Created with Adobe Firefly by James Turner

Transitions and Captions

Keyframed animation took our project beyond a simple slideshow - now we'll leverage the power of Premiere to animate the transition from one image to the next. Whereas the default Cross Dissolve is all it takes to tie all of the assets on the Master sequence together, since you have the time you need to explore the many other options available. There are rules though - follow them carefully for full credit.

For this video, we are going to follow a relatively simple rule for transitions - "your" pixels must be on the screen at all times. There are some transitions that substitute non-image pixels to create their effect. The following Video Transitions are are not to be used (except to see what they do, then replace them).

Dip to Black/White
Page Peel
Flip Over

There are also some that I have found that simply don't look very nice in this project:

Morph Cut
Non-Additive Dissolve

Stay away from these for this project

Custom Transitions

There are a ton of transitions to try, but not all of them are appropriate for this project. Many transitions can be customized. This is a great time to try out as many as you can - with other projects, you would want to limit it to 1 or 2.

Animating Photoshop Layers

Transitions can be used to quickly animate the Title layers without going to the trouble of doing a a lot of keyframing. Make your Intro stand out with some simple Push transitions. It looks best if they don't cross the middle of the screen.

Nesting Layers in a Sequence

Stacked PSD layers can be cumbersome. Selecting them and then right-clicking brings up the option to "Nest" them together in a single small sequence. Making changes afterwards is as simple as double-clicking on the sequence to open it up. Changes appear automatically on your Master.

Improving Levels in Premiere

Premiere has the ability to adjust an asset's Black and White points like we did with Adjustment Layers in the +Week6+ Photoshop video. The Histogram is not as detailed and it's even easier to overdo it, but this is a powerful effect to make some last-minute improvements on images that need it.

Crazy Cool!

Keyframing Effects (draft)

Premiere has a lot of other effects that can be used on assets, some of them quite dramatic! Anything with a stopwatch icon can be keyframed. It's easy to "break" your animation so keep Ctrl-Z handy and work on a copy of your project, just in case.

I plan to re-record this one, although it shows how "fooling around" with effects can sometimes go wrong which is a valuable lesson too. I was literally experimenting with things I had never tried before.

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