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Chapter 11: Effects and transitions

About effects

Premiere Pro includes a variety of audio and video effects that you can apply to clips in your video program. An effect can add a special visual or audio characteristic or provide an unusual feature attribute. For example, an effect can alter the exposure or color of footage, manipulate sound, distort images, or add artistic effects. You can also use effects to rotate and animate a clip or adjust its size and position within the frame. You control the intensity of an effect by the values that you set for it. You can also animate the controls for most effects using keyframes in the Effect Controls panel or in a Timeline panel.

You can create and apply presets for all effects. You can animate effects using keyframes and view information about individual keyframes directly in a Timeline panel.

For lists and descriptions of the effects and transitions, see “Effects and transitions list” on page 339 and “Audio effects and transitions list” on page 404.

Fixed effects

Every clip you add to a Timeline panel has Fixed effects pre-applied, or built in. Fixed effects control the inherent properties of a clip and appear in the Effect Controls panel whenever the clip is selected. You can adjust all of the Fixed effects in the Effect Controls panel. However, the Program Monitor, Timeline panel, and Audio Mixer also provide controls that are often easier to use. The Fixed effects include the following:

Motion Includes properties that allow you to animate, rotate, and scale your clips, adjust their anti-flicker property, or composite them with other clips. (To adjust the Motion effect in the Program Monitor, see “Adjust position, scale, and rotation” on page 293 and “Animate motion in the Program Monitor” on page 295.)

Opacity Lets you reduce the opacity of a clip for use in such effects as overlays, fades, and dissolves.

Time Remapping Lets you slow down, speed up, or reverse playback, or freeze a frame, for any part of a clip. Provides fine control for the acceleration or deceleration of these changes.

Volume Controls the volume for any clip that contains audio. (For information about adjusting the Volume effect, see “Adjust volume with keyframes” on page 237, “Adjust volume in Effect Controls” on page 238, “Set track volume in the Audio Mixer” on page 238, “Adjusting gain and volume” on page 235“Normalize one or more clips” on page 235, and “Normalize the Master track” on page 236.)

Because Fixed effects are already built in to each clip, you need only adjust their properties to activate them.

Premiere Pro renders Fixed effects after any Standard effects that are applied to the clip. Standard effects are rendered in the order in which they appear, from the top down. You can change the order of Standard effects by dragging them to a new position in the Effect Controls panel, but you can’t reorder Fixed effects.

If you want to change the render order of Fixed effects, use Standard effects instead. Use the Transform effect in place of the Motion effect. Use the Alpha Adjust effect in place of the Opacity effect, and the Volume effect in place of the fixed Volume effect. While these effects are not identical to the Fixed effects, their properties are equivalent.

See these video tutorials on Fixed Effects by Andrew Devis on the Creative COW website. Tutorial 1. Tutorial 2.

Note: The In these videos the effects are referred to as Transform effects, he means fixed effects. For more about Transform effects, see “Transform effects” on page 399.

Last updated 1/16/2012

Effects and transitions

Standard effects

Standard effects are additional effects that you must first apply to a clip to create a desired result. You can apply any number or combination of Standard effects to any clip in a sequence. Use Standard effects to add special characteristics or to edit your video, such as adjusting tone or trimming pixels. Premiere Pro includes many video and audio effects, which are located in the Effects panel. Standard effects must be applied to a clip and then adjusted in the Effect Controls panel. Certain video effects allow direct manipulation using handles in the Program Monitor. All Standard effect properties can be animated over time using keyframing and changing the shape of the graphs in the Effect Controls panel. The smoothness or speed of the effect animation can be fine-tuned by adjusting the shape of Bezier curves in the Effect Controls panel.

Note: The effects listed in the Effects panel depend on the actual effect files in the language subfolder of the Premiere Pro Plug-ins folder. You can expand the repertoire of effects by adding compatible Adobe plug-in files or plug-in packages available through other third-party developers.

Clip-based and track-based effects

All video effects—both Fixed and Standard effects—are clip-based. They alter individual clips. You can apply a clipbased effect to more than one clip at a time by creating a nested sequence.

Audio effects can be applied to either clips or to tracks. To apply track-based effects, use the Audio Mixer. If you add keyframes to the effect, you can then adjust the effect either in the Audio Mixer or a Timeline panel.

Effect plug-ins

In addition to the dozens of effects included with Premiere Pro, many effects are available in the form of plug-ins. You can purchase plug-ins from Adobe or third-party vendors, or acquire from other compatible applications. For example, many Adobe After Effects plug-ins and VST plug-ins can be used in Premiere Pro. However, Adobe officially supports only plug-ins that are installed with the application.

Any effect is available to Premiere Pro when its plug-in file is present in the common Plug-ins folder:

•(Windows) Program Files\Adobe\Common\Plug-ins\<version>\MediaCore

•(Mac OS) /Library/Application Support/Adobe/Common/Plug-ins/<version>/MediaCore

Using the installer for a plug-in is the best way to make sure the plug-in and its related files are installed in the right place.

When you open a project with references to missing effects, Premiere Pro does the following:

•tells you which effects are missing

•marks the effects as offline

•performs any rendering without the effects

For a current list of third-party plug-ins, see the Adobe website.

Toolfarm provides a list of third-party plug-ins for Adobe Premiere Pro.

For information about the Premiere Pro Developer Center (SDK resources for plug-in development), see the Adobe website.

Clay Asbury presents this video tutorial on using the Pop & HSL Tool in Looks 2 (Magic Bullet Suite 11).

Note: To edit a project containing add-on plug-ins on more than one computer, install the plug-ins on all the computers.

Last updated 1/16/2012