The Auto Reframe effect - Premiere Pro Tutorial

- A big new feature in Adobe Premiere Pro 2020 is the auto reframe effect. This is designed to make it easier to reformat your video for different types of delivery. It takes the task of manually doing this for every single shot and allow you to recompose a video, for example, a square shape if you're posting to some social media platforms or 9 by 16 because vertical video is now a thing. The auto reframe effect can be found inside the Effects panel but it also has an automated workflow as well that we'll take a look at in a second. What happens is pretty straightforward. Let's come in here to a shot and I'm going to take this sequence and switch its settings up. So let's say we were doing this manually and I wanted to go one shot at a time. We'll come here under our Sequence Settings and I'll set the size here to 1,000 by 1,000 pixels. You see it updates and let's click OK. Now, let's pick a shot. Oftentimes, it's going to seem pretty logical and many shots do work. But the auto reframe effect is going to analyze the shot and try to recompose it based upon the content. So let's just type in the word auto reframe. There it is. And I'll drag that onto the individual clip. It analyzes the shot and then adjusts it. So in this case, it decided that the key information here was not just the hand strumming the guitar but to see the neck in the environment. Here the subject is clearly cut off. We'll drop that auto reframe effect on and you see it latches on to the best parts of the shot. Now, this relies upon Adobe Sensei technology, which is their AI platform and what they did was they trained this by having a lot of folks watch video content and they used retina tracking to build a model of what people tended to look at. Usually this is really for working with other people, like faces. It's going to latch on to that. And most of the time, it works pretty well. Now, this effect again is found inside of the Effects panel and on a shot-by-shot basis, you could just select a shot and drag it on and it will attempt to reframe the shot. It's not always perfect but it does work pretty well. What you will notice though is that for things like graphics, it doesn't really do much. So let's drop that on. And you see it tried to move him a little bit but sometimes, it's going to cut stuff off. So if you find yourself dealing with a graphic that needs to be read, you may need to step in here, take a look at your tab and manually make a few changes. Dialing in the right size as such. And in this case, while it's scaled it down, I need to nudge that into place a little bit. And scale it even smaller because I chose that I didn't want anything cut off here. So I can always, of course, override. I said earlier it saves you from the tedious task of having to do this for every shot but I can tell you that it can't do every shot perfectly, so from time to time, you may need to tweak things a little bit. But since it's drag and drop and fairly automated, much like image stabilization, it does tend to work really well and can be a great time saver when reformatting video for social media. If you take a look at the effect properties here, you're going to notice a couple of things. Let's go to this clip here and I'm going to step into it. And we'll access the auto reframe properties and what you'll notice is there are three main properties, slower motion, default and faster motion. Slower motion is great if there's really no camera movement whatsoever. So talking head interviews, things like this. What's going to happen is you're going to get a fairly static shot. The default motion one is better for regular sorts of movement and Premiere Pro may add some keyframes to try to move things around. If there's something moving quite quickly, sports, material like that, then choose faster motion and it's going to adjust much more aggressively to try to keep things centered. Since this is a pretty locked off performance here, I'll just slower motion and it re-analyzes and you see the adjusted keyframes there. Let's go ahead and just reset this really quick for the motion property. Just lasso on those and press delete. And I'll re-analyze using the slower motion option and it put a little bit of movement. - To find out where I am. Go buy my stuff on iTunes. I'd really appreciate that. (lively music) - [Instructor] So I managed to keep him centered there despite the fact of the jib moving back and forth. So really simple. Feel free to explore those options as a refinement by looking at the motion preset. As you change these, it will attempt to update and you see that it did put new keyframes in. So depending upon the style, let's just make this a little easier to see both at once, choosing different styles generates new keyframes and adds a different amount of movement. So here we have the default and let's go to the faster movement option and you'll see more keyframes. - Go buy my stuff on iTunes. I'd really appreciate that. (lively music) (singer singing) - [Instructor] Now, in the case here of this graphic, you see it bounced around a little bit. That's because we applied the auto reframe effect on that type of graphic. In this case, I'm just going to delete all of these keyframes because the auto reframing didn't work well. And I can override that there and just manually position it. - I'd really appreciate that. (lively music) - So as you see, the ability to save time with this effect and you don't have to apply it one shot at a time. Let's look at that next.