky. I'm just going to take the video part of this clip into my Sequence by dragging the Filmstrip icon under the monitor and I'm going to put this down on the Timeline over the Kids rolling a tire.mp4 shot because snapping is on on my Timeline this is going to jump into position at the beginning of the clip and replace it. And there it is. I'm going to the Effects panel and I'm going to type in the Search box the word warp. That lets me quickly find the Warp Stabilizer effect and I'm going to drag this on to the clip. Premiere Pro CC begins analyzing the clip in the background and if I go to the Effect Controls panel you can see the frame count as it goes through that analysis. Once the analysis is complete we can take a look at the result. To the people… That's a massive improvement with no need to make adjustments to the settings. Over in the Effect Controls panel I do have a few ways to change the results that we get from this effect. But what I'm really interested in right now is this Result menu where I can change the option from the default of Smooth Motion to No Motion. You may notice the clip has zoomed in just slightly further than before. And that's to allow the movement to be fully compensated for. Let's take a look at this new version. To the people… Fantastic. Not all footage will have enough visual cues for the Warp Stabilizer to work with but this can be a quick lifesaver when working with roughly shot handheld footage that you would prefer to be smooth.

 

For this lesson, I'm working with the project file 07_04 Create effect presets.prproj. You'll find that Project file with the media associated with this lesson. Double-click on it to open it in Premiere Pro CC. Once you're happy with the settings for an effect you've applied you might want to save those settings for use on other clips as a preset. You can do this easily and reuse the preset on different clips in different sequences and even in different projects. At the beginning of this Going Home.mp4 Sequence I have a clip called Great forest.mp4 with a Blur effect on it. You can see it here in the background with this title in front. If I go to the Effect Controls panel I can see the Blurriness is set to 23 and the Repeat Edge Pixels option is on. I want to make this a bit more visible so you can see what I'm doing. I'm going to click on this number and type in 40, so it's extra blurry. I'm going to right click on the Gaussian Blur in the Effect Controls panel and I'm going to choose Save Preset... You'll want to give this Effect Preset a name that you can easily remember. I'll call this First Blur and click OK. Now if I go to my Effect panel which is just tucked away here in the same frame as the Project panel and look in my Presets category there's the effect. Now I'm going to drag the Navigator over to the end of this Sequence and line up my Play head and let's apply that preset to the last clip. You'll notice that last clip has a Dissolve effect already applied between the two sections of the same clip creating a transition to the Blur effect. Let's take a look at that. Now if I'm happy to keep the Blur preset as it is that's fine. If I'd like to get rid of it there's a button at the bottom of the Effects panel that I can use to delete it. But you can also combine multiple effects into a single preset. And notice up in the Effect Controls panel First Blur, the name of my preset is in brackets after the name of the effect. That's just an easy way to remember the preset that you've used. With this last clip selected I'm going to go to the Motion controls in the Effect Controls panel and I'm going to scale this down to about 85.0% something like that just to give it a border. Now I want to combine this Gaussian Blur effect with the Motion effect that has that Scale adjustment applied and to do this I'm going to hold down here in Windows the Ctrl key and on Mac OS the Command key to make a multiple selection in the Effect Controls panel. With those two effect headings selected I can right-click, I can choose Save Preset... and let's call this Blur and scale and I'll click OK. Now you can see this combined effect preset in my Effects panel. And just so you can see it I'll choose another clip and I'll apply that preset to it. I'm just dragging and dropping and right away you can see we've got the Blur and the Scale of adjustment and with that clip selected in Effect Controls panel we can see there's that 85.0% scale adjustment and there's that Gaussian Blur. These presets are not fixed. They just pre set the settings for a particular effect speeding up the configuration of the effect. I can adjust this scale property for example and perhaps even reduce the Blurriness. Effect Presets allow you to become more efficient without restricting your creativity. Anytime you feel you might use an effect in a particular way often, make a preset.