Premiere Pro FX

Premiere Pro's Effects

One area where Premiere excels is the range of effects - not just with the range of built-in effects, which is large, but also with the range of plug-ins available.  We cannot list everything available so here is a sample:

• Colour adjustments - there are a whole host of filters for adjust video levels and colour balance.  Particularly useful are levels filter which gives ahistogram display not unlike Photoshop, auto colour, auto contrast and auto level, do as their names suggest with sliders to adjust their sensitivity and shadow/highlight which allows you to bring out details in underexposed areas with out distorting correctly exposed regions. Premiere Pro has a large range of filters to adjust the look of a clip - so if one does not work you have other options to try (these are covered in our CS5 tutorial).  There are extremely powerful although some, like the 3 WAY COLOUR CORRECTOR need a little bit or work to understand how to use them properly.   If you buy a Matrox MX02 to work with Adobe Premiere you will also get the Matrox colour correction tools, widely regarded as easy to use and superior to the Adobe ones.  It is not the Adobe filters are bad, just the Matrox ones are better - they include colour matching for example which is currently missing from Adobe Premiere Pro!
• Blur and sharpness effects.
• Distortion effects - lens distortion, corner pinning, spherize and more.
• Keying filters - blue screen, chromakey, image matte, track matte, together with up to a 16 point keyframable garbage matte - so you can limit the area being superimposed and even make the are move across screen. In CS5 Adobe added a new keyer called Ultra - this is based on the stand-alone ULTRA key program that used to come with Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 - and is a much better quality real-time keyer than the others that have been in Premiere for years.
• Noise - filters for adding or removing noise.
• Lens flares, animatable gradients, cell or checkerboard patterns.
• Brush strokes - simulate a “painting style” on your image, write on - draw a path which gets revealed on screen over time, “texturize” a layer, leave colour - leave one colour on screen whilst making the rest black and white.
• Echo and posterize time.
• There is also a huge variety of transitions and wipes although these have not really changed since the original versions of Premiere.  Premiere does not have a selection of wacky transitions like the old Pinnacle Hollywood FX, or Grass Valley EDIUS' GPU effects -so if these kinds of effects are important for your editing them Adobe Premiere Pro is not the best choice of program. You can always add these using plug-ins from other companies.  Boris will add various 3D effects or ProDad Adorage will add some very wacky choices.
• Buy the Production Studio and you get access to Adobe After Effects - a very comprehensive effects program which has been used for effects in Hollywood motion pictures - a recent movie, Monsters, was edited in Adobe Premiere Pro, with effects work all done in Adobe After Effects.

All are controlled via the “effects control window”.  With this window all the parameters to change the effects are instantly available - you don’t have to open new dialogue boxes.  As this is based on the After Effects version it means that even if you adjust lots of different parameters, if you transfer your Premiere sequence into After Effects for more comprehensive tweaking, all the adjustments made in Premiere are carried over as well.

Slow motion

Premiere Pro’s  has two ways of doing slow motion - you can either change the speed of a clip using the dialogue shown here or choose "time remapping" where you can vary the speed of a clips - starting at 100% then slowing down to 50% then speeding up to 240% etc...

New additions to the normal slow motion include the ability to apply the change to multiple clips - and if changing lots of clips to ripple the changes down the timeline.

MAINTAIN AUDIO PITCH will adjust the pitch of the sound so that it still sounds reasonable.  If you slow down someone talking their voice will also get deeper.  If you choose MAINTAIN AUDIO PITCH it will bring them back to sounding "normal". 

Time remapping is carried out on the timeline.  You simply add keyframes on the timeline and then drag them apart to create a RAMP where the slow motion changed from one value to another (easier to do that to write).  Premiere Pro has one of the nicest implementation of time remapping in our opinion.

The quality is good and improved considerably between CS5 and CS5.5.  If you have After Effects you can go further and create better quality slow motion using After Effects interpolation.  On the top quality settings After Effects does not simply blend frames like most programs, instead it can create missing information for much better slow motion.

