Transcripts
1. Course Intro: Hi and welcome to this class, getting started with Adobe Premiere Pro, creating a slideshow. Now, chances are if you have anything to do with computers, someone has probably asked you to make a slideshow for them or you've needed to in your own life. This course is to make that process very pain free and straightforward and quick. We're going to take some interesting approaches to make sure that we can create a slideshow as fast as possible, so in the future, you can either point people to this course so that they can learn how to do it themselves, and that you can learn how to create your own slide shows very quickly. I'm actually using it right now. This is what I use to edit my classes. My name is Lucas Ridley and I'll be your instructor. I've been using Adobe Premiere Pro for over 15 years, and I've used it on projects like editing together my animated Star Wars, Lego short films that I directed for them and I actually use it for this course and all courses I create. I've edited probably hundreds of hours of footage using Adobe Premiere Pro, but actually learned something creating this course and have created a very efficient workflow for creating very quick and easy slideshows. I'm going to show you how to take a bunch of photos of different dimensions and sources, video, vertical, horizontal, how to arrange them in such a way that they all fit nicely together. We're going to create a custom transition that we can reuse in future projects to make our workflow very quick and easy. Let's get started.
2. Get Premiere: The first thing we need to do is get Adobe Premiere Pro, and the way to do that is to go to adobe.com. Now, these options might change in the future, but essentially you can go here, and buy a monthly subscription. I encourage you to check out the options here because you could start with a free trial of course, it's this button right here. That button might move around in the future, but essentially you just go to their website and we can view all plans and pricing. We can see, basically the two options we have. We can buy a monthly subscription just to Adobe Premiere Pro right here, but what they're going to suggest you do, and they say best value is, get all their apps for essentially a little more than twice what one program is going to cost. You get 20 programs. They price it according to try to encourage you to get everything. You get Photoshop, Illustrator, all of these Adobe products that are really nice. Once you buy that or you start the free trial, all of these programs are managed from the Adobe Creative Cloud. If you go down in Windows, at least, there should be a little icon here, my face is covering it up. Let me move my face. You go down here and there's this Creative Cloud icon. Once you click that, then you get the status updates of each of the programs that you have. You can see all mine are up-to-date. You can open them from here, and that's a great way to manage that. Of course, there's also Beta versions you can try out, so when there's new versions of the software, new features, you can actually test those out before they are production ready and give those a shot, so that's pretty cool. This is how you essentially get Adobe Premiere Pro, manage your subscription, and you can pay for only what you need because it is a monthly subscription. That's a really nice feature of Adobe Premiere and using Adobe products in general.
3. Import Media: Now that we have Premiere Pro installed, we just need to open it and get going. I've pinned it to my taskbar here, which you can do by right-clicking on "Icons" when you have the program open and choose, Pin to taskbar. It's already there. Just to show you if it wasn't, how I like to do is just search for the name and click on it. I'm using Adobe Premiere Pro 2021. But all of the things we're going to learn in this course can be applied to pretty much every version of Premiere that I'm aware of. The first screen that we get is this introductory window of saying, "Hey, what do you want to do? You want to start new projects or you want to open up one you're already working on?" It gives us a list of all of the old projects that we've saved previously. If you've never opened the program, there won't be anything there. It might also ask you to take a tutorial or something, you can just cancel out that and follow along with this course. We want to create a new project. I'm going to click "New Project". Then it's going to ask us, "What do we want to save the project as?" I'm going to call it Dudley because that's the name of the dog we're going to be making a slideshow about. Then we need to choose the folder location where that file project is going to be saved. Just naming it doesn't tell us where now do you want it to put it on your computer. That's right here. You click, "Browse", browse to a new folder. If you have a compatible GPU, I'm not a hardware guy, if you can't tell, I just use them, I don't build them or anything like that. But if you have a decent enough GPU in your computer, you want to make sure that your renderer is the GPU acceleration, C-U-D-A, CUDA, or however you say that, that's what you want. If you choose the software only, you're going to run into rendering issues and preview issues when you're trying to playback, and it's having a hard time playing something. In the future, if you are getting bogged down, I'll touch on this again in a moment, you want to make sure that your renderer is chosen for the GPU accelerated. If that option doesn't show up, that just means your hardware in your computer doesn't support that. It's not a huge deal, but it does make things move a little nicer. I'm going to hit, "Okay". It's going to create this project, it's saying it already exists. I'm just going to say, yeah, because I was already recording some of this course and already made the project name there. Now let's get oriented with the workspace we're looking at. What is all this stuff? What are all these Windows, what's going on? There's really only a couple of places we need to be looking for this entire course. There's a lot of tabs, they just don't have anything to do with what we need to do and I don't even use 90 percent of the time. We can essentially organize our workspace however we want. It tries to give you some presets essentially. There's assembly, editing, color, effects, all these different ways to reorient the windows, it's all the same tabs, there might be opening new ones and closing them, but it's all the same stuff. You can manually change this stuff if you want. If you accidentally move something, say, I click and move this over here, I don't know, that got joined with that. Now I've done this, who knows what. Normally as a beginner, this thing happens because you accidentally click something and then you're like, "I don't even know how to get back to what I was doing". What you have to do is just go to, Windows, Workspaces, and then say, Reset to Saved Layout and we're in the effects tab. You can see right here the effects is blue and highlighted and it's chosen right there. We can say, Reset to Save Layout and it's going to get everything back to where it needs to be. Don't worry if you start clicking drag and you're like, "Well, I don't know what happened. " It's not that big of a deal. But I like to appeal to stay in the editing tab for everything, even if I'm doing color correcting, I can open up that tab, add it to where I want it. This is a bit over-organized for me. I'll use it however I want. I don't like all these presets, but anyway, that's just