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Transitions: Overview

Transitions. How to smooth those edits. Whether to fix the problem or to create and call attention to yourself with something more creative. So we're going to look at transitions from A to B, or getting from one clip to the other clip. Not A to Z. And what you're gonna do is understanding the need for handles. This is probably one of the trickiest things for people who haven't worked in video to understand why I need extra media at the beginning and the end. I'm gonna go into that explanation. We're gonna apply the default transitions which it will be a dissolve to our audio and our video. And learn how to manipulate those. Changing it's duration, changing the default type, changing the location and then we'll try looking at putting some multiple transitions all in a once which is sometimes easy, especially if you're working with photographs. And also had to modify those. So it's just getting your head around what you can do. Now transitions in Premiere are very limited. There aren't a...

lot of really good transitions. I'll tell you that. But there's a lot of great third party transitions and a lot of great free third party transitions out there. And I agree with Adobe's philosophy of, let's make the program really good and let these third party developers come up with the nice transitions 'cause we want a stable product. So if you look, the basic ones are there and the truth is, 95% of the time, the basic ones are what you need. So the most obvious transition is the one we've learned of and that's a cut. What do you think the next most famous transition is? If you went to the bar and you said, oh I wanna see your famous transitions, and they said, well there's the cut and next to the cut, who do we have? The dissolve. And the dissolve is really what you're gonna use. It is kind of language of film that transitions relate to. A cut is usually there's no change in time or location. A dissolve will sometimes feel like there's a change of time. And if you go back to the old serials as well as the modern George Lucas films and Star Wars wipe, change of place and time was kind of a convention that if you had that. Now this is changed a little bit over the years but realize that if you put in a transition it's going to affect the rhythm of your piece. And everything from how fast that transition is, is it a three second slow dissolve from one image to another one? Or is it really quick dissolves? All that's gonna go with the flow of the piece. So let's go ahead and look at transition and talk about handles. So we have all our clips. I put it in a bunch of videos clips as well as a bunch of still image clips. And I want some nice transitions between these. And I'm thinkin', okay, I did my edit, I'm just gonna throw on the transition. Life is good. But life is not that easy. Because if you use the very end of the clip, all the media, and you go to another clip that you use all the media and you try to put a dissolve in, there's nothing to dissolve from or to unless you actually shorten your show, which you don't wanna do. You don't wanna have, oh, the dissolve and how everything gets, and throws everything off. What happens with a dissolve is you need a little overlap. Usually it's about a one second dissolve so you need 15 frames, or half a second, of the previous, of what you don't see of the previous shot and about another half second of the other one to dissolve through and then it works perfectly. But usually we're not thinking that when we're cutting. We're just trying to get everything in and we forget. So what happens and how can you tell whether it's safe to put a dissolve in or not? Well, if you look at your clip in the timeline and I'm gonna make this a little bit bigger, you'll notice that there's a little triangle up here. I'm gonna really zoom in so you can see that. And even move this over a little bit. Let's see if I can move this over. There we go. Little triangle. That triangle is a visible visual. Visible and visual. Representation of the end of a clip. If I see that, I have no more extra media. I'm gonna go ahead and do a quick trim. We've learned how to do a quick trim. I don't see it at all now. Because now I have extra handles. Let's look at that clip loaded into the viewer. Load this clip into the viewer. I'm gonna zoom out. This is where I brought it in and if I hit undo I'm using the whole clip. And coincidentally, this is the whole clip. So if I try to put a transition in I'm gonna have a problem. So the general rule of thumb is, prepare in advance and try to leave a little bit of handles when you shoot and when you bring your media in. And when you edit, think, oh I can't use every inch of this. There's times you have to. But that's one of the big things you learn as an editor is how to be a better shooter because you go, oh, I'll roll a little bit early and I'll leave it rolling a little bit longer before I move the camera so I have that extra handle to work with so I can do a dissolve out. Okay, so it's something to keep in mind. There will be many cases where don't have that luxury. Where somebody hands you something that's already edited. Okay, and you're like, oh, well I took every possible frame like I could have from here with the scene from the existing footage and now I have to figure out how to make it work. So we're gonna investigate all those options but let's go ahead and put a transition on on a location we know will work. And I know it will work here because I see that there's no little triangles and if I double click each of these to load them into the viewer I can see, I'm gonna zoom out, that there is lots of extra media after this. Okay, I can see when I double click it that the outpoint is here and I have lots of room to dissolve. I think this is where you can get in trouble. This is existing video. And I do the same thing to the incoming clip. Again, I'm going to zoom out so I see the whole thing. Plenty of media on both sides. So I should be able to put a transition with ease. Now where do we find these transitions? Well, we're gonna go back to the lower left hand corner. I'm zoomed in but this is the lower left hand corner where our project panel is, where our media browser is. There is a tab called, effects. And in this tab is where you will find all of the effects that we're gonna talk about in both transitions