Adding a transition effect between two clips

Far and away the most common transition between two images is a straight cut. If you look here, I've got some regular video and as I play through, there's my cut and I'm seeing another video clip. You'll notice of course if I want to scrub along my timeline, that means dragging through the content, I have to click up here on the number region here, the timecode along the top of the timeline. Anywhere else and I'm just going to make a selection. You can click over the red line but I find that a bit dinky.

I tend to just click wherever I need my playhead to go. So, the most common transition is a cut, but the most common transition effect is a Cross Dissolve. And in fact, it's such a common effect that Premiere Pro has a keyboard shortcut to apply one to your selected track based on where your playhead is. And it's set up as the default effect. So, you can change the default effect but when you first install Premiere Pro it's going to be a Cross Dissolve. If I press Ctrl + D for dissolve, now you'll see that Premiere Pro adds a Cross Dissolve between these two clips.

And if I play through them. There we go, it, it blends between the two. That's a Cross Dissolve and it's centered on the cut. You can just see, if I make this a bit taller you can see that the Cross Dissolve has been applied halfway across the join between these two shots. Now, the duration of a Cross Dissolve is in the Preferences. If you look in the Preferences for Premier Pro, right on the general section here, we've got video transition default duration.

And then we've got audio transition default duration. Now time for video is most commonly measured in frames, so you can see here the default is 30 frames for a second for NTSC video. Audio is usually in milliseconds or sample so it is a little bit easier to think of it in seconds which is the same thing. This is just the default duration. If you want to change the duration of an effect that you have applied like this, you just hover the mouse over the end of the effect and click and drag to make it longer.

You will notice that there is a limit to how far you can go, and that limit is the end of the clip. Because when you apply a transition effect, it's the left over unused media from the shot that is incorporated into the transition. And you have to be a little bit careful about that. Because very often, there's a reason why you've excluded. For example, here, the honey pour.mauve shot would have stopped here. But originally the media went all the way over here. There might be a reason why that media's excluded. So whenever you put a transition effect on, always have a good look to make sure that you don't have some kind of jump cut going on in the background.

If I double-click on this clip, you'll see if I zoom out on this player monitor here there is the leftover content. Now this content referred to as handles. It's called handles, because in the old film cutting days, this would be the part of the film that you had to handled. This would be where you got your fingerprints. The bit that's not going to be used, and that name has stuck right the way into nonlinear editing systems. So I can apply a default transition this way by pressing Ctrl or Cmd+D. If I just select this, I'm clicking very carefully, on the Cross Dissolve, and hit the Delete key, I'm going to remove it and go back to a straight cut. If I go over to my Project panel, I've got far too many panels stacked up together up in this frame, so I get this navigator, along the top. I can click and drag the navigator over to see the other panels, or at least the tabs for them.

And here's my effects list. Under video transitions, I can expand this group, I've got lots and lots of different transition effects. And under Dissolve, here's my Cross Dissolve. I can apply the same effect by dragging and dropping it onto the timeline. Now you'll notice that right now I'm dragging and dropping it into the middle, between the two shots. If I go left a little bit, now I'm going to have this effect end at the end of the honey pour shot, and this is going to mean, well I'll show you. This is going to start fading into the other shot earlier so that I don't get any additional frames of the honey pour shot.

Once I've added the Cross Dissolve, I can just move it across the drawing. You see here I can drag and drop, but I'm still limited by the end of the handle for this honey pour shot. Looks like my smiling shot goes on a lot further. I can drag this out a long way. These transition effects are special effects like any other. And essentially, I suppose, let's say, the definition of a visual special effect is that it changes the appearance of the picture. And those special effects are work for your computer to apply.

Here, for example, I'm seeing a combination of two layers of video. And the blending of them together is effort for the computer. However, if you look at this effect its got these three markers next to it. The first one tells me that this is a Cuda enabled or an open CLNA effect. This one is hardware accelerated by the graphics card on my computer. If you don't have the right graphics card or if it's not installed properly, this will be a dull gray and you won't have the benefit of the GPU acceleration.