me. I'm just going to click and drag this over because when we are editing, that's going to be this big window in the top right. That's going to be what is going to get rendered and what we're editing is in that window. But we need stuff to edit, where are all our pictures and stuff. There's a couple of ways you can do that. If you have Explorer opening you can just click and drag folders and import things straight into this. It says, import media to start, it even tells you. You can also right-click and say, "Import". I will jump to a folder location. You can choose what you want to import from there. What I like to do is just click and drag things into this Window. I'm going to grab my Windows browser, and I'm going to click and drag this folder here. These are all the files that I want to import and use in the slideshow. Now, anytime you're given a bunch of things to make a slideshow for, they're usually different dimensions, they're not rotated correctly. You might have vertical video, you might have horizontal video, pictures are landscape and horizontal portrait, whatever. The quickest way that I like to do it is, for pictures, you just go in here, double-click, and if something isn't rotated correctly, you can quickly do that with the out of the box features of Windows or whatever OS you're in typically have some basic editing function. That's how I like to lock in the rotation. I'll show you some other interesting ways to do it as well and how we can enhance even if vertical videos or whatever, are creating big black areas in our slideshow, I'll show you how we can enhance that as well. But essentially, the easiest way that I like to organize things, if everything's already in a folder like this, I just like to drag the entire folder, because Premiere will keep that folder in the structure here. As we clicked and dragged it in, you can see it said, Dudley photos. That's the name of the folder that we clicked and dragged in. Now, I did this intentionally to show you, you might get errors on import depending on, slideshows, like I said, are amalgamation of all different kinds of file types and that can be a problem when you're importing. You might get something that says, "Hey, we don't recognize this file type or we don't support it". In this case, it's a.CR2, which means it's a raw image format. Premiere Pro doesn't like those. What you'd want to do in this case is open that up in Adobe Photoshop and just save it out as a JPEG. Now in Photoshop, I can just navigate to where that photo is, the name of it based on the error it gave me, its THE image 4037. I just hop over here to image 4037, and I open that Adobe Photoshop. If it is a raw image, it will give you the camera raw window here to start with, because Photoshop recognizes it as a raw image, which means it has a greater bit depth than a typical JPEG, blah, blah, technical jargon, that doesn't really matter. All we need to do is open this in Photoshop and save it out as a JPEG. Just hit, "Open". Then we can go to File, Save As, and then we can save this as JPEG by choosing it from the file type down here. I'll go to JPEG and then I'll just leave it named that. I've already done that for this picture, so I'll hit "Save" and yeah, we'll replace it, and then I'll hit "Okay". That's just asking how much you want to compress it. Then we can hop back over into Premiere. Now back in Adobe Premiere, we can just hit "Okay", and then because it didn't bring in those files, we would need to bring those in manually. Like I said earlier, we could right-click and we could say import. We could also just click and drag them in. I'm just going to go over here and make sure that there were two files, so I want to make sure that both of them are imported correctly. There we go, we can go down to the image number that it was and see that they're both there. Now that we've gotten familiar with the workspace, how to reset it if we mess up, how to change workspaces, and how to import the media that we need, and if we run into problems, how to solve that problem. In the next lesson, let's get started actually making this thing. We're going to create one cool preset tool that's going to make our lives a lot easier. I'll see you there.
4. Sequences: Now that we are in Premiere, we got our median here, let's create a sequence. A sequence is basically how we edit. It's going to contain the timeline of our media that we're going to edit together. There's a couple different ways you can do that. If we have video, you can click and drag it into the timeline right here. It says drop media here to create sequence. If we were to just click and drag, let's say any one of these photos, it's going to create the dimensions of that photo automatically. Typically when you're creating video especially for the web, you want it to be at least HD, so 1,920 by 1,080 or those dimensions. Most photos aren't taken at those dimensions, whether it's from your phone or from a DSLR or something like that, and so if you just click and drag that in, it's going to take those dimensions that you probably don't want. That's not how we want to do it. I'm going to hit "Undo". I'm going to close that and then I'm also going to delete that sequence. We can see down here, it actually created the sequence also based on the name of the thing we dragged in. Now, if you have video that's 1,920 by 1,080 and it's the dimensions that you want, you can click and drag that in, it'll save you one step. Here's one down here. It's actually a vertical video. Again, not what we want, not the right thing. But I just wanted to mention, if you did have a video that was the right dimensions that you wanted, you can click and drag it in and very easily have the sequence set up the way that you want it. Now, again, it's created that sequence and it's named the exact same thing, which isn't very significant for me. It's the date or something. We can just click that a single time and say, sequence main or something like that so that it's easy to identify. Again, this isn't that sequence that we wanted, it's the wrong dimensions. I'm going to delete that again. But again, I just wanted to show you the different ways to do this. The way I want to do it is manually because I get to control exactly what is going on. I'm going to click this little button down here that says New Item. If you don't have these or sometimes if you don't have a button in general, it might just be collapsed so something might be too far. You can see how I got rid of that button. If you're working on a laptop or a smaller monitor, you might run into that issue. Just be aware of that, that button is there. Now we can click that, and it's going to give us all these different things that we can make in Adobe Premiere Pro. What new item do we want to make? We want to make a sequence. It puts it at the top because it's probably the most common thing that you're going to want to make from that button. I'm going to hit "Sequence", and then now we get to choose from either all of these available presets or we can manually set the settings ourselves by clicking on the Settings tab. Now, what I usually like to do is just go to Editing Mode and choose Custom, that way I can do everything manually. I can type in whatever I wanted. I'll also post the other dimensions that you might want to do to, 2K or 4K in the video now. But typically, if you're posting a slideshow to the web or something, you want a minimum of HD, which is 1,920 by 1,080, and pixel aspect ratio of one, so everything is square. Typically we don't want any fields. This is a bit