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Adobe Premiere Pro CC - Essentials Training

Custom Lower thirds using the Essential Graphics panel

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi everyone, in this video we're going to take our amazing new keyframing skills, and create this text, sliding box comes in. Realizes a little bit, did it pretty get the Discovery Channel, that investigations, crimes, murder thing? Think it was all shot in the 80s, and they all had lower thirds clunky like this. We'll make it prettier in another video afterwards, but for now let's make this clunky goodness. 

First up let's remove the bad one, so-- what bad one, the original one we made. So up here, this fades in, I can't remember, did I set any extra homework? Let's just make sure you've got rid of all of your original ones. Actually let's just have a look at how it's constructed. 

I've got it selected here in my Timeline. I might make it just a bit bigger, I don't know why, because it's better, taller, and we cheated, we didn't cheat actually, we got it to cross fade in - I'm going to zoom in. - we use the Cross Fade to fade it in, and Cross Fade to fade it out. I'd do it again that way if this is all what we're doing, but we can start using things like, can you see over here, there's opacity. If you twirl down opacity, there is a keyframe, you can start messing around with that. 

So we're going to delete those because we don't want them. In terms of the actual title itself what we did was, you'll notice over here it's a bit weird, with the Essential Graphics Panel. If you can't see it go to 'Window', then go to 'Essential Graphics'. You're like, "Hmm, how do I change the type, how do I do stuff, there's nothing over here." You actually have to click on the actual line itself, and it will all kind of spring back to life. 

What we did is we picked the font, and down the bottom here we added a background graphic, sorry, a background color to it. You saw at the beginning there, we're going to actually start animating it differently. All the text to animate separately from the background, and in this case we can't because they're all kind of fused together. So let's actually just delete that whole title here, and let's add a new one. 

So there's our little Type Bar over here. What's this panel, I can't remember what's over here, does anybody remember? I got two Project Panels open, cool, huh? Goodbye, 'Close Panel', thank you very much. We're going to grab the 'Type Tool', and we are working our Intra Sequence, kind of about here. We're going to click once over here, and I'm going to type it in my name. So we're going to use Daniel Walter Scott again, but what we're going to do is going to do some changes. We're going to turn off the 'Background', I'm going to turn off the 'Shadow', we'll leave the shadow on, and I'll show a few things when you are doing lower thirds. 

Often it's probably best to right align it, so that when we type in the next person's one, it's pushing from that side, so pushing over here, because I'm going to have mine in the bottom right. To move it around use your 'Move Tool', move it around. What we want to do as well, kind of want to add a few little bonus extras, is avoid this thing. That's the Center of Rotation, or the Anchor Point, we don't want to move that around, because it doesn't really move anything. It's used for this, when I rotate it around, so just leave it where I got it. Just avoid grabbing that thing, wherever it might be, sometimes it's in the middle, bottom left, trying to drag it around. So got mine here, and I want to, whenever I'm doing lower thirds, I want to make sure I'm working on, like the biggest, mine's quite a long name, or quite a long name, if you add my middle name, it is, but what I often do is I'll come in here and look for a condensed, so I'm looking for fonts, and I'm just typing the word 'condensed'. 

I'm just looking for a font that will work, it is condensed as well. You don't have to pick-- you probably won't have the same fonts as me, just a little tip to go, okay, condense fonts. Cool thing about it is that it can be visually, like same, like legible, but a lot shorter, it's not poking out so far across the video. So now we're going to animate it over time. What we're going to do is start it somewhere. So I kind of want it ending there, but I'm going to kind of wreck that by going, I want you, got my Selection Tool, and I'm going to drag mine off screen a little bit. 

Now dragging it off screen's a little bit tough, because I can't see the edge, because I'm on Fit. You can either zoom out a little bit, or lots, and drag it off screen. Remember, don't drag the target, drag it off screen there, or you can use, I don't know why I do this, you might not like it, but I often will use this, under here, the text, there is one under here, so I twirl that up just to make it a little easier to see, is position. I find I can just drag it off screen that way. We've done that before, up to you, I drag mine off. 

