Using adjustment layers to add spice to Premiere's bland transitions

One of the big criticisms of Premiere Pro from the FCP switchers has been the lack of good transitions. This is a criticism I wholeheartedly agree with- but with CS6 I've found a remedy, which I think will be good to use to give transitions pizazz and originality even after the built-in variety gets improved.

What I did is start with a 6-frame cross dissolve, then put a 12-frame adjustment layer directly over it. I then added a gaussian blur to the adjustment layer, and keyframed it to start at 0 then go to 200 right over the cut, then back to 0 at the end. The end result was a "blur dissolve".

I then played around with it a bit, and had it also became high in contrast in the middle, and a couple other things, and really liked the results I got.

The effects that are applied to the adjustment layer can be saved as presets, and you can also set the duration of an adjustment layer in the project panel by right-clicking on it, so you could create one just for putting over transitions, then apply a preset to it.

There are a few more steps involved in this, but I thought it opened up a lot of possibilities. Having the entire arsenal of PPro's effects available to liven up transitons is pretty cool.

(Now, if only you could use adjustment layers to change the SCALE of clips below them- then you could re-create that cool "cross zoom" transition from FCP...)

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"THAT'S our fail-safe point. Up until here, we still have enough track to stop the locomotive before it plunges into the ravine... But after this windmill it's the future or bust."

Alex Udell go to the effects panel.
search "transform" (found under distort)
can you add this to an adjustment layer?

Yes, it does! Cool!

fully re-creating "cross zoom" from FCP would probably require a lot of effort to pull off, but it's nice to know transform works on adjustment layers.

Alex Udell Optionally when you save, you can save it with Keyframes set to scale.

this means if you make and adjustment layer segment with a different duration from your original elsewhere on the timeline....then apply the preset, the keyframes should be applied proportionally based on the different duration.

Saaaweeet!! I was just thinking it would be nice if you were able to do this with presets. This will be a real timesaver.

I tried a few other effects, and noticed that Turbulant Displace also makes a nice transition effect...

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"THAT'S our fail-safe point. Up until here, we still have enough track to stop the locomotive before it plunges into the ravine... But after this windmill it's the future or bust."

Like so many Adobe products it pays to think like Photoshop to get the most out of what you're working with. Stacking adjustment layers, multiple instances of effects at different degrees, multiple blend modes, etc. On the surface it looks like an editor but underneath there's so much you can do. You always heard After Effects as "Photoshop on steroids" and if you take that same thinking into your PPro environment a whole bunch of things open up for you.

Adjustment layers are so powerful in AE I'm glad they brought them to premiere. Really though doing photoshop work I wonder why they don't make the photoshop adjustment layers more like AE, right now you can do individual image control/colour correction adjustment layers but it would be great if they gave us blank adjustment layers we could add stackable filters to like in AE. That way I could add an adjustment layer then throw a darkening curve and a blur filter, then mask out the center to make a custom vignette... like I do in AE today.