of a throwback to old video stuff, interlaced video, but the other main thing is the time base, so 30 frames a second or whatever it is. Now, when we're looking down here in the bottom left and we're taking a look at the frame rate of our video, which we can see just by looking at this column in our projects. We have frame rate here, and if you don't have that, you can scrub and find it. There's all these different metadata things. Metadata means data about data. But you can toggle this down and find this yourself by right-clicking, going to this metadata display option, and you can enable that if you don't have it or if you want to get rid of it. But in our case, we're talking of frame rate, and so if we want to match the frame rate, the most common frame rate, say we have 10 or 20 videos and they're all at different frame rates, you need to choose one and stick with it. Premiere is pretty good about handling the differences between it. Let's say a 60 frames per second is in a 30 frames per seconds sequence, it'll figure it out and it'll deal with it. Just for our purposes, I just want to mention that little technical thing, and because we already have one video and we know it's roughly 30 frames a second, that's what I'm going to choose, and that is a common frame rate to choose for video. Back to Settings, go to Custom, and the default is 30. We're going to leave that and everything else is fine. If you're having some preview issues, you may want to change this preview file format to QuickTime depending on the codecs installed. Again, technical stuff, not that important. This is more just an optimization thing. I'm going to call this Dudley sequence and hit "Okay". We've created a sequence, it's empty, now let's bring in all the media. Now, the easiest way to do that is click and drag it in. If you select everything, so we can Shift, Select everything. I'll select the top one, scroll down, hit "Shift" and click. Now I've selected everything in that folder. I can just click and drag anywhere by clicking in the screen because they're all selected. Just drag them into the timeline, you can see that a plops them all there. Now, it's going to ask you to change settings because there's all different kinds of dimensions and the videos to 29.99, and it's trying to accommodate all that, and said you want to change the sequence settings based on the stuff you're importing. We know we like it, what it is, so we want to keep it. Let's say keep existing settings, and we're going to get into the beauty of doing slideshows and getting media that's all different kinds of dimensions. If we just scrub through here, we can see that some are huge, this one's small and we need to figure a quick and easy way to scale this down. That's what we're going to do. But first, I wanted to just talk about how did this get in here and how we can set it to be the right length that we want. By default, I'm pretty sure it's five seconds for a still image. If we hit "Plus" on the keypad here, we can actually zoom in. We can also click and drag this little guy down here to zoom in, and if we want to see a thumbnail, we can click and drag where the border is here and just drag this timeline up, and it'll pop in a thumbnail of the image so we can see it a little bit easier preview-wise. We can see this is exactly five seconds. Well, what if we have like 1,000 pictures or something and we don't have time for everything to be five seconds? We can actually change that before we import it. If we did want to change that five second, I'm going to leave it for this project. But if you did want to change it, you would just want to delete all this stuff by clicking and dragging then you can just hit "Delete" on your keyboard and then change this setting. We can go to Edit, Preferences, go down to Timeline, and we get the option right here, Still Image Default Duration, five seconds. We can change that to be whatever we want, and we also see the other defaults here. The video transition, the audio transition, all that is accessible here and I'll change that. For every project that you work on, that will be the default moving forward. That's the easiest way to do that. I like to leave it at five because we're going to do a transition of one second so it gives the viewer a couple of seconds to see it before the transition starts into the next picture. That is where that setting is, if you want to change that, because it can be very tedious if you're in here and you're trying to click and drag. Just so you know, if you wanted to do some bespoke trimming here, you can just click a clip, an image, a video clip, it doesn't have to be an image and you get this icon here based on your selection, where you're hovering. I can see it's going to the right or it's going to the left if the mouse cursor is on the left side of the edit cut or the right side. We're seeing we can drag this one this way, this one that way, and that's how you would make those changes. Now, to quickly delete this gap and compress everything back down, we can hit Z or we can hit Alt A, and we can select everything from the point we're clicking after, it will drag it all over. So we just select everything. If we hit V and just use the cursor, its just going to take that clip by itself. We don't want that, we want to take everything to close that gap. We can close it this way with Alt A or with selecting the gap and hitting Z by deleting that gap. Now, that is also available here by right-clicking that gap and saying Ripple Delete. Same thing. I'm just going to undo those changes so that we can get back to every clip being exactly at five seconds long, and I'm hitting "Control Z" and if you go too far, you can hit Control Shift Z to redo what you just did. So those are the two ways to jump back and forth between the actions that you've created. Now if we wanted to rearrange some of these, because these just got plopped in exactly how they were selected in the order they're in, in this kind of project window, we could do that by clicking and dragging, and we can move these around manually like this. Now, we could also click and drag one and hold down Control. If we watch this one with the ball here, where the dog is with the ball and we click and drag it to the sleeping one while holding down Control, it will move everything down one, so it insert it there and move everything over. But it created this gap, so we're just going to go back and hit "Z" or "Ripple Delete" with right-clicking. Also be aware, if you want to bring in some new media into your timeline, you can click and drag it actually in the program view, and you can get all of these options so you can see what you're going to do. Insert Before, Insert, After Overlay, Insert, Replace, Overwrite, all these types of things. For example, let's say Insert Before, it's going to insert it and move everything down, and it's going to put it on this track because I have V1 selected here. If I have V1 selected here on the source patching, it will move it there. Let me just show you that. If I click and drag it again and go Insert Before, now it's on that timeline. That's how you can quickly rearrange clips, bring them in, cut them, trim them, change the default settings of what the length is of them. We covered a lot here and in the next lesson, we're going to create the Preset where we can get going on the cool transitions and get everything standardized so we can wrangle in all these different dimensions and sizes of images and videos that we have here. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next lesson.