Basically it's helpful to see anyway, because this is where we're going to animate it. So if you didn't do this make sure you've got your text selected up here. I'm going to start mine a little earlier. Got it selected in my Timeline, over here, in my Effects Control, I want to find the text, I want to twirl it down, I want to find - twirl up - 'Source Text'. Find 'Transform', and start the stopwatch. I actually want to start my stopwatch at the beginning, because there's no point starting it further down because I still can't see it. 

So what's the shortcut to jump to the beginning of this? You have two at your disposal. The one you can-- there's two you can use, hold 'Shift' and drag along, and it will snap, or you can use the up arrow, why didn't the up arrow work? It's because this is not highlighted. It's ignoring that layer when I'm using my up and down, now all get in there. Remember, I just have them all on. There we go, be at the beginning, and I want to set the timer going for position. Get a little diamond there, it's kind of half cut off, that's okay. Then after some time-- In terms of timing you'll have to, you'll get better at it, I like to hit 'Spacebar', then stop it just where I feel like it should come up, and then just raise it up. 

You always drag it the wrong way, drag it the right way, and up here, that's what I'm going to do, so I got two keyframes. One when it's down the bottom and one when it's up the top. So back a bit, hit 'Spacebar'. Hey, we'll get animating text. Hooray for keyframes. Let's do the same thing for the box, but I want the box to come in from the right. So what do we do? Let's kind of get to grips with the Essential Graphics Panel a little more. Let's have it selected, let's go over here, let's add a new shape. You could do it in a separate box, we're going to add it to it because it's really cool. We're going to say, I want a rectangle. Mine's already the right color, because--

Is that the default color? It's probably not, it's something I've picked. So I'm going to click on the little box, drag the Hue slider to find the color that you want. I'm going to pick that color. I'm going to use the edges of it, just to kind of get it there. It's hard to know where it should go, so we're going to play around with the Layer Order. So shape 1, I'm going to call this one Background Box. You just click on it once and then type it. I'm going to put him underneath. 

Now I can adjust it, check it, kind of how I want, and I want the opacity down a little bit on this fella, just so I can see through it to the background, for no good reason. So what I want to do is animate it, the kind of same sort of times this is happening. So, over at the beginning, remember the up arrow, get locked into the end there. Where am I going to start it? I'm going to find it over here, in my Effects Control, I'm going to twirl up the text, twirl down Background Box, and I'm going to try and find Position. 

So I'm going to start it over this way. I'm just dragging it, I just click, hold, and drag it to the right, it's called scrubbing. Just needs to be off screen. And then, I'm going to get it to come in at the same timing as this, maybe I do. If you do want to get it to the right spot, remember, you can drag this, the CTI over here, hold 'Shift', and it will snap to any other keyframes that are within this Essential Graphics thing. 

You can see them, there are circles there, why are they circles now? It's because you can't see them. They're only circles until you undo it, and then the diamonds. It's just kind of showing you that, somewhere in this little group is a diamond. To express that we're going to show you a circle. So at the beginning here, it's off screen, and what I need to do to actually kind of mark that as off screen, is actually, my 'Shape Layer', I'm going to twirl up 'Appearance', we have to set the keyframe going. Forgot to do at the beginning, it's not going to matter now. You have to do it at the beginning to kind of say that I want, at this point in time I want it to be off screen, and then holding 'Shift', at this point of time, I want it to be on screen. 

I'm going to drag to the left, you're going to drag it the wrong way, then the right way. It's a little bit mechanical, let's have a look. It's kind of like News at 5:00 from 1990. So it's animated, we need to look at doing some easing, and maybe some timing. There's no reason why this doesn't have to be either longer. Let's have a look. Whoa, is that good, or shorter? Is that good? Neither of them are good. You can select both of them and say, actually I want it to be sharp, but I want it to-- I want the starting one to start later on, so it does nothing until it gets to here. Zooms out, look. A little bit 1990s still. We're going to make it prettier, I promise, but that for the moment, is us getting a little bit more advanced into Essential Graphics Panel, because we're actually adding animation and keyframes to them. That is it for this video, let's jump into the next one.