Playing with time: Freeze, change speed, and duration

Time. Time is money, but it is also changeable and you can freeze it too, especially in Premiere Elements. Let's take a look at how to do that. Once again, I have my three clips of my dancers, my girl pouting, and she finally dances, and I also added a clip of an interview from the dance company. We will take a look at that in a second. Okay, first things first. I think she really would be happy to see this in slow motion. So I have a tool here called the Time Stretch tool, and if I go up into my area here where my tools are, I am currently in the cursor, or the Selection tool.

I can go next to it into the Time Stretch tool, or click the letter X as a shortcut. So I am going to select the Time Stretch tool. Now what if I want to make it faster? So the Time Stretch tool becomes this really strange cursor. And if I hold it over, you can see it's just like the other tool, but I have got the two arrows up and down now, and that's indicating to me that I can speed things up or slow them down. So I am going to select the end here, click and drag, maybe to there, and while I am at it, I am going to expand a little more.

So I can see now that--and let's go just a little more zooming in-- I have got 139.06%. And once again I have the red bar, which means I would need to pre-render this, but we are not going to do that right now. We are going to press play and there they are, moving a lot faster. And you also notice that as I did that, I got a gap here, so once again you would right-click and choose to delete and close. We are not going to do that just yet. We are going to Command+Z to undo, and we are at 100%. And I am going to zoom in a little bit.

What if I want to make it slower? I can click and drag. I can't. I am stuck. Why? Because there is a clip next to it. I go to this clip, try and drag to the right. It won't let me. I can only make it faster or click it in or make it smaller. So I can't slow it down just yet. However, let me just drag my Selection tool, move this interview clip over, go back to my Time Stretch tool, now if I drag it to the right, I can slow it down.

And now I have slowed it down to 66.91%. And I can click and play and there she is moving a lot slower. Cool. And we will stop it there. And now I might like that and I might want to right- click and delete and close the gap. So let me undo this, because there is another way to do this, without all of that dragging around. So I do want to make this slower, so as my Time Stretch tool is selected, I am going to go over the piece of footage I want to slow down, I am going to right-click, and this gives me some options.

Go down till I see Time Stretch and click that. Now in the Time Stretch dialog box, I can change the speed to anything I want by clicking and dragging left and right. I can also click in it and choose in exact amount. So let's say I am going to go 50%. I want it to be really slow. It's showing me that my duration is now 17 seconds. I can reverse it, so go backwards, and we will actually do that. And Maintain Audio Pitch, we are going to talk about that with the interview footage. So let's just click this. So I click OK.

Now it pushed the other clip away from it, allowed me to stretch it, and I am playing it 50%, and it's backwards. So let's go back here and when I press play, there it is, all slow motion in 50%, and it's backwards from what it was. Maybe I think that's the way it should be. Time should go backwards. So it really is that simple, and let's go back. Command+Z to undo this. And if you see, we are playing in real time, and we are going in the right direction.

Now let's go into this interview, and let me just play this for a couple of seconds, by pressing the spacebar or clicking the play button. (Female speaker: Dance classes. That's the foundation of our programming.) So she is talking about dance classes and programming, which is pretty relevant to this. Now if I wanted to, I can go to the end here, since there is nothing there, and I can slow this down and press play. (Female speaker: That's the foundation of our programming. Um.) Okay, but what if I want to make it faster. So let's say I make it really fast and I will press play now.

(sped-up inaudible speech) So that sounded really weird, and that's where we talk about what pitch is, a high pitch or a low pitch. (sped-up inaudible speech) This chipmunk sound is the high pitch, and we don't want that, and there is ways to fix that. So let's undo this by pressing Command+Z and now we have got our normal speed, and I will just test it. I am hitting the spacebar, okay we are good. So instead of dragging, I am going to right-click once again, go into Time Stretch, and I am going to make this 150%, but I am going to maintain my audio pitch.

So make sure that's selected, click OK. Let's go back a little bit. Let's press the Spacebar. (sped-up inaudible speech) Okay, so you can see it's completely different now. It's not sounding as chipmonky. It's little weird, but it sound useable. So that's how you would do that. And I am going to press Command+Z to undo. Now one last feature that's really cool. What if right here she is doing her move I wanted to freeze that time? I am going to go up here into this lovely little camera here that's called the Freeze Frame, and I am going to select it, and this is showing me what I am freezing, how many seconds I want it to be.

So I am just going to start with the default to five seconds. If you have Adobe Photoshop Elements installed as well, you can send it to Photoshop Elements after you have done this. Maybe you want to do some kind of the cartoon look in it or something, whatever. You can do all that, be creative if you'd like. Now I can export a freeze frame clip or I can just insert it right there where I want it. So I am going to insert it into my movie. It moves everything over and now if I press play, we are playing, we are frozen, and we are playing again.

That's a little long, so I am going to get my Selection tool. I am going to drag it over a couple of seconds, let go. It ripple-edits. I am going to press Play once again. We froze and we are doing it again. So as you can see, it's really easy to become a master of time in Premiere Elements.