5. Scale: In this lesson, we're going to wrangle all these dimensions to fit the frame that we've created and create a preset so that we can get animating the transitions between each image and apply them all at the same time so we don't have to do this for every single photo. The first problem is every photo comes in at a slightly different dimension and or can, let's just say hypothetically. In our case, these images are huge, most of them. Some of them are small, maybe they were edited on an iPhone app or something like that and so the export was smaller than the original. But one thing we can do to standardize all of the sizes is that we can scale them to the frame that we've created, and the frame is the sequence dimensions. That's what we put in at the beginning, the 1,920 by 1,080. You can get back to those settings if we're not sure what those are. If we just want to revisit that, we can get to those here. We can go to sequence, sequence settings. What we want to do is just standardize everything so it fits all the dimensions we've created. I'm going to click ''Drag'' and select everything, right-click anywhere on the highlighted ones and we have a ton of options here, but the one we're interested in is scale to frame size. We can see it pops the image to be the frame size and if we scrub through we can see those huge images that we had before are now exactly the frame that we want. Cool. We don't have to scale these each individually. Now, the other important thing to note here, I'm going to hit ''Plus'' to zoom in, ''Minus'' is to zoom out. If I select one of these and I go to the Effect Controls, this is where all the transforms live. What is its scale? What's its position? If we want to animate those things the Effect Controls up here is where we get to that. Now, that's under the Motion tab here. If it's toggled down or something, you can get to it there. Also be aware here like I mentioned earlier, if things are collapsed down, maybe you're not seeing the words or something, make sure that that window is wide enough so you can see everything. We can also adjust this one so we can see the length of that clip is the five seconds. We can see our time indicator moving in the Effects Control as well as in our timeline here. That'll be more important later when we're animating. But we can see the scale is actually 100. But this thing got scaled way down, so how is that 100? That's a special part of this feature. When we choose that, we can see it's now checked scale to frame size. If we uncheck that and we select the image, we can see it's still 100, but the image got huge. One cool thing about this, is we can standardize everything to appear at 100 even though it's getting scaled down. If we set to frame size, what we'll see is that is actually scaling, we can see it change from 100-27.8. But because the preset we're going to create is going to scale everything from a value of 100-110, we don't want to deal with all these different values. That's why we're choosing this option so it'll work well with a preset we're going to create in a moment animating. I'm going to change this back to scale to frame size. If I do that after I've already scaled the thing, it's keeping that 27.8. I just need to say, let's get back to 100 and we can see indeed it is scale to frame size, scaled to 100 and so now we have a standard value for every clip, everything. That makes it easy to animate a preset that uses that value of 100. Cool. The one thing to remember about this though is if you are going to scale your image up a ton, it's resampling the image. We don't want to use this if we are actually going to scale the image up a ton. We want to turn that off because it's essentially squashing it down, getting rid of all those pixels, and then we're trying to scale it back up and we've already lost all those pixels because we scaled it down. That's the one disadvantage of using this is that, if you are going to scale it up a ton, then you wouldn't want to use that. You could just go on those individual images where maybe I don't want to use this and do this manually. But I want to show you a standardized way, we can just like in the future, click and drag photos in, bring them into a sequence, add this preset, add the transition and we're done. But as I go along here, I want to tell you all the but this and but that so that in your case, you can make that decision on your own in your future projects. In this lesson, we learned how to scale everything to fit the frame that we're doing and what that means between the two options we had, set to frame size or scale to frame size and the significance of scaling down and having that value of 100 so that in the future when we are animating that with a preset that needs that value to be the same for every clip, that's why that's important to use this option that we've discussed here, scale to frame size and not set to frame size. In the next lesson, we're going to deal with transitions and how to apply them all at the same time to our clips to make it very quick and easy to apply them. Thanks for watching.
