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Lesson Info

Filters & Effects: Overview

Okay, we're going to look at filters now. We just looked at transitions and guess what? If you got your head wrapped around transitions, filters are easy because you don't have to worry about handles, you just put it on a clip. Now let's take a look. We're going to look at filters and effects. They kind of fall into the same category. We're going to look at applying filters and modifying like we did with transitions, changing them over time because that's a big thing. Like maybe you want something to go from in focus to blurry or you want it to fly somewhere, or you want to modify it, color in or go to black and white. Stacking filters because sometimes you may want to get an effect by putting two filters on top of each other to give something a certain look or a certain feel. Audio filters. There's a whole slew of audio filters that come in Premiere. We'll look at those briefly. My opinion with audio filters, unless you really know what you're doing, you tend to make audio worse. They...

are ridiculously powerful tools but there's only really a couple that are go-to that I really like. Not that everything else isn't good. It's just I am like the average person, my audio usually sounds worse once I start playing with these audio filters. And by the way, never say audio filter to a sound engineer because a filter is something very specific. It's an effect. A filter cuts out a certain bandwidth and they will wag their ponytail at you. (class member laughs) And now I'm going to be getting tweets from every single audio engineer, and I love you guys. (class laughs) But you know you have ponytails. (class laughs) So it's good. Copying and pasting effects. You build something you like. How do you move it to another clip? And also there's something really cool called an adjustment layer and if you've worked in Photoshop, you're probably familiar a little bit with this. But it allows you to put a filter on a bunch of clips instead of putting them on one at a time. So with that said, let's hop in to look at filters. Now we're going to use some of the same material that we worked with in our transitions, we're just going to use them differently. So if I want to put a filter on a clip, I select the clip. Once again, I would go into my effects tab. Now you can work with this a couple of ways. You can work with it in your traditional editing layout. And a lot of people like that because it's a comfort factor, you're familiar with where everything is. Again, what Adobe has done is they've actually made work spaces for working with effects. And what that does is it keeps pretty much the same Windows but it reorganizes them to where they're a little more useful. So for instance, we have our effects controls here where we can modify the filters. We don't usually have a big space for our project window because usually, everything's in the timeline already. So that said, "We can push that aside. "Want to see our whole timeline." And then they put the effects over here so when you scroll down, you can see them all. So this is a nice view to work with. I'm going to step back to our traditional view just because you're used to looking in certain locations. But I wanted you to be aware that there are different work spaces for working with your audio, your effects. There is one specifically for color correction that we will be going to when we do look deeper into color. Color is one of the filters or effects that you will see but we're not going to go so deep into it here, we're just going to do some general over arching 10,000 foot view of filters. So I'm going to go back to editing. Going to throw it open to the class a little bit. So what do you think are some reasons that you would use filters or effects? Why would you want them? Why are you taking this lesson? You don't know. I'll let you speak. Like they're giving a mood. A mood. Yeah, perfect. You want to give a fill to it, a look. Maybe you want to make it feel like cooler, temperature wise, make it a little bluer and it has this different feel or it make it like a desert like, warmer. Probably we have to match them to the pictures too. Match them to the pictures. Maybe you have two or three different images and you want to color balance them so everything looks like it was shot with the same camera or the same time of day. So you would use color correction filters to do that. Or the Lumetri filter to be able. So you're using it to give a look was one thing, stylize. You're also looking at to fix a problem. Our challenge where our images don't necessarily all visually match. So you're fixing things, or you're creating a look or a feel, or stylizing something. Those are what these filters can do. It allows you to modify a clip. So much like before where we found our video transitions under the effects tab, it's also where we're going to find all of our filters, are our video effects. And again, these are broken down into categories so they're easy to find what you're looking for. A lot more of these are native to Premiere that are really nice as opposed to transitions which are more limited. Again, third party stuff, great stuff out there. If you go to the Adobe website and you look at third party under Premiere, you can get a link for third party plug ins. That's what they're called, plug ins. And it will lead you to some great stuff. There's a lot of free stuff out there. A lot of these developers give away stuff to bring you to their site and it's really good stuff in both transitions and filters, and I think you should look into that, they're very easy to install. So the Adobe website, it's safe to link to that, you're not going to get any viruses. Life is good, these things are pretty self-contained. I've