Picture In Picture or "motion" Effects

Every clip has some basic settings which you can see here.  MOTION is for 2D movement.  If you want to move the object in 3D there is another filter called "basic 3D" which lets you twirl objects around in 3D.  Basic 3D does not let you move the object left and right so you combine the motion effect with BASIC 3D to do this.  Both are realtime with the right graphic card so you can stack quite a few of them without having to render anything.

Alternatively you could add a plug-in like Boris Continuum which will give you a decent 3D pnp in one filter. although not realtime like the Adobe filters.

Tighter integration with After Effects

The dynamic link with After Effects means you can take a Premiere timeline and open it in After Effects with nearly all the effects in tact and each clip still separated - which makes adjusting effects in After Effects a lot easier.

Now you can lasso some clips on the timeline and choose "replace with After Effects composition".   This will do everything for you including putting the After Effects composition back on the Premiere timeline, ready to be rendered.

Apply effects presets or transitions to multiple clip

A function added in CS4 you can now select multiple clips and drag effects on to all of them at once. You can also choose to remove all effects from a clip.

Photoshop blending modes on clips

Another new addition in CS4, obviously still available in CS5.5  you can now use Photoshop blending modes to overlay clips on the timeline.  This is available from a simple drop-down list in the opacity section of the effects control window.

If you bring in a Photoshop file and choose to import it as a sequence of layers, (which then become separate tracks on the timeline) then the blending mode with be set from the Photoshop file.

The best plug-ins for Adobe Premiere Pro

ProDad Mercalli 2

A decent image stabilisation program for Premiere Pro. Easy to use and quick Mercalli produces great results inside your editing program.

You can do image stabilisation with Adobe After Effects, which you will own if you buy the Production Studio, and with CS5.5 they have added a new filter called WARP STABILISER - basically as easy to use as Mercalli and doing arguably better scaling.  You can use the DYNAMIC LINK to simply send the clip to After Effects, apply the stabilisation, and then the results will be rendered in Premiere Pro. The downside being you need to buy the Adobe Production Studio (which will give you a lot of other great Adobe programs as well) which is more expensive than just buying Mercalli 2.

ProDad Vitascene

A range of filters which include glow and sparkle effects, image manipulation with movie-look style features, and various mask-style filters. Can be used with as a filter or transition.

Read more about Vitascene here.

ProDAD Adorage

Adorage is a range of complex and wacky transitions. There are several volumes with hundreds of transitions in each volume. The shear breadth of transitions available is staggering,

Visit our ProDad pages for more information

Boris Effects

Boris produce several plug-ins for editing programs, all of which have been updated to work with 64 bit Adobe Premiere Pro. 

Boris Continuum

A huge array of effects all of which include motion tracking for most effects - so you can make your effects “stick” to your subject.  Includes keyframable slow motion, decent keying and even a filter that can remove a moving object from a shot! Boris Continuum filters act like native Premiere filters - so you apply them and they are then controlled directly from the EFFECTS CONTROL WINDOW.  Boris 3D object filters will not work with Premiere Pro. although they will work with Adobe After Effects.  All the other Continuum filters work properly with CS5.

You can buy Boris Continuum as a complete collection or just but a selection of effects as a Boris Continuum unit, so if you need a specific filter you do not need to buy the entire package.

Click here to read more about Boris Continuum.

Boris Red V5

Boris RED is a compositing program like Adobe After Effects - in fact the have many of the same features  Boris' speciality is 3D - you can extrude text or objects into 3D and add materials to the different sides and light them like you would in a 3D program such as Newtek's Lightwave.  After Effects can do 3D movements and treat object as 3D but cannot extrude objects into proper 3D in the same way as Boris.  Boris RED will laso work as a plug-in for After Effects as well as Premiere Pro.   Both are very good programs and both have their strengths and weaknesses.

RED also includes all the filters from Boris Continuum -although you apply them insides RED's interface not as Premiere-style filters.

For more information visit our Boris Pages.