6. Transitions: Now let's create some transitions. We've looked at the effect controls panel here. When we're looking at what's the scale of this thing, what's the position? All that good stuff. Now we have another similarly named panel that we need to get familiar with and that's the effects panel, just effects. We're not controlling anything from it. That's really neat effects controls up here in the top left. In this one, we're seeing effects. If you don't see any of these panels, you can get to every single panel from this, you can see the ones that have checkboxes next to them are the ones that are currently open. If you don't see one of these, if you don't see effects, you can just click the check here, and then you can click and drag it wherever you want it to be in the order of these or if you want to split this, so we can see maybe our project at the same time or with the effects, we could do that. What I just did here was click these little arrows. If things are collapsed too far down to where you can't see the tabs that you all have open, you can click the arrow, and you can see all of them there. But I just want to leave this there, just trying to teach you little things along the way as we go. Transitions, there's all different kinds of transitions. One we're going to just focus on is the cross dissolve, the default transition. That's essentially when something is fading from one image to another or one video to another. We can go to video transitions, dissolve, and we can see we have different types of dissolves. But the one we are curious about is the default, the film dissolve. We can actually change what default is by right-clicking and saying set selected as default transition. For some reason you want every transition for the video or image slideshow to be a slide from left to right or push or whatever it is. You could click one of these and say set default as selected. Now that's significant because that's tied to a hotkey. If I select any of these, and I hit Control D, that's the default transition being applied. That's what that is. I'm just going to hit Control Z to undo that. I just want to show you where those effects lived, and if you wanted to do a different one or rechange what the hotkey is connected to you can do that there. I'm going to hop back over to the project windows just so we can see everything default and drag this out. Now, we want the film dissolve, it's already set as the default transition. I'm going to select everything. I'm hitting minus two on the keyboard to zoom out. I'm going to select everything, I'm going to hit Control D. Now, it's also important to know with images, we have an infinite amount of time. In image, there's no time associated to it, but with videos, there's a set amount of time. There's an in-point and out point. If you're trying to dissolve a video that is already set to its in-point, there's nothing to dissolve from its starting right at frame 1. That's why you see when we look through all of these film dissolves, we can see that on the cut which we can toggle between cuts with up and down arrows on our keyboard, so we can jump between cuts. That the dissolve itself is centered on that cut. But if we go over to the video that we had here, we can see that the film dissolve is not centered on that cut. Why is that? That's because we have a finite amount of time with our video clips. We have an in-point, we have an out-point. The film dissolve needs something to dissolve from and to. But if your video is starting on frame 1, it has nothing to dissolve to, so that dissolve is starting on that frame. To fix that, if we wanted to have something to dissolve from and I can just scrub to show you what that looks like. It's not an issue when you're dissolving from a photo because that photo has a set an infinite amount of time to dissolve from. Let me just drag this out. I can hit ''Alt'' and just drag this out and it'll make a copy of that. It's another little fun hotkey. If I tried to dissolve these two clips that have there in and out points finite, you'll be able to see that nothing's going to happen. Insufficient media transition will not contain repeated frames. We can't create a dissolve between nothing. There's nothing there to dissolve from. We can see that it stops as soon as the transition starts. We can see that he's not moving in the video clip that it's dissolving to because there's no frames there. Then same thing for the others, it stops moving once it reaches its in-point. What I'm getting at here is that we need to trim these to give it some time so that it has something that dissolves. I can just click and drag each one out and then drag them together and now watch what happens when I hit Control D. That cross dissolve is happening and centered on that cut. Now the video continues to play through the transition, even though it's dissolving, his tail still wagging all the way until the last frame until you can't see him anymore. I hope that makes sense. But that's also why we're not seeing that problem when we have images because like I said, there is no time involved with them. I'm going to delete that copy. I'm going to get rid of that film dissolve. I'm going to trim this video clip just a little bit and then hit control D, and now you can see that it applied a film dissolve and centered it up because now I created a little time. We can see at the very beginning of the transition now his tail's already wagging all that good stuff. But if we hadn't trimmed that clip a little bit to give it that time to dissolve, he would have just been frozen in space until the start of his clip. We don't want that. That looks a bit jerky and not super professional. That is these little things along the way. You're like, why is this happening like this? That hopefully, this quickly solves that problem and explains that. We've created a transition for every clip. We have shown how to adjust the default transition. We've shown where all the transitions live in the effects panel if you want to choose different ones, all we have to do is just click and drag those in. Let's say we want to do a wipe of some kind, you can just drag it in. I don't know, I'm being particular about this right now, a check wipe, whatever. We can click and drag that in. Now we can see that it's doing this super wonky. I don't like these transitions if you can't tell us why we're not using it. But anyway, that's how you apply those other transitions. We've learned how to do all kinds of stuff just very quickly. Obviously, if you select the transition itself, that's where you get those controls. You can see what A and B, how it's going to do it. We can actually show the real sources so that we can see without having to scrub the timeline. It's a bit redundant, it's a bit overkill. There's not much to really change here other than what's getting blended on. You can change that by hitting ''Reverse''. There's a couple of options here, but it's not crazy. But if we wanted to change the direction, we could do that with these little arrows as well from here. It's going to wipe from a different direction in the case of wipes. There are a few little features of wipes or transitions that you can adjust from the effects controls once you bring them in. We've learned transitions, we've learned how to change the default. We have learned why does some transitions not work when we're using video clips that have in their out points. There's a lot more to this than that meets the eye usually. It can hopefully this video has saved you some time search around Internet trying to figure this out for yourself between 1,000 different YouTube videos or forums or something. Hopefully this sketch on the right track in the next lesson. Now we're going to create the preset animation, then we can apply that to every clip so that we have some motion. That's the one thing about still images in a slideshow. It can be a bit boring, and just the slightest bit of motion can help the viewer stay interested. We're going to do that in the next lesson. Thanks for watching.
