Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 Studio Techniques

Before you dive too deep into adjusting effects in the Effect Controls panel, you need to understand the two types of effects you can adjust: Standard effects and Fixed effects.

Standard effects are the effects that Premiere provides in the Effects panel's folders. You must manually apply them to your clips by dragging and dropping. Fixed effects are the basic properties that a clip has by default when it is placed on a track in the timeline. Video clips have two Fixed effects: Motion and Opacity. Audio clips have one: Volume (Figure 8.2).

Notes

If you're familiar with Adobe After Effects, the Effect Controls panel's design and implementation may seem familiar to you. In designing Premiere Pro, Adobe tried to bridge the few gaps between After Effects and Premiere. Because Adobe designed a number of Premiere Pro features similar to their After Effects counterparts, if you're familiar with one program, you will be comfortable with effect work in both. With 2.0, the inclusion of Value and Velocity graphs for individual effect parameters closes the effect gap even more between the two applications.

Video Fixed Effects: Motion

When you add a video clip in the timeline, you are placing it over a black, empty frame of space, whose size is defined by your Project Settings. You can use the Motion Fixed effect to reduce, enlarge, or move your clip within that frame of space. Combine the Motion effect with keyframes and you can pan and zoom around an image. The basic Motion parameters are

• Position. The physical location of the image inside or outside the frame. You can adjust the clip's X axis value, which moves it right or left, and Y axis value, which moves it up or down. To "hide" a portion of your clip, adjust Position so part of the clip is outside the boundary of the frame. Only the portion within the frame boundary will be visible (Figure 8.3).

  Figure 8.3. Clicking and dragging the clip updates its Position value in the Effect Controls panel. You can also modify the X and Y values directly. With the Monitor set to 25% view, you can see the visible frame area (black square) and the boundary of the clip being repositioned (wireframe)

• Scale. The overall size of your selected clip. 100% is the normal default value. You can adjust the Scale Height and Scale Width of a clip separately if you click off the check box for Uniform Scale. Leaving Uniform Scale checked ensures that all scaling adjustments are equal with the height and width (Figure 8.4).

  Figure 8.4. When you adjust the scale of your clip you can adjust the Height, the Width, or both together (Uniform). Here a 50% uniform scale adjustment results in the clip being half the size of its normal scale

• Rotation. Defines the angle at which a clip spins (rotates). If keyframing is not turned on, you can change the rotation angle dynamically. To make your image rotate you must turn keyframing on and set at least two keyframes with different Rotation values. The clip will spin from the first keyframe's Rotation setting to the second's (Figures 8.5 and 8.6). If you want to rotate a full 360 degrees, the rotation value will be preceded by a prefix in the form "1x," with the number indicating how many full rotations have passed.

  Figure 8.5. With the scale still at 50% it's easy to see a rotation adjustment applied to the clip. This rotation setting is at 47 degrees

  Figure 8.6. This rotation setting is set at 47 plus two spins

  Notes

  Keyframing is a technique for which you assign changes in values to effect parameters at specific frames, called keyframes, in a clip. The job of the keyframes is to identify specific effect values at exact frames within the boundary of clip. For example, you set the first frame of your clip as a keyframe with the Scale effect set to 100%, and you set the last frame of the clip as a keyframe with Scale set to 200%. When Premiere plays back this clip, it dynamically increases the clip's scale from 100% to 200% over the duration of the clip, so the clip seems to smoothly zoom from 100% to 200%.

• Anchor Point. The spot at which you choose to center your motion adjustments. Think of the anchor point as a tack through your image. If you move the anchor point to the bottom-right corner, any rotation would spin from the corner, not the center of the image (Figure 8.7).

  Figure 8.7. The anchor point here is defined as the lower-right corner of the frame, which has an exact coordinate value of 720x480. The anchor point and adjustments defines the point where effects and adjusts will apply symmetrically. If you were to apply rotation with this anchor point, the clip would spin and rotate around the lower-right corner

• Anti-flicker Filter. When animating still images in recent versions of Premiere Pro, noticeable image flickers or a sort of unwanted shimmering effect often shows on the images when they are played back. This does not happen all the time, but it can occur. If, when animating a title or still image, you get a flickering/shimmering effect that you want to remove, try increasing the Anti-flicker Filter value (Figure 8.8).

You can adjust the parameters for Motion, and other Fixed effects, in the Effect Controls panel (more on this coming up).

Video Fixed Effects: Opacity

The Opacity effect enables you to adjust the transparency of a clip so that you can see through it to varying degrees. In previous versions, Opacity was used to fade up titles, graphics, stills, and video clips on any track other than Video 1. Because Premiere Pro can use transitions on all tracks to fade in and out, you can now use Opacity for custom fades and overall opacity adjustments (Figure 8.9).

Audio Fixed Effects: Volume

The single Fixed effect for audio clips is Volume, which has two parameters: Level and Bypass. Level adjusts the actual level of your audio clip either increasing it or decreasing it. Bypass enables you to turn off your level adjustments and use the default volume of the audio clip.

Adjusting an audio clip's Volume parameters affects the dB rating of the clip instance in the timeline. When keyframing is turned off, you are adjusting the overall volume of the entire clip. Turn keyframing on to dynamically fade up and fade down the volume levels of your audio clip (Figure 8.10).

Audio Standard Effects

The Audio Effects master folder in the Effects panel contains separate Mono, Stereo, and 5.1 subfolders, all of which contain the same Standard effects, customized by channel type. When adding these effects to your timeline, be sure to use the proper audio channel type. For example, mono clips would need Mono effects, stereo clips need effects from the Stereo folder, and 5.1 clips need those from the 5.1 folder. If you are ever unable to drop an audio effect on a clip, most likely you are trying to add an effect type that doesn't match the clip type.

Notes

As you may remember, you can modify a clip's gain before adding it to the timeline. Because clip gain is separate from clip volume, you will not see an adjustment to the displayed clip volume if you have adjusted the clip gain.