Learn how to work with photos, titles, and graphics in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Import and edit photos and graphics using the Media Browser panel.
For this lesson, I'm working with the project file 04_01 Working with image files.prproj. And you can find that project file with the media associated with this lesson. Just double click on the project file to open it in Premiere Pro. It's likely you'll want to incorporate still images and graphics in your projects. It's easy to work with this kind of material in Premiere Pro. Let's dive in and take a look. I'm going to the Media Browser panel where I've already browsed in my storage to the Media Files associated with this project. But what I'm really interested in is this folder full of 1280x720 photos. I'm going to double click to open up that folder and let's choose one of these. I'll right-click on the photo I want and choose Import. The photo appears in my Project panel and I can double click to open it in the Source monitor or I can switch to Icon View and just view it as a Thumbnail. In any case I'm going to drag this straight into my Sequence. I'll put that at the end of the video clip. It's pretty short. I'm going to zoom in a little bit using the Navigator at the bottom of the Timeline panel. And I can see looking at the bottom right corner of the Source monitor it's a 5-second clip. We're seeing here at 30 frames per second, this is 4 seconds and 29 frames, the last frame makes it 5. To change the duration that a still image plays for you can click on the end of the clip and drag to any length you like. You'll notice if I just hold on to the mouse button for a moment I'm getting an indication of how much I'm adjusting the duration and what the new total duration will be. I'll just click to line up the Play head so we can see the image in our Sequence. Now what we're looking at here is a regular still image. In fact, it's a JPEG but if I go back to the Media Browser and go into my Media Files. I've got a multi-layer Photoshop document here that I'm going to import as well. When you import a Photoshop document an additional dialog comes up. Up at the top I can choose Import As: and if I choose Individual Layers I can turn off and on the Checkboxes for the layers that I want. I'm going to choose Merge All Layers and click OK. And there it is in the Project panel. Once again, I can double click to open it in the Source monitor and I can drag this into the Timeline right after the existing photo. And there it is. I'm going to drag along a little bit in the Sequence here to get a gap in the Timeline and go back to the Media Browser. And back into that 1280x720 folder. I'm going to select the rest of these photos. I'm just holding the Shift key down to make a list selection and I'm going to drag them straight into the Sequence from the Media Browser, all four of them. When I do that you'll notice back in the Project panel all of those photos have also been added to my project. Like all of the images we've imported so far, these have a 5-second duration. So I'm going to undo and undo again so they're no longer in the project. And I'm going to make a change to a preference. Here in Windows I'm going to go to the Edit menu and choose Preferences and Timeline..., this would be under the Premiere Pro menu in Mac OS. Here in this Preferences you can see I've got the option to specify the Still Image Default Duration. I'm going to set this to 2.00 Seconds and I'm going to click OK. Now I'm going to go back to the Media Browser, I'm going to take those four images and pull them in again and right away you can see they now have a 2-second duration. Remember of course you can change the duration to anything you want but this can be a useful workflow if you've got a lot of images to work with. Importing image files is the same as importing video clips. The main difference is that Premiere Pro needs to know how long to play them for. You can edit them into Sequences and work with them just as you would any other clip.
What you learned: Add images
- Add photos to a sequence just as you would add video clips.
- If you import a PSD file from Adobe Photoshop, you can choose which layers you would like to import.
- You can change the still image playback duration from its 5-second default length by choosing Edit > Preferences > Timeline > Still Image Default Duration (Windows) or Premiere Pro Application Menu > Preferences > Timeline > Still Image Default Duration (macOS).
Create your own original titles and graphics with the Essential Graphics panel.
For this lesson, I'm working with the 04_02 Create a new title.prproj. You can find that project file with the media associated with this lesson. Double-click on it to open it in Premiere Pro. Let's create a title using the Graphics workspace. I'm clicking on Graphics at the top of the screen and just to be on the safe side I'll click on the Panel menu and choose Reset to Saved Layout. The Essential Graphics panel has two tabs Browse and Edit. There's not much for us to do in the Edit tab just yet, so let's start in Browse. Here we can see a long list of pre-built graphics that we can choose to incorporate into our Sequence. I'm going to take this Basic Lower Third and I'm going to drag this on top of the clip we have in this Sequence. If a dialog pops up advising you to use Typekit to install a missing font just make sure you're online, put a check in the box to Sync from Typekit and click Sync Fonts. The font will be installed and you'll be ready to go. You'll need to close the Project and open it again for the font to display correctly. I'm lining up my Play head so we can see the title as well or I can just click on the end of the clip and drag it to make it a little bit longer. Now I'm going to select this graphic by clicking on it just once and when I do the Edit tab in the Essential Graphics panel becomes live automatically. I'm going to select the Type tool and you'll notice that in this workspace the tools for the Timeline have moved up to the top of the screen. And let's edit this text. I'm going to click where it says Your Name Here and why not, I'll put Maxim Jago and then let's edit the second line. I'm just going to press Ctrl+A that'll be Command+A on Mac OS and let's take this Travelogue title. You'll notice in the Essential Graphics panel we've got some pretty standard options for Fonts and for a Fill color. The Fill color is the color of the text that we've got selected and you'll notice at the top of the Essential Graphics panel each item is a separate layer on this list. Whichever one is selected is the one you're going to edit with all of the controls in this panel. You'll notice that this T icon for the Type tool has a little tiny triangle at the bottom right hand corner of it and that triangle indicates that it's a menu. I'm going to click and hold and this gives me access to both the Type tool and the Vertical Type tool. With that selected I'll click at the top and I'll type in some text. I've typed in the word Holidays but my text is too tall. So, let me just press Ctrl+A or Command+A to select all and under the Text category of controls where my font is I've got a Font Size. I'm just going to click and drag on this blue number to make that a bit smaller. There's a Slider control to do the same thing right next to it. Now you'll notice in the Tools panel here I have a Pen tool and if I click and hold under the Pen tool I have a Rectangle tool. I'm going to use that to pick out a section of the screen just like this where my text is. Of course, this new shape appears in the Essential Graphics panel but it's at the top of the list which isn't much good to me. I need it under my text, so I'm going to click and drag down until it's at the bottom of the list. Now it's behind my text. I'm going to select that Shape 01 layer as it's called and I can either give this a Fill color by clicking on the color swatch and choosing something, maybe green, I'll click OK or I can use this Eyedropper. I'm going to click on the Eyedropper and now you can see as I drag around the interface I'm getting different colors. Let's choose the sky color. You also have the option to add a Stroke. I'll just make that a little bit bigger by clicking and dragging on the number here - there we go - and a shadow if you want. There are a number of other controls in the Essential Graphics panel, you'll find that if you select an item either with the Text tool or by going to the Selection tool as I am now you see you can click on each item separately. You can experiment by clicking and dragging on the controls. But I'm pretty happy with this as a start and I'm going to go back to the Editing workspace to continue working on my project. You'll notice there's a highlight on this word Travelogue because I've got that item selected. I'm going to click on the background layer of the Timeline panel to deselect and I'm ready to carry on editing. It's a good idea to try out several of the templates in the Essential Graphics panel and use them as a starting point for your own designs.