7. Animate: In this lesson, we're going to learn about animation and how to animate through the transitions that we made. Just like the in and out points that we had a trim so that there was something for the transition to and from, same way that we want to set key frames in a way that they also encompass the transition time. You'll understand a little bit more once we get started here. Let's learn how to animate first. Let me just delete these transitions so we're not having to deal with that aspect yet. If I select a clip, I get this little effects control panel that we're familiar with now. I can scrub up here, but I don't recommend scrubbing here because as you scrub through, it jumps. We can see how it just, what just happened? It just jumped a bunch of clips ahead. If you want to scrub, scrub in the timeline. I don't recommend scrubbing up here because it's very finicky. I'll talk about that more in a second. But essentially, let's just say we want to scale this image up very gently from 100 to 110. What we want to do is set the little stopwatch here. We're going to set the first key frame. When I click the stopwatch, now, we have the option to delete that key frame right here or we could add more as we scrub through the time. We could scrub or if we know we wanted to go all the way to the end of that edit, we can just hit down on the keypad. Now, it's important to take note here. When we're jumping between edits, it is selecting for us automatically the next clip. Where the time indicator is? This blue line is the time indicator. It's already selecting the next clip if we're using up and down. But we wanted to set the key frame for the previous clip, so we have to manually click that to make sure that we're setting it for that. Now, we can type in a certain value, 110, and we can see it automatically adds a key frame there at the very end of that clip. Now, when we scrub back and forth, we can see that it's gently zooming in to that picture. That's cool. Now, where transitions come in is if we were to select both of these and do our nice little hotkey, control D that we've already learned. It's going to set that transition. It's a bit hard to see here because we're not scaling up by that much. I'm going to select my clip, I'm going to go back to that key frame by clicking the arrow. Now, again, it's selected the wrong clip so I'm just going to go back and select the right clip that does have the key frames. I'm just going to scale us up a lot so we can actually see this problem that we're going to solve. Scrubbing the timeline, we can see that the image stops scaling mid transition. It's a bit jarring that we've been watching this thing the whole time. Nice, gentle zoom in, and then it will stop at the midpoint of the transition, and then finish fading out. We don't want that. At least I don't want that. It's jarring, it doesn't look deliberate. This doesn't look good. I want to continue that animation through the transition. We need to move that key frame to include the transition time to encompass that time as well. If we click the clip and we look here, we can see the transitions are actually included in our timeline here in the effects control panel. We can see that this key frame is actually, we can see, it is at the midpoint of this transition. That's what these little purple boxes are, those show what are the length of the transitions. We could extend the transitions if we wanted, we could do all different kinds of stuff, and then that would also now be reflected in the effects control panel here. But I want everything to be pretty standard so I'm leaving them at their default time amount for the transitions. But back to this, look, it's at the midpoint, we don't want it. All we have to do is just click and drag it to the end. Now, I can't drag my mouse any further than the endpoint here, and I'll let go. Now, when we play back, we can see that keeps scaling up all way through the transition. It's one of those small things but if you're watching like 10 minutes of images, you'll notice it. We don't want people to notice that stuff, we want people to notice the images, not jarring problems like that in our animation. That is why we want to get the transitions and first, to create this preset. Because what we're going to do is apply this to every single clip By making a preset of this. We don't want to have to hand animate this for every single image. Let's just do this once and be done with it. We're not having a fiddle with the effects control flipping to the next clip by depending on where the time indicator is, it's just to click and drag that key frame back to wherever we want it, and then we can use these arrows. Since that time is within that clip, it's not in the transition, it's not trying to flip to the next clip. Because if it was over here and we hit the arrow, now, we're on the next clip, we don't want that. We want to stay on this clip. The easy way to do that is just move the key frame back towards nice and safe and we're not having to deal with that annoying feature, I guess. What we want to do is get back to something reasonable, a nice gentle zoom in from 100. Now, we can click and drag this key frame back. Now, what we have is we have key frames that encompass transitions for an image clip that exists for five seconds. We've standardized everything based on the defaults. We have the default five second transition that we learned how to set in the preferences, and we could change that if we wanted. We're using the same place where you could change the default transition amount which is one second. That is including all of those things where these key frames are set in time. That's important because we're creating a preset, we wanted to work for everything that we applied to. Everything needs to be standardized in this way, and of course, the other thing that we learned about was when we right-clicked and scale to frame size, that got everything to work within this 100 scale value. Even though everything got scaled down or up or they got to fit to frame, everything has that one value in common now, that 100. Everything is going to start at 100, no matter how they got to there which that was the nice fancy thing of the scale to frame size. Now, all we need to do is to create this preset and apply it to everything. What we can do is go to this little three line button here. It's a bit hidden. What we're going to do is click that. With motion selected, you can see that Save Preset was grayed out. If it's grayed out, it's because you don't have motion selected. Let me just show you that one more time. See how Save Preset is gray, we need motion selected. Now, we can save a preset and we can just name it whatever we want. I'm going to say course. It's a long name, but I'll notice it when I'm looking for all my presets. Now, we've created this preset. How do we apply it to everything? Let's select all of our clips. I'm going to just click, drag, select. We could select the first one and it will just overwrite what we've already done anyways. We need to go back to the Effects panel here again. Again, if you don't have that, you can go Window, Effects. Now, we're back. Let's toggle all these little arrows down. The top folder here is presets. Let's jump to presets, and our presets are just right at the top of the stack. We can see what we had named here, CourseProjectTransitionScale. Whatever you named it as, that's where you want to find it. We just need to click, drag, and let go. Now, when we scrub through, every single clip has the right dimensions, it's scaled correctly to fit the frame, it's scaling up all at the same time, and they all have the same transition. The scaling up is happening through the transition. right it's clear why we've taken the steps that we have and why we did them in the order that we did so that now, you can have 1000 pictures. It didn't matter the number of pictures or videos that we had. Remember, the video transition issue, that's the one thing about videos. You you have to adjust that in and out point for the videos transitions to work. Don't forget that. But if it's just images, you could have however many you want to have. Just like that, you can apply all of these effects the same time. Now, we have this really nice transition animated, all the images. It didn't matter where they came from, what dimensions they were, how they were oriented. Although I will mention, if you didn't want to do the orientation stuff earlier, you probably already figured this out, you can rotate them right here. If something came in the wrong way, you can just use rotation here in the Effects control panel and fix that yourself. But like I said, it's a lot easier to do that if you're in Windows. Just go in Windows Explorer, double-click it, rotate it, close it, and hopefully, it should save that orientation correctly. In this lesson, we learned how to animate in Adobe Premier, how to deal with the finicky timeline, try to jump to the different clip, especially when you have transitions. We recovered the shortcut of hotkey [inaudible] it's up and down. We talked about how easy it is to just move that key frame back into the clip so that we can set the time to a different value of that, so we're not jumping to the next clip. I'm probably making it sound more confusing than it is now but you've been through it so you should know what I'm talking about now. In the next lesson, we're going to wrap this up and I will show you a few cool things to finish out this, to make it look and seen a little bit more. I'll see you there. Thanks for watching.