and filters and color correction. So any kind of effect you use. There you see video transitions and these are all the default ones and they're in folders or organized by dissolves and 3D and whatnot and we'll look deeply into that. All our video effects, so those filters that you might use. Audio transitions, don't be shocked by the quantity of audio transitions that you have available which are three. Okay, and they're just different ways that audio goes from one clip from another clip and we'll explore those. Constant, gain constant power and exponential. There's also audio effects which you can use to fix audio. We'll look at that under the filters. As well as some color effects and some presets that Adobe has put in since probably Premiere Pro One. And you'll rarely use any of these because they're 1980. (chuckles) Unless you do a show about the 80s in which case you're in good shape. So what we wanna do is, I wanna put a standard dissolve on there. So I'm gonna simply open up the folder that has our dissolves. There's a variety of dissolves available. Dipping to black, dipping to white, film dissolves. The cross dissolve is the default dissolve that we use in television and it actually is set up as the default. And you can know what is your default transition because there's gonna be a little blue box around it. And that being a default transition, I can use a keyboard shortcut to put that on. But if I'm just learning how to do this and I just want to apply this transition, I can go over to a clip and I'm gonna just go ahead and trim this a little bit. Because I wanted to show you what happens if I put a transition or dissolve on the end of a clip. So I'm gonna go ahead, grab my cross dissolve and I just drop it right on the edit point. And it puts in a cross dissolve and because we're not going to another clip it's cross dissolving to black or it's a fade to black. So at the beginning and end of a clip even if you don't have handles, no problem because it's going into it or it's coming out of it. So that's a good thing. Now to remove it I selected and hit delete. Let me close this gap. Now if I go ahead and I drop it between two clips, I get a default one second dissolve. That was nice and smooth. I kinda like that. Okay, it was good for under water stuff. So we're talking about default, a lot of default transition duration, default dissolve. This is where you go into your preferences and say, you know something, I want everything to be a certain length. The default duration is one second, 30 frames. Okay, 30 frames for a 30 frame timeline. We talked a little bit about that on the first couple of classes. So I can go in here and go to my preferences, under general we'll zoom in. Right here, video transition duration, 30 frames. And you also can control your audio. 30 frames is one second unless you're in a sequence that is 24 frames or 60 or whatnot so you have a choice to say, oh, maybe I don't wanna do it by frames, maybe I wanna do it by seconds. And I can go and I can say .5 and now no matter what my sequence frame rate is it's always gonna be a half second dissolve. So this one was one second. How do I know what's one second? Well, if I click on it and say set transition duration or just even double click on it, I can see the default duration there. And I could change this if I wanted to. I could say, I want this to be a two second transition. So I typed in 200. Remember in a previous lesson that you always have to deal with frames. Two zero zero, it puts the colon in. So if I go two zero zero that's considered two seconds. If I hit OK, we see that got twice as long. Okay, very easy to do. I'm gonna delete this. We changed the default duration to a half second, remember? I could go ahead and drag this over. Drop it on and I'm gonna double click so you can see it. I have to zoom in so I can... 15 frames, it's a half second. So it changes automatically. Now I don't always have to drag it over especially if I'm using my keyboard. I don't wanna move things around. Shift D is the keyboard shortcut for my transition. Automatically puts it in. A lot easier. Okay, puts it in for the half second. As a matter of fact, if you go up here, you can't remember what the keyboard shortcuts are and you've got a transition you're gonna see there's actually three transition options available. One of them is grade out because we're dealing with just video. That's an audio transition. So I did shift D. That just gave me a transition on whatever was selected. So if I had a video clip that had sound to another video clip that had sound it's gonna actually put a dissolve on both the video and the audio. Okay, on both 'cause usually you want a smooth, that's what you want, that's your default. But I do have the control of if I just wanted to apply a transition to the video layer and have the audio be a straight cut I could use command or control D and shift command or shift control D if I just want to do an audio transition. So I don't have to worry about using that option key to unlink it if I just wanna put a dissolve between the audio I can do it with these keyboard shortcuts. So that's nice, that's an easy way to put them in. Now let's say I put in this transition, it's 15 frames, I wanna change it. Very easy. It's drag and drop. It's what you see is what you get. If I grab the edge and stretch it, you'll notice I see a little update on the bottom that says what the new duration is. In this case it's two seconds. And also how much I've stretched it by. Okay, so it says what I've modified it by and what the new duration is. I simply let go and I have that nice long dissolve. And I go back and I watch it. A whole different feel than a short one. Go ahead, bring that in tight. Play again. Different feel. So the duration's important and generally I usually like about a half second as a default but there's a lot of times that I'm doing something very quick cutting but I still want that dissolve feel, I'll maybe make a six frame dissolve. Or even a four frame, that's called a soft cut. It's an interesting term but it has a different vibe than a full 15 frame or 30 frame dissolve. If I'm doing something with lots of beautiful imagery and I just want it to flow, I might do two second dissolves between them. So again, control it for the feel of the music, for the feel of what you're editing and that's going to control the flow of your show.