Character Intro Effect - Adobe Premiere Pro, YouTube Video Editing FX to Make Your Videos POP!

1. Welcome to Class: Hi, welcome to this course on character introduction effects in Premiere Pro. My name is Cal and I've been using this particular effect on Premiere Pro. Not only in my YouTube videos, but also other videos as well, just like the one you're watching right now. I absolutely love this character effect and I'm excited to share it with you today. Once you've completed this class, you'll be able to use this effect, whether it be to introduce characters, highlight products or capture action in motion, just like we'll see here today. As a bonus, I've included a downloadable PDF guide that lists every step we take in this lesson on Premiere Pro. That way you don't have to scroll back and forth in this video to re-create the steps I'm about to show you. We'll look at setting up the main effect, enhancing the effect, adding background effects, animating the background and text plus I've added a few PNG files you can use to make your background more unique. If you have a YouTube channel, if you like editing videos, or if you're just looking for a cool Premiere Pro effect, this course is for you. All you need to do now is grab a video clip to play with and jump on Premiere Pro and follow along with me. Great. See you in the next video. 2. Setting Up the Main Effect: [MUSIC] So The first thing we want to do is setup our main effect. If we pop on over here to Premiere Pro, if we look on the timeline, we can see some of this stuff that I've already put up. We've already seen this in the introduction video. Right here I've got this particular girl as she freeze frames here. Then I can adjust the size so you can see these together. Then we have our product popping out for us right here. Notice that down here there are few extra files. These two files in the center are background animations. We see here, we don't have them here, but you have a choice you can be as creative as you want, add whatever you want. So keep that in mind as we go throughout this quick lesson. Let's scroll over and give ourselves a little space. We're going to animate and isolate the motorbiker. Notice I scroll over here and I've got my motor bike's video right here. I'm going to double-click on that, show up here in our top-left source panel pain. We can scroll throughout here and we've got all these bikers coming through but I've isolated this particular clip of the video. In order to do that, it's real simple. Just find your in points and out points. At your in point, click on the letter I on your keyboard and at the out point, click on the letter O, and you'll have these two areas here. The next thing you want to do is grab right here and drag it into your timeline. We have our clip. Notice it's scrolling across the screen. The next thing we want to do is find the part that we want to freeze. I'm going to go right about here because it's pretty clear right there. I'm going to click on my clip. I'm going to cut. When we do that on the second side, on the right side clip, what you'll want to do is drag out a little bit however long you want and then right-click and go up to "Add Frame Hold". I'm going to Click on that right there. Now notice what happens. We're going to slide over and it just stops at that part and we have this area to manipulate. The next thing we want to do is duplicate this. Now I'm on a Mac. In order to duplicate, I'm going to click the option button and just drag up and let go. We've made a copy. Now if you have Microsoft, all you need to do is click the Alt button and perform the same procedure. So now we have two clips. Let's click on the top clip and then let's go into our effects control panel. Under opacity, we're going to have this pen icon. Now this pen icon is going to allow us to make a mask around our biker here or whatever object you want to isolate and create an effect. Now keep this in mind. I'm going to scroll in a little bit so you can say, instead of fit, let's go to 200 percent. I'm going to move this down. You can easily manipulate your screen by grabbing right here and moving things around. So I'm going to come down a little bit. Notice right about here if I were to make a mask for this entire, just around the motorbike and motorcyclist, we're going to have this section right here that will stay within that mask, but we don't want to keep that in here. We want to cut it out. So what we're going to do, if you have a similar situation, we're going to make a mask around it but we're going to cut up this triangle here. Then we'll make a second mask to take this section of the leg and you'll see what I'm talking about in a moment. Let's go ahead and create a mask by clicking on the pen icon, and I'm going to start clicking around. To make it easier, let's go to 200 percent. Going to scroll down here to see where we are. I'll click on the outside. We can move these masks points to however we want to best suit and cover the perimeter of our object. You can do it like this, let them come in or you can just scroll over to the next endpoint. Now, I said