never had a problem and I've found some great free stuff so I do recommend looking there. But let's go ahead and work with what we have. So if I want to apply a filter and we're going to just apply maybe a simple black and white filter, okay? So I have no idea where the black and white filter is and that's okay because I can go up here and I can search. So if I go into this search box and I type in black and white, let's see if it's under... So let's see what we see. And what's interesting is I had a feeling it wasn't going to be under black and white. But you see these things? Hero three black? That's a specific GoPro. Black magic cinema cameras. They have filters that will compensate for things such as the distortion that you will get when you're shooting with a GoPro and it automatically fixes that. Now it's very CPU intensive but it does quickly fix distortion of that wide angle view. The thing is it's not going to be under black and white, it's going to actually be under desaturate. Well, there it is, it is under black and white. (chuckles) Don't listen to what I say, listen to what the program says. So I want to apply this. I can simply grab it and drag it or if I already have it selected, if I double click on it, it applies the filter to whatever clip is selected. So I just applied a black and white to this beautiful video time lapse, okay? And if you look over here, we are in the effects control tab. Once again, to find that, we were in the source area and under effects control when you select a clip, you can now see and there it is. Black and white. And the thing with this filter is it's basically on or off. Okay, it's black and white or it's not black and white as opposed to something you can do degree of desaturation. So let me go over here and type in desaturate. No desaturation filters so we can't work with that. And this is the challenge I have. I probably have 600 filters in my Premiere library and they're great. So sometimes I'll look for something, it won't be there because it's not native to the application. But there are others ways that we can work with that. So let's go ahead. You can apply an effect. I want to apply something that I can do some modification to. And for instance, a blur filter. Maybe you wanted to do a blur to this. And I'm going to go ahead and pick the next clip. Gonna go up here, type in blur. A lot of different blurs. The Gaussian blur is kind of your go-to blur, it's one of the fastest ones for the computer to calculate. It's what we're used to. If you came from Photoshop or Lightroom, you're probably familiar with a Gaussian blur or a gowsheen blur. If you have vision like me, everything might be a blur. So that's why I want to use this filter. I put it on and isn't that wonderfully blurred? It's blurred to me, I can't see that. (class laughs) But it's not blurred to you. When it goes on by default, it's blur level is zero. Zero amount of blurriness. So if I wanted to make this blurry, I would simply go up here and I could just use the slider, and automatically bring it to the amount of blur that I want. Why would I want to take my beautiful sharp photography and make it blurry, you ask. Well, maybe I'm running a title over it and I just kind of want this movement in the background, and then I want to bring it into focus. There's a lot of reasons that I may want to have a little bit of blur to something. Especially if I'm compositing or if I'm layering. So it has some nice things. Now I want to point out something that I really think was brilliant with the guys who designed this. When you make something really blurry... And you might have done this in a video editing program, you might have done this in a photo editing program such as Photoshop. Sometimes you get this blurry edge of black and that's because what the software wants to do is blur the black outside of your image in with your image which isn't necessarily what you want. And they did a nice job here, they made a little button that says, "Repeat the edge pixels." And if you click on that, boom, you have the blur you want without having that blurred distortion. So you can see it's very easy to manipulate this. But I want something more, I want to create something more dynamic. So I'm going to go ahead and I actually want to take this scene, and maybe have it go from black and white to color and from blurry to in focus. And I have to do a couple of tricks here because I'm working with a very limited filter. You saw that black and white filter was either on or off, right? So let's do that challenge first. I'm going to zoom in. Black and white. I want to go to color. What if I cut this clip in half and took the filter off in the second half, and then did a dissolve? Think that might work? No, you don't think that'll work? I hope it works. (chuckles) So I'm going to cut the clip in half. This'll be great if it doesn't work, I'll just be... (class laughs) I'll be like, "Okay, time for me to go home." I'm going to cut it in half. To do that, I'm could do the razor blade which I taught you about, the cut C, or the keyboard shortcut command K, the German cut. Cut. So I cut this in half. I'm going to go over here and the filter's still on both sides. And I can if I want to just deactivate it, hit the FX button. The filter is there but it's turned off. You can kind of see it on the edge there. Color should come back in. If I wanted deleted completely, I could just select it and hit delete. So now I'm in a situation where we're going from black and white, color on the move, and I change my default transition. I'm not going to get caught in this. And I also made it six frames long so I'm not going to get caught on that. Let me fix those preferences from the previous lesson. Okay, preference, general, make this 30 frames. Okay. Go down here