Fading in and out

If your video clip begins or ends abruptly, you can soften the intros and outros by applying Fade In and Fade Out effects. The Fade effect creates an animated transition between your first frame and your fade duration, and again your last frame and its ending fade duration. If your first and last frames are black, you'll see a fade in from black effect. If they are not, you'll see an interesting blur. To create a fade, click on the media clip that you want to adjust. I'm working on Slide 6 of my presentation. When I click on my media clip, I have new tabs appear for Video Tools, Format and Playback.

I'll click on Playback. In the editing tools on the left-hand side, I see two boxes for fade duration. Fade In and Fade Out. I can either use my arrows to increase them and decrease them in .25 increments or I can also type in the box. Now when I preview my video, I can see that blur. (Male speaker: It's actually my anniversary tonight and I forgot about it?) I'll skip to the end. (Male speaker: ?saving my relationship tonight so it's where I come every time.) So you can see that blur effect.

Now, if you do really want a true fade in from black and fade out to black, but your video clip does not have a black frame for the first frame and the last frame, here's a workaround that you can use. I am going to go to Slide 4 and apply this effect to this video. The first thing that I need to do is set this movie to play automatically. I will go to my Video Tools Playback Ribbon and change the Start from On Click to Automatically. The next step is to create my black box. I will go to Insert and Shapes and I'll choose a rectangle. I'll drag it to my exact dimension of my video clip.

Next I need to change the color to black. So I'll go to the Drawing Tools Format tab that appears and click on Shape Fill and select black. Now I need to animate these two effects. Go to your Animations tab. Because this rectangle is already black, I am going to want it to fade away. So I'm going to click on the More button in my animation effect and find Fade Out.

I'll make its duration 1.5 seconds. I will open up the Animation Pane by clicking on this button right here on the right hand side of the Ribbon. I do want this animation to happen at the same time as my movie so I'm going to change the start from On Click to With Previous so that it starts fading at the same time my movie starts playing. Now, I need to make it fade to black at the end. So I am going to click on the rectangle, right-click on it, copy it, click on it again, right click, and paste.

Now I have two rectangles. I'll also move it right on top of the first rectangle. Now this time I want this shape to fade in because it doesn't exist and then I want to see it as black. So I'm going to change the Effect option to Fade In, and I want this to happen after the other effect. So I am going to change the start this time to After Previous and again up the duration to 1.5.

Now let's play our slide and see how it works. I'll click on Slide Show. (Female speaker: Hansel and Petal has been for years?) There is my fade in. (Female speaker: ?most amazingly beautiful?) Now because this is all working on timing, I can't actually fast-forward through this video so we are going to watch it. (Female speaker: ?to get something and I always greeted with a smile and they always provide excellent recommendations.) (Female speaker: And they never fail to send me out of here with an amazing bouquet or amazing product and you just can't beat the price.) And there is our fade out.

So we have created a fade in from black and a fade out from black by using three objects, animations, and animation timings. The ability to create this fade will definitely smooth out the flow of your presentation so that your media doesn't jolt the audience.