You'll still have good real-time support, it just won't be as outstanding as if you do have the graphics card. So if you possibly can get that on your machine, I encourage you to. The next option tells me that if I want to, this effect can be rendered at 32 bit floating point. And this just a very, very high quality way of calculating the effect. Regular video doesn't need to work at this quality. But if you want the best possible output. This is a good thing. And then YUV, it's very dinky letters, but it's YUV tells me that this effect operates in YUV color, which is the color system used by most cameras.

And that's different to the color system used in computing usually, which is RGB red, green, and blue. This system's designed to translate one to the other, but there's nothing quite like staying in the same color format as your original media. So this is a good effect to use for all of these reasons. Having applied a Cross Dissolve effect, if I go to my effect Controls panel up here and I'll just adjust the size of it, so you can see what's going on. I'm going to get settings for this Cross Dissolve. I can choose, for example, again, where it's going to appear in relation to the clips.

And up on the right, I'm getting the original first clip duration. And there's the leftover handle media, the unused part. That darker region. And here, I've got the smiling shop, the second shop. And the join in between is the Cross Dissolve. I just zoom out a little bit at the bottom here so you can see the relationship of it a bit more clearly. This is based on on an AB editing mode that an early version of Premiere used to use. And I was very fond of it when it was there, but it as taken away a long, long time ago. Here on the left I've got an option to show actual sources. And if I tick this box I'm going to see the first or the second clip. So I can just work out what I'm doing inside this panel a little better. And I can also center the cards, or start at the card, or end at the card and so on.

For this particular effect, these settings I'm going to give you anything much more than you'd get directly on the timeline. But with other effects, you'll find that you get many, many settings in the Effect Controls panel to adjust. If I want to replace a transition effect with a different transition effect, let me go for something very different here. An Irish Diamond, I'm going to drag and drop this on and that's going to replace the effect that's there with a new transition effect. But it's going to take the same duration and position.

And you'll notice this one doesn't have the go faster icon next to it. Which means that the computer is unable to playback the effect. This is what this red line is telling me as well. The computer is unable to playback this effect at full quality in real time, for whatever reason. It could be just that I've put too many effects on at this point, or my hard drive isn't fast enough, or the CPU isn't fast enough. Whatever the reason. I'm getting a red line here to show that this effect can't be displayed in real-time. But if I press Play with the spacebar you'll see it looks to me like it does a pretty good job. So with Premiere Pro even if you've got effects that need to be rendered, they need to be calculated by the computer.

You'll usually get something anyway and this gives me a good opportunity if I zoom out a little bit to tell you how render. Now if your computer is unable to playback the combination of effects in clips and audio that you have in your sequence at any given time. And this red line is telling me that for this time Premiere Pro things going to be bit problem. You can have the system render, or create, or compute, a new video clip that looks like the original video, but with the effect applied. So effectively it's a new piece of video that just plays back like a normal piece of video, but it looks a bit different.

And this means that it's very straight forward for the computer to playback. If you want to render, all you have to do is press the Enter key on your keyboard. And there we go, that's going to create a new preview file, and you'll see, that red line goes green. And when the red line goes green, Premiere Pro now has a Preview file, version of this content, and it'll playback absolutely fine. If I zoom in a little bit here, just so you know what's going on, as Premiere Pro plays through this media it's playing the original file. When it get;s to this green line, it's now seamlessly switching to a file that just looks like this.

It's a single video clip on your hard drive. When it reaches the end of that section, it seamlessly, invisibly returns to playing the original media. So you don't notice it. All you get is a green line. But it means that you suddenly get perfect playback performance, even for very, very complicated effects, or ones which are simply not designed to work in real-time. Example, anything here that doesn't have that go faster mark on it. So that's adding transition effects, changing the settings for them, and removing them in Premiere Pro CS6.