under dissolve. We don't want to dip to white, cross dissolve. Right click as we learn, select that as my default, transition. Cross my fingers, shift D, spread it out a little bit longer. Luckily, it worked. (class laughs) Okay, I was scared. So this is a case where I kind of faked it. It's a great way. And I love doing this, being able to go from black and white to color. And sometimes I'll do it really, really like a long dissolve so they don't even notice. And suddenly it's like, "Wait a second? "Wasn't that black and white before?" So that was pretty fun. It's going to hurt me on my next thing though because I want to do this blurry thing, right? Again, it's going to create a problem. I like creating problems for myself. Well, I don't know if I like it but I'm very good at it. I'm going to show you how to create the blur move and then you'll see where it breaks. So we're going to go to this next clip here which is a fairly long clip. Nice underwater stuff. We made it blurry before. As a matter of fact, our Gaussian blur is still there set to zero. We learned in the audio lesson about key framing. We're going to key frame here also. We want the blur to change over time. And I know I can key frame something because I see these little stop watches that I saw with the audio that says "Yes, you can key frame something." And pretty much, you can key frame most parameters of filters and effects. So I want this to start off fuzzy and then I want it to go to clear. I'll probably pick where I want the clear to be. I'm working backwards so you don't have to but it's easier to work backwards. And I'm going to simply hit that stopwatch and you'll see as soon as I do that, it has created a little diamond here which is a key frame and has locked in this parameter at this moment in time, okay? Keep that in mind, it's a time parameter key frame. So I'm going to go now back in time and I can do that either in my effects panel or in the sequence. You see that both the play heads move at the same time. And now, because I have one key frame, if I modify that parameter, it will automatically create a new key frame in that location. So I'm going to go over here and just make it a little bit blurry. You see a new key frame has been created. And I think that's a good level of blurriness. So as I play it from this point to this point, it should come into focus. And I say, "Well, that's great. "It just took really too long." Okay, and it was blurry for too long. So I can either grab these individually and move them. So now I'm moving this key frame. Or if I needed to, I could actually grab a group of them and move them as a chunk. So I want it to actually start getting in focus a lot quicker. And I can go back and I can play it, and see okay it's coming into focus and it's sharp. So I'm going to put a title over there or something. Now this is my problem. I was really clever about the black and white thing but if I want the black and white and focus to happen at the same time, it's going to be really hard. I could come into focus first, right? And then I could come into black and white but I want them both to happen and my head's about to blow up trying to figure out a solution. A third party plug in would let me have done maybe the black and white another way. And there's actually some built in ones where you can do it but I'm creating a challenge here. I want to be able to put something else on top of this effect. And I have a couple of choices. I could do something called nesting which we've talked about in an earlier lesson where you can literally put this into a container and then I could put the filter on that container. So if I want to nest this... Because right now if I put that dissolve on, it would stop at this edit point. I would select, then right click it and there's an option to say nest. And it's going to ask me what I want to call the nest. And I'm going to call this my open time lapse. It looks like a clip now, okay? And it works like a single clip. But I still have that effect happening, it should go to color. Here we go. And now if I want, I could go ahead and I can do that fade, that dissolve. And I'm really lazy and I've already built it here so guess what? I can go over to that Gaussian blur, copy, command C, control C, go over here, command V, and I just pasted that effect from the first one onto the second one. So you can copy and paste an effect. And I just achieved the trick that I want and hopefully taught you a couple of tricks. I'm going to repeat that again because I'm moving pretty fast, right? I can tell because everybody's eyes got much bigger than their heads. So what I did, the nesting was actually pretty cool. You can do a single clip, multiple clip, and you're not committed. Once you build a nest, guess what? You can step inside of a nest by simply double clicking on it. It actually creates a new sequence that puts the old sequence inside of the new sequence and is actually a new element. So I can go in and I can change anything I want with that. And you'll notice when I double clicked it, it actually opened a new sequence in my timeline area. And then there's my original one. So I can go in if I want to make a change. Maybe I wanted the timing of the cross dissolve to change. Do a roll edit there, happens a little bit sooner. It's going to roll up and now it's going to update. And then what I did is on my nest, I put any filter I wanted. And I was lazy, I wanted to use what was there, so I copy and pasted and I want to show you how I did that again because there is a couple of different rules you need to follow. If I just want to copy a single filter with all the parameters, I would open that filter up in the effects control tab, hit copy and then paste it on to another clip and it will paste with all those parameters.