Premiere - Video & Effects

I touched on how to add video clips to the timeline already in a previous blog. In this blog I want to run through how I ordered my video clips and the few different effects that I used to enhance the trailer.

When I set up my project in Premiere I chose to have 5 video and audio tracks available. I probably only really needed 3 in the end but having the extra couple did allow me to space out the types of video quite nicely, even if I didn't use the fifth track at all.

Layer 4 was all my titles - these were the uppermost layer as I would always want these to overlay anything else on the screen.

Layer 3 was for my mattes.

Layer 2 was only really used in one place at about the 50 second mark where I used it for a matte I created to go with a single bit of video. The video was actually placed on layer 3 and the matte on layer 2 - I'll explain why in the blog later.

Layer 1 was for all my main video clips, ie trailer footage and gameplay capture.

Hopefully you can see in the above screenshot the layout of the video. The purple blocks are titles and mattes. The blue blocks are the video clips. You can probably see a pattern in that where there is a title and a matte there is no video clip. Video clips do often have a title though, especially at the beginning when the story is still being told and due to time constraints the story needs to be told at the same time as the video clip is going on.

There are two beige blocks attached to 3 of the blue video clips, one at the end of the first video clip and one between the third and fourth clip. These are transition effects that were used. The first one faded out (or dipped to black) the Independence Day clip so it transitions into the black matte more smoothly. The second one does a similar job except this one was a cross dissolve.

I used a Dip to Black effect for the first transition since the following matte was actually black anyway so I didn't feel the need to use a cross dissolve. A cross dissolve fades from one scene into black and then from black into the new scene. For two different clips a cross dissolve tends to soften the transition and make it less jarring. This was important when going from one clip into a totally different one. Hopefully you can understand why I chose to use these two transitions.

I certainly could have used more transition effects between the gameplay clips at the end but after trying them with and without I decided I quite liked the way that they snapped quickly from one to another without the transition. It seemed to promote the frenetic style of the trailer at this point so I left them as is.

The other effect that I used came about because of a clip I wanted to use at the end of the video where "You Want It" is displayed. This seemed quite apt to end the video with suggesting to prospective buyers watching the trailer that they did indeed want the game! However the only place I could find the trailer was off a video clip on IGN where they have an IGN watermark on the video. This was annoying so I wanted to find a way to get rid of it. Whilst in another clip I use this watermark / logo is on a lighter background whilst the scene moves it is much less noticeable on this specific bit on an unmoving black background it is far more prevalent and distracting.

The way that I went about removing this logo was to introduce an effect called a 16 point garbage matte.

To add this to a video clip you need to select the Effects tab in the bottom left window where your project bins are located. This will give you a list of various effects that can be used.

In the picture above I have expanded the video transition options although for audio effects and other effects you would follow the same procedure. Simply select an effect and then drag and drop it onto your video or audio clip on your timeline. Whilst it won't immediately appear any different you can access the effects options in the top left window under Effect Controls in the same way I talked previously about when adding key frames to the opacity in titles.

The 16 Point Garbage Key is under Video effects -> Keying -> Sixteen-Point Garbage Matte

By dragging and dropping this on my "You Want It" clip I see this.

Around the outside of the preview window there are sixteen yellow points that can be dragged around to crop parts of the video. You can see that I have moved the point that was located in the bottom right corner to more towards the middle of the screen. This just cuts out the IGN logo but leaves the majority of the particle effects behind the You Want It lettering.

When I first played it back it substituted the background as black (which is what I set it up to be when creating the original sequence). However the black really stood out from the black of the original clip. To try and minimise the effect since I had really only substituted one eyesore for another I decided to try and put a matte behind the video where the black was showing through and have it match more closely the black used in the original clip.

Initially I tried colour sampling from around the area that I was hoping to mimic but after a few tries it didn't seem to be working too well. It was either noticeably too dark or too light. I therefore decide to go for a shade that was a little too dark and then adjust it in the colour picker until I had something I was happy with. I settled with colour #130A07 which didn't seem as disruptive as the others I tried.

Whilst it is still visible to me others that have viewed the trailer said they didn't notice it at all so it seems to be doing it's job.

The last technique I used to alter a piece of the vide was on the bunny clip. I wanted to include as much of the bunny clip as possible as the way it pans from a happily playing rabbit to a decapitated head on a stick gives the sequence impact, plus fans of the original Doom games will know what is coming anyway. Not having the start and end though lessens the overall impact of the piece however due to the time constraint I didn't have enough time to show it in it's entirety. It's about seventeen seconds long and I had a seven second window.  In order to fit it all in I had to speed up the clip which is really just one long panning sequence anyway.

To speed it up I used the Rate Stretch Tool. I dragged it from it's normal 17 seconds down to 7 seconds and then moved it into position on the timeline. I could then make minute adjustments to get it to fit perfectly.

Upon playing it back the sequence was sped up but didn't look too bad considering that the majority of the clip static anyway - it's just panning from right to left over a picture.


Those were the techniques I used along with basic editing ones to achieve my trailer. I'm sure with more time and knowledge I could improve it in a lot of ways and create more of the effects from scratch myself but I'm happy with how it works at the moment. As with all my pieces, time permitting I will have another pass at them if I think of any things that could b improved quickly to enhance how they are presented.

My next blogs are likely to be about my summary of how I think each piece has gone and what I would do to improve them.