8. Final Polish: In this lesson we're going to wrap things up and I'm going to show you how to finish on your slideshow and render it. But first, I just want to mention a really nice resource. At least right now, things might change in the future, but you always want some music typically with your slideshows. The easiest way to do that is to try to find some royalty free stuff, something that isn't going to get flagged by Facebook, or YouTube, or whatever social media platform that is trying to figure out the copyright stuff. YouTube actually has a really nice audio library that you can choose royalty free music from. If you have a YouTube account, all you have to do is just go down to the YouTube Studio, and once we're in there, on the bottom-left there's an Audio library. When we click that we get access to all of these songs, and we can filter by different genres and whatnot and then we just download it, and we can use it in our projects without worrying too much about copyright issues and that kind of a thing. Just be aware of that if you want to add audio to your project. So you download it, and in Premiere, all you have to do is just import that audio. Just like anything else, right-click "Import" or you could click and drag it in, and then once it's in here you can navigate to where the audio is, just click one, hit "Okay". It has imported it, and now we can click and drag it in the timeline. If we wanted to extend this out, we could just Alt click to make a copy of itself, and we can extend that timeout. We could just make a copy of itself, overlap it. Same thing with the video transitions. If we just adjust the in and out points so that there's something to transition to and from, and I can lock this timeline and then hit "Plus" to zoom in here. We're getting a bit more technical, but all I'm doing is, I'm going to hit "Z" now. I locked the timeline above just so that nothing is going to move when I'm hitting the Z stuff. We can see that this moved. It'll tell you if there's video linked, audio linked to video rather. It'll tell you it has moved so many frames, so lets move five seconds, one second, and then we can just drag that back. That was because we locked one track and not the other. Now that we have this audio we can select all of these and hit "Shift Control D", and that will create an audio transition so that it'll be a nice fade in/fade out or a constant transition rather depending on what your default is. If we just hit "Play" we can see the audio is really loud. If we wanted to reduce that we could go through each audio clip and pull the gain down here. But we know this whole track is too loud so we could actually just go to the audio clip, not the mixer here. What we want is the Audio Track Mixer. If you don't have that open, you're going to open it here. Then we have this nice little slider, so we can see it's A1, Audio 1. That lines up with this A1, Audio 1. We just drag this thing all the way down, and we can see that we can control the audio. I just pull up all the way down so it's not overpowering anything. That's a really quick and easy way to add music and adjust it's volume. One other problem with this, I'm just going to mute this by hitting "M" here. It's going to mute the track so its not going to play back while I'm scrubbing. Look at all the black area around the image, especially vertical images. Let's create a nested sequence now so that we can create a nice little effect to help ease that harsh contrast between seeing an image and a total blackness around it. Especially for vertical video, this is a really nice effect to apply. What I want to do is actually nest this sequence into another sequence. The way to do that, I just click and drag this over the New item button, and it will create a new sequence for us. Now, it's named the exact same, which isn't very helpful. We want to click here and say Nested and hit "Enter". Now we have this sequence. What I like to do is Alt click the video track up. Now we have a copy of itself around on top of itself, and let's scrub to that vertical image. What I can do is now apply a blur effect and scale this up so that we have a backdrop that's blurred out, of the exact same image or video that we're looking at. I'm going to go to Effects. I'm going to go down to Video Effects, go to Blur. Of course we can type this in here as well if we know exactly what we want. I'm going to go to Gaussian Blur. I'm going to drag and drop that on the bottom track. Well, just so we can see the blur take effect let's first grab the scale and scale it up only this way because we want to fill out the frame because we're using the exact same image. If we were to scale right now, it's going to scale the whole thing up, which you could do as well, but you're missing the top and bottom. I like to see everything horizontally matching whereas right now we have blue sky, and then a white building. I'd like to see a blue sky. What we can do is actually untick Uniform Scale. Now we have scale width, it becomes available. We can scale this width-wise to whatever it needs to be. It doesn't matter we're going to blur it out anyways, but now it's a much nicer transition, I think. But we don't want a totally scaled image, we want to use the blur that we clicked and dragged on earlier. We can see that's now living in our Effects Control, so now all we have to do is increase the blurriness by clicking and dragging. We can also repeat edge pixels. You can see a little black area here because when it's blurring it's averaging the pixels near it, and if there's nothing near it, like the edges, it's going to be black. We want to say Repeat Edge Pixels. Watch this, click, and now we have a nice blur all the way to the edge of our frame. Now it's applied it for the entire thing because we did it to a nested sequence, so it's applying it to the entire sequence. Maybe the vertical video, we can still see we have black bar so we might need to increase this scale with just a little bit more so that it fits the the lowest common denominator of what's the narrowest thing. It's probably going to be this vertical video, so we need to scale up based on that. We can scrub through here, we can see we have a fade in, we have the nice background even for crop stuff, we have audio in, we've changed the volume. Let's say we want to add a title. That's very easy, you can hit "T" or get to the tools which you can hover over here which I've been referring to a little bit. I don't really use these that much because I just use V pretty much all day, I mentioned earlier. But T is the type tool, so what I can do is hit "T". You can see now it's highlighted, I can just click anywhere and now I can start typing. I'll just say