Adding the Video Clip to the Timeline

The first step in creating this effect is the same basic step for virtually all of the projects in this book: go get your media clips and place them on the Timeline. For this project, the video clip is retro-footage.avi. We'll be taking stills ("freeze frames") taken directly from this video that we later will manipulate to show just a very narrow area, concentrating almost exclusively on the subject and cutting out most of the background.

Add the Video Clip to the Timeline

Start Premiere Elements and create a new project called retrotitle.

Click the Get Media from button on the Media panel to access the Get Media from view, if it's not already active.

Select DVD, Digital Camera, Mobile Phone, Hard Drive Camcorder, Card Reader.

When the Media Downloader displays, click the Advanced Dialog button to switch to Advanced mode.

Select the retro-footage.avi clip.

Click the Get Media button. Premiere Elements copies the retro-footage.avi clip from the DVD onto your hard drive and adds it to the Available Media list for this project.

Select the retro-footage.avi clip on the Media panel and drag and drop it onto the Timeline in the Video 1 track. Be sure to line up the start of the retro-footage.avi clip with the beginning of the Video 1 track.

Tip

If you're in Sceneline view, drop the retro-footage.avi clip onto the first scene box. Premiere Elements will place it on the Video 1 track.

Click the Timeline button on the My Project panel to switch to Timeline view, if it's not already the active view.

Note

We need to switch to Timeline view because for this project we are working with mulTiple clips on multiple video tracks.