Section 58. About Preset Effects


58. About Preset Effects

SEE ALSO

28 Use and Customize Preset Camera Moves

60 Enhance Video with Advanced Image Controls

61 Add and Customize an Effect

67 About Keyframing

68 About the Properties Panel


Premiere Elements offers a wide variety of powerful preset effects for changing the qualities of your images or sound. These presets can be applied in one move, and most work effectively right out of the box.

TIP

The Effects and Transitions panel offers a number of ways to quickly locate any effect, preset, or transition. You can isolate Video FX, Audio FX, Transitions, or Favorites by clicking the appropriate category button at the top of the panel. You can also type the name of the effect or transition you're looking for in the space to the right of the binoculars, and Premiere Elements will automatically locate it for you.


There are two categories of effects that are classified as presets. The first category includes keyframed effects, or standard effects from the Premiere Elements Video FX collection in which keyframes have been added to produce prescaled or precreated motion paths. These kinds of presets appear in the presets folder in the Mosaics, PIPs, Solarize, Twirls, Pan, and Zoom categories. When applied to your clips, these presets automatically scale and position the clips in your video frame, create a motion path, or create a transitional effect at the beginning or end of your clip.

A second category of presets is the automatic adjustment effects found in the Adjust category in the Video FX collection. This category includes effects that automatically balance color and contrast settings for your clips.

Video and audio effects and presets, as well as transitions, are displayed in the Effects and Transitions panel as thumbnail previews.

It's important to note, however, that these presets are based on math, not magic, so a little adjustment is often in order. The Auto Color effect, for instance, does a fairly effective job of automatically correcting color in a video clip. (See 60 Enhance Video with Advanced Image Controls.) However, this automatic adjustment merely works by taking into consideration the whitest point and the blackest point in your screen image and then mathematically estimating the correct values for the rest of the color settings based on those two points. Unfortunately, a perfectly color-corrected screen image is not always the result.

Fortunately, once applied to a clip, every effect opens a control panel that allows you to tweak its settingscorrecting with your eye what no computer program can do with its best math.

Apply the Auto Color effect to a clip on your Timeline, for instance, and then, with the clip selected, look in the Properties panel. You'll see that the Auto Color effect has been added to the list of auto properties. Toggle open the details by clicking the triangle to the left of the effect, and you'll see, in addition to tools for setting the ranges for the black-and-white points in the screen image (essentially affecting the contrast), controls for adjusting Temporal Smoothing, which averages color values of pixels for a smoother color blend; for Scene Detect, which overrides Temporal Smoothing when the composition of the image on your clip changes drastically (such as a change in scenery); and for Blending any changes you make with the original image.

Preset Video Effects

The following is a list of the Video FX in the Presets collection in the Effects and Transitions panel. (For information on keyframed motion or transitional effects and how to adjust or create them, see 67 About Keyframing.)

The Horizontal Image Pans, Horizontal Image Zooms, Vertical Image Pans, and Vertical Image Zooms presets are detailed in 28 Use and Customize Preset Camera Moves.

NOTE

Every preset effect has been created from a standard Premiere Elements video or audio effect. In fact, after they are applied to a clip, the basic controls of the original effect become available so even preset effects can be tweaked and customized.


The Bevel Edges effect tints the edges of your image frame to create the illusion of it being a three-dimensional box. The Bevel Edges Thick preset sets the default width of the edge at 15% of the size of the image frame. The Bevel Edges Thin preset sets the default width at 2%. Customizable controls include Width of Edge, Light Angle, Tint Color, and Intensity.

The keyframed Blurs presets offer in and out Transitional effects from or to a 100% blur (Fast Blur In, Fast Blur Out), each with a one-second default duration. Customizable features include keyframe settings, dimensions of the blur, and variable Speed controls.

In the Color Effects preset category, the Tint effects (Tint Blue, Tint Green, Tint Red, Tint Blue/Green, Tint Blue/Red, Tint Green/Blue, Tint Green/Red, Tint Red/Blue, Tint Red/Green) tint or replace black or white points on your image with variations of color. Customizable controls include Selectable Tint, Selectable Tint from White, Selectable Tint from Black, and Amount of tint. The Increase Saturation control automatically sets Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, and Hue to levels designed to enrich color or bring color back to a faded image.

The Drop Shadow effect is one in which your clip (presumably reduced in size or moved) leaves the illusion of a shadow on the clip on the video track below it; this effect offers several presets for shadows off the Lower Left, Lower Right, Upper Left, and Upper Right. Also included are presets for keyframed drop shadows moving from Lower Left to Lower Right, Lower Right to Lower Left, Upper Left to Upper Right, and Upper Right to Upper Left. In addition to keyframe controls, these effects and presets also offer controls for Shadow Color, Opacity, Direction of Shadow, Distance from Object, Softness, and the option to Hide the Object and reveal only the shadow.

In the Picture-In-Picture (PIP) collection, you will find more than 180 Picture-in-Picture presets, some stationary and some animated, that reduce your video frame to either 25% or 40% of the standard frame size, creating a picture-in-picture effect when the clip is placed on a video track above another clip.

In addition to the effects found in the Presets collection, the following "auto-matic" color corrections are located in Video FX, in the Adjust collection:

  • Auto Color can instantly correct color on your screen image. However, this preset uses math (based on the whitest white point, the blackest black point, and an averaged midrange), not magic, so the results are probably better assumed to be a starting point for adjustments. Additional tweaks can also be made using the controls for setting the ranges of black and white points, Temporal Smoothing (which averages adjacent pixels for a smoother color blend), Scene Detect (which overrides the Temporal Smoothing settings when the scene content changes), the option to Snap Neutral Midtones (which matches your midtone color to your black point and white point settings), and Blend with Original (which controls the percentage of change from the original clip). We demonstrate how to maximize this effect in 60 Enhance Video with Advanced Image Controls.

  • Auto Contrast uses math similar that used in Auto Color to correct color range and contrast. Controls for this effect include Temporal Smoothing, the Scene Detect option, Black and White Clipping, and percentage of Blend with the original screen image.

  • Auto Levels works similarly to Auto Color and Auto Contrast but affects the red, green, and blue values separately. Controls for this effect include Temporal Smoothing, the Scene Detect option, Black and White Clipping, and percentage of Blend with the original screen image.



Adobe Premiere Elements 2 in a Snap
Adobe Premiere Elements 2 in a Snap
ISBN: 0672328534
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 199

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