Video Layers: Tips for Transforming and Enhancing Clips

I'm going to hide those properties, so I selected all my layers. Command-A or Control-A is Select All. Command-Tilde hides all the properties.

Command-Shift-A deselects all. Okay, and if you don't want to use the keyboard shortcut,  Edit-Select All, Edit-Menu-Select All, Deselect All. Okay, by the way, you can also deselect by clicking on empty space.

I just wanted to hide it, because honestly,  looking at all the properties is a little annoying after a while. Okay, so the name of this first lesson of Section 2a is called Working with Video Layers. Okay, so look, aside from video layers have set lengths, there's no difference in a video layer and an image.

Okay, none at all. They both have the same transform properties. They can both receive the same effects.

The only difference is that video has a length,  and therefore video could be slowed down or sped up, because it's video it plays. Okay,  now for this, it is going to have you add the video layer from the video folder. By the way,  yes, for those of you who did Premiere Pro, they're called folders here, not bins,  like regular.

It's going to have you add the video. It's going to be, I forget how long it is,  it'll be shorter than timeline, honestly, I think. And then it's going to have you position it,  adjust it, that sort of thing, so it's kind of on screen.

It's going to be a little too small. We're going to scale it up a little bit, because it's a little too small, by the way. And then we're going to add some effects to it, so it looks more like smoke and less like the fact that it's actually flour being blown past the camera.

Okay, that's what it is. If I were to preview just this blowing particles content, double click, it would open in footage, and I press spacebar to play it. That's what it would is.

So it's literally a dark room, a black background, and a light,  and a camera, and flour being blown past it. Okay, now if I had better setup, I'd have a really nice solid black background, but I didn't, so it's this. We're going to use some effects to clean this up a little bit, okay, because my goal is this.

I need the black background to be darker than it is, and I need the white flour to be brighter than it is. I have to adjust the contrast to that for the effect I need to work. Okay, I'll close the windows.

Okay, so how long is this? Blowing particles, when I highlight it at the top of the project panel, tell me the name of the file,  the dimensions of the file, the second line. 1280 × 720. How big was our composition? 1080 × 1080.

Those two sizes are not the same. Okay, so it's wider than the comp, but it's not as tall. We'll fix that.

Okay, the third line is the length. It is about nine seconds, 23 frames,  is what it is. That's the frame rate, 30.

It has millions of colors. It does not have transparency,  because it would say millions of colors plus for transparency in it, and it's a H.264 video file,  which is basically a standard MPEG-4 file, so pretty common. Okay, no problem at all.

I'm going to add that to my timeline. Where does it want it? It wants it above the rock and guitar picks text layer, so I'll just drag it in. We're cool.

Okay, one note. When you drag into the left where the layer names are, the layer will start at the beginning. If you drag into the right where the actual time ruler is, the layer will start in time wherever you drop it.

Okay, so depending on where you add things to your screen, it will look different. If you drag into the composition panel,  it will start at the beginning of the timeline, go to the top layer, by the way, but it will be placed wherever you drop it. So depending on where you drop things, you will get different results.

Okay, because why not? Why not do it like that, I guess? I don't know. I'm not defending it. I mean,  this is how people do it.

Okay, so the instructions in this book always assume that you're dragging it to over here where the layer names are. Okay, I'll go back to the beginning of my timeline so I can see this without the pictures above it. Okay, so one, that is approximately nine and a half seconds.

Okay, right there. That's the one. The video file has a black corner at the beginning, black corner at the end, indicating you were at the physical beginning, physical end.

You cannot extend something beyond its physical beginning or end. Okay, the only thing I can do for this is basically slow it down so it lasts longer if I wanted to. Okay, which is fine.

Which, by the way, is what it's going to have you do a bit later. Okay, now when I did this originally, because I wrote the book, by the way, I didn't notice these two little problems right there. Those two little problems right there.

I didn't notice those. They're basically dead pixels. They never actually stop being right.

Okay, so when they start to tell you to make it left aligned, that was my bad. Okay, so you might want to leave it in the center, honestly. Okay, so first I'm going to do is I'm going to rename this so smoke1.

Call it Bob, probably cares. I would like to make this take up the full height of the comp. You could manually grab the corner and scale it, but they got a command for this, honestly.

I'm going to right click on the layer. Transform. Do not do fit to comp.

That will squash the length of your layer. It'll force it to fit in a square and it'll squish it. Okay, so fit to comp does not maintain the proportions of your layer.

The other two do. I'll fit to comp height. That will scale it up or down until it fits the height of the comp, and in this case airspace on the sides.

That gets rid of my left pixels being a problem. Okay, if you wish to align it left,  there's an align panel right above properties. Left, center, right.

By the way, the top, middle,  bottom would do nothing. It's already the height of the comp, so there's nothing. But if you want,  you can change the alignment right there.

You can also drag the layer if you choose,  but there's align buttons. If you have more than one layer, you'll also get distribute layers as a choice. Distributing spreads out spacing between layers.

I only have one layer highlighted. It's not helpful. Okay, it doesn't do anything.

But if I were to grab like many different layers,  I think I need three more actually, by the way, that's in distribute turns on. So, if you want to like have three layers side by side, you want to have the same space in between that's distributed. Okay, aligning is lining things up.

I like this. This is nice. Okay,  kind of.

Now, so once I got it positioned where I want, I can move it. Once I got it like existing where I want, that's fine. I'm just going to go a couple frames forward.

Okay,  here's where it's interesting. Okay, if you want to move frame by frame,  it's not Premiere Pro's keyboard shortcut, okay? Okay, command on your keyboard, if you're on Windows, it'd be control, and the right arrow moves forward one frame at a time. Command in the left arrow, or if you're on Windows, control on the left arrow,  move back one frame at a time.

Be careful. Here's why that happens. Look at the number here.

It says negative two frames. It is actually possible to move the current time indicator before the time line starts or after the time line ends, so just be careful, okay? If that happens, your entire screen goes gray because there's nothing there and exists there, so just be careful. The instructions have you move a couple frames in.

It's up to you if you want to move frame by frame or just type the number in. I think it says six in the instructions, but wherever you want, it's fine. It says five, actually.