Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

Change & apply default transition to lots of footage at once in Premiere

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hey everyone, in this video we are going to show you how to choose a default transition, how to change it, how to apply it to lots of images really quickly, changing all the default transition times as well. So we're going to do lots of Cross Dissolves, all quickly and automatically, and then really easily change it to this kind of like white flash camera noise. You imagine the noise, that's what I was going for anyway. Let me show you how to do that now in Premiere Pro. 

Let's start by adding the default transition. What is the default? If you go to your 'Effects Panel', go to 'Video Transitions', and go to 'Dissolve'. How do you know? One of them has a little blue line around the outside. You might have noticed this earlier. That's the default, that's how you kind of visually see. Let's say we do like a Cross Dissolve, it is the most popular transition. So how do you apply it? What you'll do is, make sure you're between two gaps, I'm going to mute the audio track. So make sure, remember, holding 'Shift', snap between any of them, and then hit 'Command D' on a Mac, or 'Ctrl D' on a PC, you're like, "Didn't do anything," you're like "Why didn't it do anything?" 

Basically what it needs to be, it needs to be in between, which is perfect, and you have to have nothing selected, so just click out, then hit 'Command D'. Needs to know kind of both of them, or you can have both of them selected and hit 'Command D'. That works, just can't have one of them, which is the default if you're holding 'Shift'. Who remembers? Because it's a bit of a pain, right? You're like, "Oh, stop selecting them all then?' I'm like, "How do I just stop that?" Do you remember from one of the previous videos, how I stop this automatic selection? You're like, 'Nope'. I remember it but I don't know where it is. It's under 'Sequence', and there's this thing, 'Selection Follows Playhead'. Remember, this is per project, if I turn this off, it doesn't matter if I'm using the car carousel that we did earlier, or this one here, it turns off, but as soon as I start a new project it will turn back on. 

It's on all the time unless you turn it off, and it would be off for this project only. So now click off, and I can hold 'Shift' and I can jump between these things. Command D', or 'Ctrl D' on a PC, and you can start adding your defaults. How do you do it all at once? Just select them all at once, and go 'Command D', 'Ctrl D' on a PC. It's a handy one, that's why I said it a million times. It's a wonder note-down in terms of your shortcuts. 

One thing you will notice, we've talked about how to adjust this transition, I can't remember if we did the default transition, if we haven't, it's good to cover it again anyway just for our memories. So let's say I'm going to undo all of that so I've got rid of them all. I want to go through, go to 'Premiere Pro', 'Preferences'. If you're on a PC, remember, it's under 'Edit', 'Preferences', and we're going to go to 'Timeline', and you can see here, we've got our default video transition. 25 frames, in our case this is a second, let's say you want it to be longer. Let's say it's kind of a, and a half, so we're going to go 37. It's kind of like 25 seconds plus a half, that's close enough. So I want it to be a little bit longer. Click 'OK', now if I select them all and hit 'Command D', they're just all a bit longer and moodier. 

Other things to note is that the first one is actually a Fade to Black. You got to decide, it's not actually a Dip to Black, it's more, it's fading through to the background, and because there's no image joining the beginning or the end, it just fades out to like nothingness. So you can decide whether you want to maybe just get rid of that, or I'll show you a trick, actually once we do a few more things to kind of loop it back around. 

So we've got here, let's do our Option B, and look at changing the default transition. So let's duplicate this one, and we're going to change the defaults, because I want Option A and Option B for my client. So we've got 'Travel NZ - Option A', let's right click it, and go to 'Duplicate', click it once. Double click it, open up. For some reason mine's not working today, normally just double click it and it changes. I'm going to go the long way, this happens to you, right click it, go to 'Rename'. It just won't do it, weird. Why won't it do it? I don't know. I like to leave this sort of stuff in the course, because sometimes you're like, "What if that happens to me?" 

Let's have a little look, click once, double click. Nope, not working; give me a sec. I'm back, not sure where I went wrong, I just closed it down and opened it up. I'll leave that in the course just because that might happen to you. Premiere Pro is reasonably solid, but don't be afraid to close it and open it again. So now I can rename it, click it once. I'm going to call this one 'Option B V1'. Cool; so I've got it open down the bottom here. What I'd like to do is do a few things. I want to select it all and let's change the timing to something a bit faster, I'm going to do a kind of like, you saw at the beginning there, kind of like a camera flash. So right click it, 'Speed/Duration', and you can see why now it might not go and change my defaults, because I'm not even sure what I want, because I'm messing around with different kind of creative ideas. 

So in this case I want the duration to be, I don't know, one minute-- 1 second, and let's go 13 frames. I'm going to make sure I do my Ripple Edit, so it all comes down. My little Cross Dissolves don't really work anymore. I'm going to leave them there, it's a little bit hard to delete all of the Cross Dissolves. You can delete them individually by clicking on them. What I want to do is just replace them, it's easy just go over the top. So I've got them all selected, we've got the timing different, let's go to our 'Effects', and we notice before, that, under 'Video Transitions', under 'Dissolve', Cross Dissolve has got the blue thing. So here what I want to do is Dip to White. Just set it as default and you just right click it, and set this as the default transition, get a little blue. 

So now our 'Command D' on a Mac, 'Ctrl D' on a PC, I've got to be down here, make the blue line, go around it all and then hit 'Command D', You can see they're all Dip to Whites. What I might also do is go into here and change my preferences, 'Timeline' to, what is it? 'Video Transitions'. So there's video by any sort of transition, and I'm going to turn mine back to something slower, which was 1 second. Actually no, it needs to be more. I pick 12 frames, now select them all, hit 'Command D', 'Ctrl D' on a PC. Now I've got these kind of like white flashes. 

I'm trying to give it like a picture. I know it's not beautiful, I needed to find a second Option B to show you how to change the default. I use white flashes a little differently. I was trying to-- it seemed like a good idea, when I was thinking of the tutorial, like a camera snap. We probably need the camera clicks all through there and, I don't know, it needs to look more like a photograph but you get the idea. I'll show you what I do with white flashes. This is an example of how I do it. I like to kind of keep pace with the white flashes. I saw it on somebody else's tutorial, I was like, yeah, it's a good way of kind of like, white flashes, exciting music, let's do stuff, get creative. 

I'll show you, like, I'm playing, watch the transition. "The tools and features necessary to make it both beautiful and easy." So, white flash. "You'll learn how to easily enhance images, correcting the light and color." Large. "You'll know how to add, remove…" It's also like a visual cue, that I'm changing topic. "…mask and we'll combine images." "Then we'll work with…" Lots of white flashes, that's what I use. Really short ones, I can't remember how short they are, but that's what I was using white flashes for, and it's just a Dip to White, really fast. 

So that's going to be it, I'm going to do one last thing before we go. You can go, I'm just going to change the music, and I'm going to pick, it was in 'Exercise Files', under 'Wedding', under 'Audio', it's the 'Blizzard's one. Kind of match my-- at least I felt like it matched my 'snapshot'ing camera thing. Let's have a little listen. Got a bit more of a pace to it. I liked it, all right, that's it, I'll see you in the next video.