Dudley. I can hit "Control A" to highlight it, and I could toggle this down, same area, same effect controls but if I toggle the text down, now I get all these crazy options here. Maybe I want to center it, I want to change the font to something else. Let's do Medium, change that. Now all I have to do is just match the position with the position here from the motion. We can see we have two positions. We have the position of the text and the position of that layer, because when we hit "T", if I plus in here with the sequence selected here and plus, we can see it has actually created a new track by itself. So we have the position of that track, that clip, then we have the position of the text itself and they're not the same. The position of the clip is always going to be in the center. We know the center is 960 by 540, so what I have to do is just type that in here and it will center up the text to be in the exact center of our frame. That's how to create a title. We could hit "Control D" and feed that in and out as well. That would be a nice way to add a title if we wanted to do that. Cool. We've added a lot of cool things right here at the end, now let's export it. I'm going hit "Control M", and it's going to pull up the Export settings. Be aware of what you have selected. Let's say we were in project and we were maybe looking at the video in the source here, which we haven't talked much about because we don't have a ton of video on this, but this is essentially the difference between that's the clip and this is our actual edit over here. See how they're different? But if I was here and I hit "Control M", it's going to try to export that video. We don't want that, we want the timeline. So select the timeline, hit "Control M", and now we can export according to whatever settings that we want. There's a ton of presets here that you can pick from depending on the codecs that you have loaded on your machine. You might not have Apple ones, it all depends. Typically what I like to do is do QuickTime. H.264 is a very common one as well, go on YouTube very nicely and keeps the quality okay. But I like to start out really high-quality, and then I'll compress it in HandBrake. So I'll go QuickTime, and then I like Apple ProRes 422 LT. Then I'll match source just to make sure that all of these things down here like the dimensions which we can untaken, we could scale it up right at the very end for some reason if we wanted to or change the frame rate, all that stuff. But we're going to keep that the same. We do have audio so we can make sure that's ticked. We can hit "Export", and it will export to whoever we have this output name located. Right now I have it here and let's say I want it somewhere else, I can just navigate in my explorer to this project and name it whatever I want it rendered, hit "Save", and then when I hit "Export", now it's going to export that video as a movie file based on the settings that we chose QuickTime per Apple Pros 42. But again, H.264 does really well, then you don't have to use HandBrake, which I'll show you here in two seconds. Now that we have it exported, I just want to mention HandBrake very briefly, it's a really nice open source free software that you can use to compress your very high-quality videos down to a much more reasonable file size for the Internet or for delivering to someone so that it's not massive. Because if we take a look at this file, it's pretty huge. We can see that the actual export that we just did is almost three gigabytes, and that's pretty massive. Let's use HandBrake very quickly so that we can compress that down. I'm going to click "HandBrake", it's going to open. Then I'm just going to click-and-drag this in, and now it's going to compress it. I'm going to type p4. Instead of the m4v whatever, I want it to be an MP4. I just manually type that in, and then it should pull the correct dimensions and the frame rate. But again, there's presets here if you want to change it to something else, and then the actual quality is set in the video tab here. If we want better quality, we just drag this to the right. If we want lower quality we drag it to the left. But 22 is the default that it brings in, so I'm going leave that close to that and I'm going to encode this by hitting the "Start Encode" button, and just wait for this to finish and we can compare the file size and the quality. You can see the HandBrake is a very nice thing to have in your toolkit. Now that's finished encoding, we can compare the file size. You can tell there's a massive difference. It's a three-gig file down to 100 megabytes. That's huge and that's the advantage of using HandBrake, starting with a high-quality thing and let HandBrake do its magic so that it gets it down to a reasonable size. Then we can delete the original so that we can free up some storage space on our computer. I'll see you in the next lesson where I will discuss next steps and what's next possibly for you in your journey learning this kind of thing. Thanks for watching. Bye.
9. Next Steps: Thanks for watching this quick course on jumping into Premiere Pro and how to create this type of a slideshow. You've seen seem now that you have it set up, how quickly it is to import your media, scale everything to fit the frame, add a transition to everything in it, apply a preset, and in those few steps, you have an entire slideshow done, exported, ready to go. In the future, if anyone asks you to do a slideshow, you can either make it for them or refer them to this course and they can make it themselves. That's what I'm going to be doing from now on in case anyone wants a slideshow from me. Hope you'll check out my other courses. Leave me feedback about this one, what you liked, what you didn't like. If there's an opportunity to give a review, I would appreciate that, and also give me a follow on social medias and all that good stuff. Also, hopefully, we'll be putting hours in another class related to slideshows and will be a nice capstone to this effect would be to do a 3D fly through collage, a bunch of photos. It's something I've done for one and I want to share in a course coming up soon. If you visit my profile or the course library of things I'm teaching and you don't see it, hopefully it's coming out soon, so stay tuned for that. Please check out my other courses where I teach more about animation. I have Adobe After Effects courses as well, and of course, my main thing and my professional life is animating on movies and games and all good stuff and now teaching. Hopefully some of my knowledge can help you on your journey doing what you do. Thanks for watching and I look forward to seeing you in my next course. Bye.
Lucas Ridley, Professional Animator
