Transitions
Larry Jordan
Lessons
Lesson Info
Transitions
There are three types of transitions there's cuts, there's dissolves and narrow wipes a cut is a change in perspective a dissolve is a change in time or place and a wipe breaks the story and takes you somewhere else, for instance, as you've watched throughout the day today, the director in a control room is cutting from one camera to another from a wide shot to a tight shot oh, from one speaker to another speaker, because what the cut is doing is it's giving the audience a different perspective based upon what the director thinks you need to see at that particular point in time, the director will do what dissolve when they want to imply that there's a change in location we have gone from seattle to vancouver we've gone from day tonight dissolve is a change in time or place we use cuts when we feel we need to show the audience new information or if the speaker is boring, we cut to make sure that you're not falling asleep because we're going to put some energy into it one way or the othe...
r are there by having a more dynamic speaker or by cutting rapidly from one shot to another. We do a dissolve to imply a change in time replace but it dissolve also has a very interesting idea and that it carries thie emotion from the earlier to the later shot this's why when we're doing stills montage which is what I'm going to do in the fourth segment we will have we will have the music playing but we will dissolve between shots because the dissolve serves as a music amplifier amplifying the emotion of the first shot into the second shot in a way that a cut doesn't cut will carry the emotion but a dissolve amplifies it wipe is totally different ah wipe breaks the story and takes you somewhere else a wipe is a perfect thing to do when you're wiping out of an open into the body of this of this show back in nineteen seventy seven I was sitting in a theater watching the first star wars movie and here's a little thing popping along sand dunes and in following along behind it was a vertical wipe I mean imagine a vertical y pioneer knocked the popcorn out of the hand of the person sitting next to me said you see that there was a vertical wiping a feature film. I spent the next five minutes talking with my seatmate about whether that vertical wipe needed to be there or not and whether it was reminiscent of the nineteen forties daytime serials I totally lost track of what that little thing he was doing hopping across the sand because the wipe took me out of the story by calling attention to itself that's not to say wipes or not important but they need to be carefully used. And if you think about the best time to use a wipe, sports comes first to mind in the fall, there is a sporting event that some men like to watch. I'm sure you guys have heard about it. It's called football. Now football involves very large men running around very quickly on a large field of grass, and then they all jump on top of each other. We consider this normal behavior and then, ah, committee meeting breaks out. Television hates committee meetings. So what is television do? It wipes out of real time into replay time and all of a sudden now we're running the slow mo cam, the helmet cam, the referee count the blimp cam, the grass camp, the reverse field cam, the over the shoulder count, the coach cam the quarterback cam were running the microphone from inside the defensive linebacker and then we wipe back into real time. The white breaks the story and tells us that we are somewhere entirely different in a different time in a different place. One we're really time exists and one were real time does not exist the white breaks the story takes us somewhere else now, there's another reason to use of life. You use a wipe when the talent you're working with has no talent now I know this is hard to believe, but sometimes performers can't perform. They can't sing, they can't dance in the editor's job is to hide that fact. I know it comes as a shock to you. Well, the very first thing you do is you take the camera handheld because as soon as the camera is hand held, their eyes so busy looking at the things moving in the background, you're not even following the fact that you're not even looking at the people in foreground, then you surround them with naked dancers, because if there's naked people in shot, you're going look at them, not the performance you can't act can't sing you can't dance, then you shoot lights or you shoot weird angles, looking up slightly out of focus with a pull focus who does something else that looks kind of weird because you want to distract the audience from the fact that the people on camera have no talent and then you cut really with you with you fast so that the audience knows having it never has any idea of exactly where the cutting is occurring? Well, here we are hiding the fact that the talent has no talent by putting in wipes by putting in special effects by by blurring the fact that we're hiding their lack of town think of fred astaire ginger rogers dance piece they had one cut in a five and a half minutes seen the camera was sent bag locked down on a single shot and all they did us let the performers perform get your hands out of the way let fred astaire and ginger rogers show you how it's done one of the sooners I see fast cutting I know one of two things is going on one the performers have no talent or the person doing the cutting doesn't have a sense of the beat of the moment there's a rhythm to human speech there's ah rhythm to performance there's a rhythm to dancers of rhythm to talk there's a rhythm to sports you find that rhythm and you stay with the rhythm editing can help that so how do we do things like adding transitions that's the last thing I want to talk about before we take a break we'll hear I have two clips sorry, I have three clips here I have three clips if I highlight a clip and type command d for dissolve if I highlight the clip they had a point type command d for dissolved I will add a dissolve at the point that I had selected let me just assume in a bit here to to do where we go there's our dissolve if I play it we dissolve boom from one shot to another to change the duration of resolve click hold and drag and the dissolves longer grab the edge of the dissolve and drag it in and it dissolve this faster highlight the dissolve so it changes color hit the delete key and it's gone so to add a dissolve command d changed the duration of a dissolve, grab a wing and drag it doubleclick a dissolve and you can change to set its duration and there's also a way to change the dissolving the effect using the effects controls will talk more about that we talk about effects in just a minute to add a wipe we go to a new part of the interface that we haven't looked at which is the effects tab here inside the effects tab which is on the same level is project and media browser inside the effects tab you'll see a folder called video transitions inside video transitions we can twirl down to say slide and we'll just grab a slide transition, drag it over and drop it on top of the transition itself and one image slides on top of the next you see this a lot too day slide it is the new page peel from the nineteen nineties again select the transition modified by going to a tab called effect controls and you can say I want to slide to come in from the right hand side by clicking the right arrow the left hand side, by clicking the left arrow, come up from the bottom by clicking the bottom arrow or come in from the top by clicking or a diagonal by clicking a diagonal arrow. Same thing highlighted. Hit the delete key to make it disappear. Grab an edge, change its duration by dragging a wing longer or shorter. Ninety percent of your edits should be a cut. Of those, ninety percent of the remaining should be dissolved. Use wipes only when you want to break the story and use wipes sparingly. One of things that I've learned jim over time is that people will research cool effects till the cows come home, but they won't spend any time looking at editing and trimming. So I spent a lot of time talking about editing and trimming, because that really is the heart of what you're doing and people will have fun looking up. Transitions, there's, there's. Thousands of transitions available from third party developers all over the world.
Class Materials
Ratings and Reviews
user-b48fe5
We are so happy that we bought this class. This is the prefect introduction for beginners. We admire not only Larry's knowledge but his talent & willingness to share it. He does it very well! We personally love his humor, (you may call it sarcastic). He makes it easy to learn & remember this way; much easier than a dry, word to word presentation. We owned Premier Pro for a long time, but remained intimidated by its spaceship-like appearance & got quickly overwhelmed. Not anymore! Thank you, Larry, you are fantastic!
Frank Crews
Larry is a terrific teacher - for me this course had a great balance of tech and artistic teachings - While he can be a little cheesy at times he gets away with this well because of his clear ability to teach and to teach clearly. When looking for the next level to take on I hope he is an option!
Jetaun user-8ac968
I actually do really love this class. For those of us who like and need to take our times in understanding how Adobe Premiere works, Larry is a great teacher. He keeps it entertaining and helps you cut time through talking about keyboard shortcuts.
Student Work
Related Classes
Motion Graphics