Online Video Production Blog

Two fun and simple techniques: playing a clip backward and changing its speed. Consider the possibilities; Kids diving out of a pond, a bowler retrieving his delivery, and a reverse replay of an explosive building demolition. Combine that with slow motion, or speed things up and you can add drama or humor.

You also can use a freeze frame as an effective way to close a segment or an entire production. For instance freeze the final frame and then fade to black.

Adobe Premiere Pro ships with over 90 effects, and dozens more are available from third-party providers. Rarely will you use more than a few in any project and like transitional effects often "less is best". That said on many occasions I have completed a project where every clip has at least one effect applied but it is usually a subtle color correction or brightness and contrast control.

You apply video effects simply by dragging and dropping them to a clip on a sequence or in the Effect Controls window. You can add multiple video effects to a single clip. Doing so can produce surprising and unpredictable results; the order in which you apply effects can also greatly effect the end result. Effects interact differently when applied in a different order

You might note that when you add an effect to a clip, two thin horizontal lines show up in the sequence. A red line below the Time Ruler indicates that this clip will need rendering before final output. And a line at the bottom of the clip in the sequence serves simply as a reminder that you've added an effect to this clip. That line is green when the clip is selected and purple when it's not selected.

Keyframing enables you to change an effects behavior over time, for instance you can gradually take a sharp picture and blur it until it is unrecognizable over time or a color clip black & white over a period of time.

The motion controls in Adobe Premiere Pro are greatly improved on previous versions; you can now accurately control the motion of a clip and apply key frames to change that motion over time.

Pictures-in-pictures have a much more realistic feel when those pictures have drop shadows. And adding borders or frames further enhances that look.

With Adobe Premiere Pro "keying" is available as an effect. A great strength of Adobe Premiere Pro is its ability to layer (or composite) multiple clips over one another. Compositing can be as simple as placing a logo over a product shot or as complex as shooting actors in front of a green screen and then electronically placing them within another scene with both foreground and background elements.

Venturing Into Color Correction: It has more than 40 parameters and sub-parameters. I can't begin to cover them all here, but will in later posts. It introduces concepts like Pedestal (akin to Brightness), HSL Hue Offsets (Circular tools to adjust colorsin shadows, midtones and highlights), and Curves (graphical displays of Red, Green, and Blue curves with useradded points for more precise control).For brief explanations of most of the parameters, read Adobe Premiere Pro's help files.