What you learned: Create a title
- Use the Browse tab in the Essential Graphics panel to find prebuilt title templates that you can drag directly into your sequence.
- Use the Type tool to edit the contents of a template title or to create a new one.
- With a title selected, use the Edit tab in the Essential Graphics panel to change settings such as font, color, and layout.
- Each piece of text in a title is on a separate layer, displayed at the top of the Edit tab. Select the layer you would like to change to adjust its settings.
- Drag layers up or down in the Essential Graphics panel so they appear in front of or behind other layers. Upper layers are in front of lower layers.
- Switch back to the Editing workspace when you have finished.
Not all media you import into your project will match the frame size of your sequence.
For this lesson, I'm using the project file 04_03 Change the size of clips.prproj. And you can find that project file with the media associated with this lesson. Double click to open it in Premiere Pro. Not all media that you import into your project will match the frame size of your Sequence and if your images are too big the edges will be cropped. Premiere Pro makes it easy to change the way oversized images are handled. Let's take a look. I have a Sequence here with a number of clips and images. This shot Walking on sands.mp4 is the right resolution for our Sequence. But if we look here we've got a shot that's much too big. This is a photograph and it's common for photos to be much bigger than video resolutions. If I scroll down in our Project panel to find it here we go, it's this Whale in the foreground.JPG shot, 4272 x 2848 pixels, it's pretty big. If I double click to open this up you can see the original composition. Not only is the image the wrong size it's also the wrong shape, it's not 16 x 9 like regular HD video. In the Timeline, I'm going to right click on this clip and I'm going to choose Set to Frame Size. This automatically resizes the image so that it fits in full in our Sequence image resolution which is in this case 1280 x 720 pixels. The horizon line is still off and it would be good if we could fix that and the image size still isn't perfect because we're getting these so-called Pillar Boxes on the left and right sides of the clip. That's of course because it's not 16 x 9 and we've got to find some way to fix that. So, I'm going to make sure the clip is selected by single clicking on it in my Timeline panel and I'm going to go to a new panel Effect Controls. The Effect Controls panel will give you options that relate to effects for each clip that you click on and it'll only show you the settings for one clip at a time. If you have more than one item selected you won't see anything in the Effect Controls panel as you can see here. In fact, you just get a warning that there are multiple clips selected. So, I'm going to deselect and just choose this one Whale in the foreground.JPG shot. I'm going to expand these Motion controls in the Effect Controls panel. And you can see we've got some pretty standard options here to change the Position on screen of the shot. We can change the Scale, that's the size of it and we can Rotate it. Let's begin by fixing that horizon line. I'm going to click and drag on this Rotation control to get this a little more level. In fact, I can expand the Rotation control and get a more of a graphic interface to adjust this. And if I click and drag with the Ctrl key held down I get a little bit more precision in the adjustment. I'm going to go for something like -1.4%. I think that pretty much works. Now I can use these Position and Scale controls to rearrange the composition. I'm going to start by clicking on the Scale control and dragging to the right to make this a little bit bigger, so it fills the screen. And then above that you can see we've got a Position control with two numbers, the first number is the X Position, I'll drag that so you can see left and right and the Y position that's the up and down. So just imagine there's an X and a Y next to these controls to get a sense of what they do. We have quite a lot of other images here as well. And they're all much too big for this Sequence but luckily if I select all of these and right click I can use the Set to Frame Size option for all of them in a single step. Of course, now you'll want to make those individual adjustments to get the best possible composition from each image but this is a quick way to get started. If you work with video clips that are oversized for your Sequence you can use exactly the same technique to resize them.
What you learned: Resize clips
- By default, oversized video clips and photos will be cropped to the frame size of your sequence once you edit them onto a track.
- To resize a clip so that it fits inside your sequence frame, right-click the clip in the sequence and choose Set To Frame Size.
- If the clip aspect ratio doesn’t match your sequence, you can use the Scale and Position controls in the Effect Controls panel to make adjustments. Use the Rotation controls to fix things like a horizon line that isn’t level.
- Select a clip in the Timeline panel to see controls for it in the Effect Controls panel.