we wanted to cut this off, so I'm going to come up here, cut this here, go up here. Let's do this real quickly so you understand what I'm doing. Click right about here, come down here, and then we're going to stop it at this, let's say the bottom part of the name. Later we're going to take out this mask right here. Let's go around here and create our first mask. [MUSIC] We're about to close our mask and connect the first and last points together and we'll look at that we've got our first mask. I'll go ahead and go back to fit and you can see it right here. Now, we still have the leg that we need to include. In order to do that, let's go back up here and let's click on the pen a second time and notice that we have a mask number two, so we can create our second mask. Let's go ahead and go back to 200. Isolate our leg. Let's try and write it out here. It's where we click on [inaudible] here, down at the knee. Let's make right about here and [inaudible], we have our second mask. Now, if we go down and hit "Fit", we've got both of our masks. We can see mask number 1 and mask number 2 For each mask, you're going to want to go to mask feather option right here. It'll be at 10 as a default, Let's keep it 0 for each of those. Click "0" and then 0. Then we want to create our effect. In order to do that, we want key frames at the beginning and at the end. Let's go to the beginning of our second clip right here. We're going to go up here to position, click it, position, and scale. Click on these two icons. We've created two key frames here. Now if we scroll a little further over to the center, let's go around the center and create two new key frames and make some adjustments. Let's go ahead and change the scale to be a little bit larger about right here. Let's move the position a little bit over to the right. Notice as we scroll back and forth, we have an effect. Now, we still use two key frames they're in the center. Let's highlight those and drag them all the way to the right so they encompass our entire clip and clip, and this is the effect that we have. Now we want to separate our background from our main object here. So what we'll do is let's go down to the bottom clip and we want to go into our effects. We're going to put two different effects on our bottom clip. The first one is a blur effect. If you type in G-A-U-S and it'll pop up our Gaussian Blur option here. Click on it and drag it to the bottom clip. Now we have our Gaussian blur. Let's adjust the blurriness a little bit to whatever looks best for you. I'm going to go to about, let's say 30. Then let's go back up here and click on black and white, B-L-A-C-K and ampersand and we'll have the black and white option here and drag it also onto the bottom clip. There we go. We're scrolling through our video. There's a pop in a contrast with blur color and our main object. Fantastic. So if everything looks good to you, the next thing you want to do is click on the top clip that has the animation. Right-click and let's nest it. Click "Nest" If you want, you can type in a name, but it's not necessary, and then click "OK" and we have our first main effect completed. [MUSIC] 3. Enhancing the Effect: [MUSIC] The second thing we want to do is create an enhancing effect by putting an outline around our object. The way we do that, let's go back into our effects panel and search, just type in radial and you'll get radial shadow. Drag that onto our nested clip and notice we have a shadowing effect. All we need to do is modify it. The first thing we want to do is go to opacity. Instead of 50 percent, let's give that 100 percent. We have a clear black shadow on our object. If you want to change the color, go for it. You're certainly welcome to do that. I'm going to just choose a simple white outline as opposed to black. But you can get creative and choose any color that you want. Let's go to our projection distance. Move it. Let's tweak it to right about here. Let's move our light source a little bit to where we've got somewhat of an outline. This looks pretty good to me. Let's go ahead and test it. We scroll in and we have our effect. Before we go on to the next step, let's take our nested clip and drag it up 1, 2 spaces so we'll have some room here for our background and text effects. Coming up next. [MUSIC] 4. Adding Background Effects: [MUSIC] For our next step, we want to add background effects and text effects. It's pretty simple. Already included in our Skillshare course, if you look in the project and resources section, there's a file that has several PNG files that you can use as backgrounds, and you can insert them and modify the colors which we're about to see. If you want a different background, you can create your own, you can use canva.com, if you have an account, you'll be able to create a PNG file with a transparent background, or you can go to www3.lunapic.com. I'll leave the link in the description and you can use their free site. But for now, let's use one of the images that I've included here on Skillshare. If we go down into our effects panel here, I have got an image labeled Shapes. Now I'm going to drag