Transitions are tough. Whether it’s the transition from living at home to being away at school, starting a new career or job, or moving to a new city, it’s often difficult to move from one thing to another seamlessly and smoothly.

It’s the same in video editing. Sometimes you need a seamless way to get from one shot to another, or one scene to another.  When a straight cut just won’t work, a lot of us default to the dissolve. But this can get boring pretty quickly and, if we’re not careful (or if we’re just lazy), we could wind up with a video that’s reminiscent of bad 90’s wedding videos. Premiere Pro comes with an extensive selection of prebuilt transitions like wipes, slides, and zooms to help you with this, but let’s be honest…a lot of these canned effects are, well, pretty cheesy.  So, what are we supposed to do?

The stock transitions and effects in Premiere Pro might not always work for you out of the box, but if you can learn to combine effects and transitions, you can unlock a whole new level of creativity in your video editing.  Check out this great video tutorial showing you how to combine effects to make something bigger than the sum of its parts and learn how to make a simple but very cool zoom/blur transition that you can use in your projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niMcUQ0Bkxg

 

When I teach multimedia skills, whether it’s video, photo, audio, or web technologies, I always find myself wishing that I had more time. Every project is different and the nature of creativity means that there is no one right way to do it. At WMI, we try to throw you into the deep end and get you creating content quickly and learn by doing. Sometimes, I just don’t have the time to show you all the cool stuff you can do. So, I decided to start this blog as a way to help you keep learning outside of the classroom and to share with you some of the cool things that I see other people doing that I just can’t squeeze into a two hour class.