About Effects and the Effects panel

Learn about audio and video effects in Premiere, how you can preview them, and use the Effect Controls panel and Properties panel to manage them effectively.

Use effects in Adobe Premiere to enhance and modify video and audio clips. Effects let you adjust motion, opacity, time, and sound. For example, you can use effects to adjust the exposure or color of footage, manipulate audio, distort images, or create artistic looks. You can also rotate and animate clips or adjust their size and position within the frame.

Premiere provides a variety of effects organized by functionality and processing type to help you work efficiently. You can control the intensity of effects by adjusting their parameters and animate changes over time using keyframes in the Effect Controls or Timeline panels.

You can also create and apply effect presets to reuse settings and streamline your editing workflow.

Preview effects before applying them

The Effects panel displays animated preview thumbnails for video effects and transitions, helping you understand how an effect looks before applying it to a clip. Hover over an effect or transition in the Effects panel to view a short animated preview. You can then drag the effect or transition onto a clip in your sequence.

Use Preview from Source to preview an effect on your footage instead of a sample clip. The preview uses the footage at the current playhead position in the Program Monitor. Enable Preview from Source in the Effects panel to see how an effect looks on your footage before applying it. This is particularly useful for color and blur effects, where the result depends on the footage.

Find effects faster with search and categories

Use the search field in the Effects panel to find effects by name or commonly used editing terms. For example, searching for "color" returns effects such as Color Replace, Brightness & Contrast, and Vignette. Searching for "green screen" returns Ultra Key. Search also supports approximate matches, misspellings, and typos. For example, entering "Gassain" returns Gaussian Blur.

You can browse the effects tree by category if you prefer — Blur & Sharpen, Color Correction, and so on. Select a category folder and the panel shows animated previews for everything inside it. 

Favorites, presets and custom bins

There are a few different ways to access frequently used effects and settings more quickly. 

• Favorites folder: Add an effect to your favorites by clicking the star icon in the gallery view or right-clicking the effect in the list. Access your favorite effects from the Favorites folder at the top of the Effects panel.
• Presets: Save specific parameter settings for one or more effects by configuring them in the Effect Controls or Properties panel, then right-clicking the effect and selecting Save Preset. Access your saved presets from the Presets folder. 
• Custom bins: Create a custom bin by clicking the button in the lower-right corner of the Effects panel and assigning it a name. Drag effects and transitions into the bin to save copies for easy access.

Edit effects in the Properties panel

After applying an effect from the Effects panel, you can adjust its parameters in the Effect Controls or Properties panel.

The Properties panel displays video effects, audio effects, and masks as collapsible cards. In comparison, the Effect Controls panel displays effects in a flat list. The Properties panel is intended to replace the Effect Controls panel over time. Use the Effect Controls panel to visually drag and arrange keyframes on a timeline. The Properties panel doesn't currently support this functionality.