it over here. I'm going to put it at the very bottom of our two options and I'm going to slide it over a little bit so we're consistent with the duration of our clips. This looks pretty good right here, however, I might want to change the color. Now, if you want to change the color, it's pretty simple. All we need to do is add another effect. If we go into our Effects panel here, this time we're going to type in the word change. [MUSIC] With change, you have these two options, change color or change to color. Make sure you choose Change to Color and drag it onto our shape. Now since this is a black PNG, it's a little tricky. Normally what you do is you just click on the color picker and click here on the color, but instead, what's it's done is it's all over here on the right side. Instead, we want to drag it all the way to the left. This will make it easier for us to switch colors. Then click Okay. From is our black color on our PNG file. The next thing we want to do is we can either just click here and choose any color we want, or instead, we can choose the color picker and choose one that's on our main image. I'll just choose this red right here, so it matches our biker's helmet. Then finally, in order to make the change, we want to click here and instead of hue, let's go down to the bottom and choose Hue, Lightness & Saturation, and voila, we have a color change. Finally, let's put in some text. Let's choose our text icon here, or type tool, click somewhere on here and type in whatever text you want. Let's go ahead. I will type in Racer and I'm going to highlight it. Let's change the font style. Just once again, make sure we have things highlighted. Click the text and I'm going to go with neon light just because it's easier to find. It looks interesting. You can change the color if you want, but I think white looks just fine here. I'm going to make it a little bit bigger and modify its position. Now let's go back into our timeline. Notice that the tax was put at the top instead, let's modify its position, let's move it around a little bit, and have it consistent with the rest of our clips. There we go. Let's look at our clip again. We've got a racer coming in, we have the effect of the racer himself or herself. We don't really know, but we don't have an effect for the background and the text. We will in a moment coming up in our next video. [MUSIC] 5. Animating the Background and Text: [MUSIC] Let's put some animation effects to our background image and our tags. Let's work with the shape first. Choose your shape and we're going to add keyframes pretty much as we did earlier. Let's start at the beginning here. Let's add keyframes for position, scale, and rotation. Then let's scroll to around them a little toward the end, and let's change the scale. I'll think I'll go make it a little bit larger. I think I have it move a little bit to the left in contrast to our biker. Then I'll give it a bit of a rotation to match the biker leaning to one side. I think this looks pretty good. Now, we have our three key frames in the center here. Let's do the same as we did earlier. Click on or highlight all of them and scroll all the way to the right. Let's take a look at the effect. It looks pretty good. Now, let's do the same thing for our text. So we'll start at the beginning with Racer text, highlight your text, and give a key frame for position, scale, and rotation. Let's move towards, let's say 75 percent of the way over to the right, adjust the scale a little bit, let's say right about there. Let's move its position, go further down. I'm going to rotate it to face a similar angle as we have our shape right about here. Let's move this up a little bit, and position it to where it looks as best as it could. Let's test it out and boom, things look pretty good to me. If everything looks good, the next thing you want to do is highlight all four of these end clips, and we're going to do a second next. Right-click, go up to nest, type in a name if you want or not, and click Okay, fantastic. In order to see things play out as best they can, let's go ahead and render effects. We're going to render our sequence by clicking at the beginning, clicking our the letter I on your keyboard, go toward the end. Click on O, we have this section to render. Let's just go up to our sequence at the top menu. Click Render in and out. Then right-click here and clear in and out. Now, our sequence is smooth and can be easily viewed. I'll just click Play. Boom, there we go. [MUSIC] 6. Class Project: [MUSIC] Now you know how to create your own character intro effect. We looked at setting up the main effect, enhancing the effect, adding background effects, and animating the background and text. Now, it's your turn to give it a shot. Go ahead and use what we've learned here today on Skillshare. Use some of the PNG files that I've included here for you and complete our class project. That's for you to create your own character intro effect and submitted here on Skillshare for all of us to see. I hope you've enjoyed this lesson and I hope to see you for another class coming up soon. See you then.