Advanced use of Adobe Premiere

There are quite a large number of consumer video editing tool on the market these days, but the program that offers by far the most possibilities is Adobe Premiere. Although it is one of the highest priced tools it is definitely worth the money if you are looking for really advanced video editing. However, the possibilities are so endless that you may have difficulties to find out how to easily achieve advanced effects. This article gives you an example of a great effect and explains how to do it. It is assumed that you have a basic knowledge of Premiere, but this article is also worth reading if you don’t.

The Movie.

The movie that is explained is the first part of an introduction clip that I created for a DVD containing a number of my home movies (although I adapted it a little for the purpose of this article). The music is taken from the old TV series ‘The Persuaders”. Below you see two frames from the clip. Click on one of them to download the clip in your preferred format.

The effects that are demonstrated are the filmstrip with the scrolling clips and the rotating paper that appears.

The Scrolling Filmstrip

Although you can do the whole movie at once in one project it is easier to first produce a new video file containing the scenes in the filmstrip in a separate Premiere project.

This is done with the Adobe Title generator. Using the basic shapes in the left hand menu you can create the frame with rectangles with a black fill and small rounded squares with a white fill.

Because the ‘holes’ are recurring items and need to be equally spaced in the filmstrip, it is the easiest way to first create them at a random location and then adjust the size and positions by inputting the numbers in the right bottom section of the Title window. See the red circle in the picture below.

Make sure that you distribute them evenly over the height of the frame and that the first and last one are half the distance away from the edge of the frame.

Once you have the outline ready, you can save it as a title template. If you like the template that I made, you can download it from our server for use in your projects: Filmstrip.prtl.

Next is to overlay the filmstrip on the scenes. This is an easy job. Load the scenes that you want on the timeline, import the template in your project, place them as an overlay on an extra video track and export it to a new file.
Personally I have chosen to place all the scenes that I wanted right after eachother on a single timeline and export them to a single file. This file then contains all the scenes that I want to use for the scrolling filmstrip.

The movement of the scenes over the screen is done with the Motion Menu of Premiere. The most important issue to take care of is to make sure that the scrolling frames are perfectly in sync. You don’t want a gap or an overlap between the successive frames and they need to move at exactly the same speed. You can do it by trial and error, but a faster result can be achieved by doing some small calculations.

The Coordinate System used in the Motion Menu of Premiere is defined in such a way that the frame size is 80 units wide by 60 units high. Position 0,0 is in the center of the screen and the top left corner is -40,-30. The image size that I have chosen for the scrolling clips is 30% of the original frame size. So the height is 0.3 x 60 units = 18 units. As the starting point I place the clip just outside the visible area. The Y-coordinate should be -30-18/2 = -39. When the clip has moved 5 discrete steps downward the Y-coordinate will be -39 + 5 x 18 = 51.

With these figures it will be very simple to manage the synchronisation of the successive clips. I only have to make sure that the next clip starts playing after 1/5 of the duration of the clips.