Premiere Elements 8: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Create Animated Effects

When you edit video, the fourth dimension—time—is all-important. You want to control the pacing of your movies. You want voices in sync with images. Music should reflect the action on the screen and the mood you want to create. And effects should occur at just the right moment. In Chapter 7, you learned how to apply effects to an entire clip, while Chapter 6 focused on transitions (which are really effects at the beginnings and ends of clips). This chapter explains how to control the timing of those effects.

Premiere gives you frame-by-frame control over your effects. You’ll learn how to make effects fade in and fade out at exactly the right moment and how to make pictures, clipart, and titles move around the screen.

What Is an Animated Effect?

An animated effect is one that changes over time. Consider these two animated effects:

• You want an object to start out perfectly visible and then to slowly fade away.

• You want a small picture-in-picture window to move around a static background.

Even though these two examples will look very different in your movie, they have something in common: the tool that Premiere uses to control the effect’s timing. That tool is called a keyframe, and it’s a type of marker you place in your movie’s timeline. For example, in the first effect listed above, you want to control the degree of transparency of an object (Figure 8-1). By adding a keyframe, you tell Premiere, “At this frame, I want this object to be exactly this transparent.” ...