Animating the First Actor s Still and Credits


Animating the First Actor's Still and Credits

We'll now start animating all of the clips we've created so that they move in and out of our audience's frame of vision while the music plays. To do so, we'll use one of Premiere Elements' most powerful effects features, the Motion effect. By the way, the Motion effect is one of Premiere Elements' fixed effects, meaning that the effect is available for all clips and doesn't need to be applied to a clip first from the Effects and Transitions panel.

Using the Motion Effect

On the Timeline, move the CTI to 00;00;10;00, whish is the start of the retro-title_FF.bmp clip.

Click on the retro-title_FF.bmp and in the Properties panel, click Show Keyframes.

Click the triangle next to Motion.

Click the Toggle animation button for Motion.

Move the CTI (either on the Properties panel of the Timeline) to 00;00;14;28.

Change the Position to 360 725.

Timesaver

Premiere Elements automatically places a keyframe here at the change in Position.

Move the CTI to the halfway point, at 00;00;12;15.

Change the Position here to 360 240.

Did You Know?

You can control time. By placing a keyframe at a point in the middle of the clip's timeline, you are controlling exactly how much time the retro-title_FF.bmp clip stays on screen before it starts to move. Therefore, since the clip is 5 seconds long, for the first 2.5 seconds the retro-title_FF.bmp clip will remain "frozen." After 2.5 seconds, the clip will rapidly depart the "stage," so to speak, following the path you set.


Understanding Motion and Keyframes

A key part of creating the Retro Titles Effect is the use of motion. Motion is one of the effects in Premiere Elements that you can control with keyframes. Video clips are made up of frames. Keyframes are the key points in a clip where something significant, or "key," happens, such as when a video clip changes size, speed, direction, or opacity, for example, or when an audio clip changes volume.

The Motion Effect

For the purposes of this effect, we want to create motionin other words, we want to animateboth the actors' stills and the credits. To do this, we are using Premiere Elements' Motion effect, which is a default effect for every visual media on the Timeline, including video clips, stills, and titles.

To animate a clip, you first set a start point (assigning the x, y coordinates as explained earlier in this chapter), an end point (again assigning the x, y coordinates), and one or as many middle points as are needed. Each point is defined using a keyframe and each keyframe marks the frame where a change takes place.

You don't need to set keyframes or set the x, y coordinates for every frame in a clip, however. Premiere Elements takes care of the "in between" changes for you. This is known as tweening, a term that comes from the animation (cartooning) world (as does the term keyframe).

For example, if you have a keyframe that has the clip starting in the lower left corner of the screen and a keyframe that has the clip ending in the upper right corner, Premiere Elements will "tween" (in other words, or provide us with) all of the changes to the clip for the intervening frames across the screen.

You can control the motion and timing of a clip using a combination of dragging the clip in the Monitor panel to define the motion, and setting keyframes and entering numeric values in the Properties panel to define the timing.

Controlling the Timing of a Clip

In the preceding example, the speed at which the clip travels diagonally across the screen is uniform for the given duration of the clip. If we want to speed up or slow down how the clip moves at any point, we can add additional keyframes. How far apart or close together these keyframes are controls how fast or slow the clip plays.

You can also view and manipulate keyframes right on the Timeline. Keyframes are gold when selected and gray when not. You navigate from keyframe to keyframe and add and delete keyframes in the Timeline the same way that you do in the Properties panel. Using keyframes on the Timeline is best suited for Opacity changes and Volume changes (for audio clips).

For example, if near the end of the clip we were to add another keyframe at the middle of the screen, then the clip will be take a relatively long time to move from the left corner to the center of the screen, after which it would rocket from the center to the upper right.

If, on the other hand, we set this third keyframe very near the end of the clip and very near the upper right corner, the clip would rocket immediately to the upper right, and then take a relatively long time to go from that point to the end frame in the upper corner.


Animate the Credits for the First Actor

Move the CTI to 00;00;14;05, where the top edge of the retrotitle_FF.bmp clip just passes the bottom of the Title 01 clip, as shown in the illustration.

Click the Title 01 clip, the credits for the first actor, in the Video 2 track on the Timeline.

In the Properties panel, click the triangle next to Motion.

Important

Be sure you click just once on the Title 01 clip. This will ensure that we are working with the clip as a media clip. If you double-click, you'll open the Titler, and you will be working with the clip as a title.

Click the Toggle animation button.

Note

If the keyframes work area is not displayed (as it is in the illustration), click the click Show Keyframes button.

On the Properties panel or on the Timeline, move the CTI to the end of the Title 01 clip, 00;00;14;29.

Change the Position here to 940 240.

Timesaver

Premiere Elements automatically places a keyframe here to mark the change in Position.




Hollywood Special Effects with Adobe Premiere Elements 3
Hollywood Special Effects with Adobe Premiere Elements 3
ISBN: 0789736128
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 274
Authors: Carl Plumer

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