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. It doesn't take anything fancy; a simple Cross-Dissolve is enough to tie the assets together into a single, smooth sequence.
Before proceeding, make sure all your keyframing is complete, meaning everything has been completed on the Week 8 page. This includes reversing the position of at least one image in each category so that there is a mix of zooming in and zooming out in your project. Transitions are 1 second long by default, so they will use up a half second at the beginning and end of each image, which affects the keyframes. You don't want to be keyframing once transitions are present because the images can be hard, if not impossible, to see.
Grading Your Checkpoint
The final assignment of the first grading period, T1, is to turn in your Premiere project file. Everything taught in Week 9 will NOT be included in the grading, so don't worry if you are still working on transitions or captions.
I will be looking for answers to the following questions on this assignment:
Is the file name correct?
Does each category have one "zoom" opposite from the other two?
Are there two keyframes for Position and Scale at the beginning?
Are there two keyframes for them at the end?
Are there any extra keyframes other than those four?
Do any images go off the screen?
Does the Scale go over 100% at any time?
Default Video Transition
Step 1
Activating a Track
Click on the name of the track, V2 in this case, to activate it. This allows certain actions to affect assets that are on that track. While not always necessary, it's something you need to know.
Select all the assets on the Video 2 track. You can use one of the following techniques:
Shift-Click on every one of them (very time consuming; similar to Ctrl-clicking file selections)
Carefully draw a long rectangular selection box, starting after the last image (don't include other tracks)
Lock Tracks 1, 3 & 4 and then draw a selection box around everything.
Then, just press Ctrl-D to apply the (D)efault transition to all of the selected assets.
Cross Dissolve
The default Video Transition is the Cross Dissolve, which fades from one image to the next. Instead of making them overlap using two video tracks, then keyframing the Opacity down on one image and up on the next , this Transition takes care it for you.
Image Captions
Step 2
Review Your Document
Earlier, we used our Word document to create some initial captions for our images. We'll get them ready to copy/paste into Premiere after editing them to make sure they suit their purpose.
Using the Template Captions
Two high-contrast options were provided in the Template. Here we'll shorten them both to 4 seconds and place them on the first image. After deciding which to use, we move them to the next image, leaving behind a copy to paste our text in.
Continuing with Captions
Being careful to use the Snap feature to carefully place the four-second captions, we'll keep sliding the Template captions to the right, choosing which one looks better for each image. We'll use the Safe Margins feature to keep away from the edges.
Transitions for the Captions
Once the first category is done, select the 3 captions and use Ctrl-D to apply Cross Dissolves. Each caption should fade in and out in between each of the image transitions. Use the Preview button at the top right and the space bar to do a full-screen Preview.