Work with Graphics and Titles

These are notes on the Adobe video - https://helpx.adobe.com/premiere-pro/how-to/add-image-text-adjust-size.html . Download the sample files from the website - suggest you put these in a folder at the top level of one of your drives rather than saving them to your Downloads folder (because the downloads folder may be difficult to find using the Media Browser within Premiere Pro, unless you know it is generally at c:\users\YourUserName,downloads) and if you have a lot of files in downloads, Media Browser may be slow.

Work with Image Files

Open the step1 project file; the easiest way to do this is to double click on the project file in your downloads folder in Windows Explorer. The screen is divided into four sections: Source (upper left), Program (upper right), Project (lower left), and Master Sequence (lower right). If the Media Browser is not visible in the Project Panel, click the >> symbol at the top right of the panel. Using the Media Browser, browse to the 1280 x 720 Photos folder in Media Files. Right click on a photo and choose Import. You can double click it to view it in the Source Monitor or switch to icon view, to view it as a thumbnail. Drag it to the Sequence Panel and put it at the end of the clip. You can determine the length of the photo clip in the Source Monitor. The default duration for an image in Premiere Pro 2018, 2020, 2022 and 2023 is 5 seconds; it 10 seconds in Premiere Pro 2019 and 2021. To change the duration, you can drag the right end of the image in the Sequence panel and the duration will show underneath as a tool tip when you drag.

To change the default duration for an image, choose Edit > Preferences > Timeline and set the "Still Image Default Duration" at the right. Changing it will only change the duration of images brought into the Timeline after this changed preference is set.

Now we will import a multi-layer Photoshop document. Click on the Media Files folder, and then right click on Sun Seeker Title Graphic.psd and choose Import. When you choose to import a Photoshop document with layers, an additional dialog box will come up and you can choose how you want to import the layers. If you choose "Individual Layers", you can turn on or off individual layers for import. I'm going to choose "Merge All Layers" and then click OK. Drag the Photoshop file into the Sequence at the end of the sequence.

Close the project file.

Create a New Title

As we have seen, you can create a title for your video by creating a Photoshop or image file with the title and then bringing this file into the sequence. In this section, we will see how to create a title for the video within Premiere Pro.

Double click the step2 project file in Windows Explorer. You want to open the Essential Graphics panel. You can do this by selecting in the menu at the top of the screen Window > Essential Graphics. You can also get to this panel by click on the word Graphics at the right top of the screen. The Essential Graphics panel has two tabs - Browse and Edit. Choose Browse. You'll see there a long list of prebuilt graphics. I'm going to take the "Basic Lower Third" and drag it on top of the clip in the sequence so that it appears in the v2 layer. The reason you put it in the V2 layer is so that it will appear in front of whatever is in the v1 layer.

In the Sequence panel, position the playhead so that you can see in the Program panel the text you just added to the clip.

Click on the graphic and the edit menu in the Essential Graphics panel becomes live. The various elements of the text in the Prebuilt graphic along with a description are shown at the top. If you do not see them, click on the text in the Program panel and the associated item will show in the Essential Graphics panel. Click on the Type Tool (T), double click on the one you want to edit and drag the mouse through it to edit it.

• Use the Backspace key on your keyboard rather than the delete key to delete the existing text.
• Use the Text section of the panel to set the font, font style, font size (you can enter a number or use the slider), etc.
• Use the Appearance section to set the font color (using the fill color)
• In the Appearance section, notice that the Background section is unchecked by default. This means that the text you create will have a transparent background. If you check the box, you can specify a color for the background.
• You can reposition the text by using the Selection Tool which is the top tool in Master Sequence Panel (lower right).

In addition to the Type Tool at the left, there are additional tools (such as the Vertical Type tool) which you can use to make additional changes that are described in the video.

Close the project file.

Change the Size of Clips

Double click the step3 project file in your Downloads in Windows Explorer.

• By default, oversized video clips and photos will be cropped to the frame size of your sequence once you edit them onto a track. Thus you will want to resize the video clip or photo so as to not lose some portion of it.
  • The clip "Walking on Sands" is the right resolution for our sequence. However, the image "Whale in the Foreground" is too big, as you can see if you cursor over the image in the Project Panel at the lower left (4272 x 2848 pixels). It's common for photo resolutions to be greater than video resolutions. If you double click on the image in the Project Panel, you can see the entire image.
• It is also not 16 x 9 like regular HD video. 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. This will set it to 1280 x 768 so that it fits in full. It does not change the number of pixels.
• The horizon line is off (the horizon line is a faint horizontal line on the image) and we are getting "pillow boxes" on one or more sides of the image since it is not 16 x 9. With the image in question selected, open the Effect Controls panel and expand the categories. You can click and drag on the blue rotation control number to rotate the image. If you hold down the control key when you drag, you get a finer control.
• You can click on the Scale control and drag on the blue number to resize it and the x and y in position control to position it.
• For position, you have two numbers (x and y) and you can click and drag each of them to change the position.
• The Set to Frame Size command can be applied to multiple images at the same time. Just draw a selection box around all of the images you wish to resize in the Master Sequence panel and then right click and choose Set to Frame Size.
• In summary, if the clip aspect ratio does not match your sequence, you can use the Scale and Position controls in the Effect Controls panel to make adjustments and use the Rotation controls to fix things like a horizon line that is not level.
• Although we changed the size of an image, the same techniques work for resizing video clips.

Revised: April 17, 2023. Comments to William Pegram, wpegram@nvcc.edu