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Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

How to use a Morph Cut in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi everyone, in this video we're going to look at a transition called a Morph Cut. Now Morph Cut is a way of blending two kind of Jump cuts, watch this. This is a bad one, can you see, I've got the Jump Cut, I want to smoosh them together, and preparing for this video, I assumed we'd all have a good laugh at how badly it works, but, I don't know, in this video you'll discover that it's either getting better, or it's mainly down to me, doing it badly, because, look at this, this is how bad, this is a bad version, watch. 

Looks like the Matrix or Early Terminator, but later on, look at this, it's not bad. This is meant to be a big ugly Jump Cut, watch, Morph Cut, it's not bad. So let's reserve our judgment, get amongst it, and see how good or bad this Morph Cut can be. It never works mostly, we really need to show it to you, because you will have seen it, through one of the Adobe Premiere Pro, kind of Adobe Max new features, and if you're like me, you're like, "Oh, this is so good," and then it doesn't work. It kind of works, that's why we need to kind of go through it, it works in very limited situations. 

So I'm going to show you some of the things to expect. So let's bring in the footage, it is called 'Morph Cut 01' and '02', bring it into your project, let's drag it into a new sequence. Make sure that 01 is in front of 02. You can see, at the moment my one. So backslash, '\' to fill up the screen, I'm going to hit 'Shift +' to kind of zoom in a bit, and you can see they're around the wrong way. 

Who remembers how to reorganize them? You remember, with the Selection Tool, have this one selected, hold 'Command' key down, 'Ctrl' key on a PC, and drag them around. So I've got 1, and then 2. Now for this to work there needs to be, kind of some pre and post roll. What I mean by that is they need to be, like some of this tucked in here, and some of it needs to be tucked in there for it to work. Do you get what I mean? There needs to be kind of like, post roll is the stuff afterwards and pre roll is stuff before, the take you want. 

So it won't work if you've got, I want to call it a butt cut, I know for sure that that's not video editing. What I mean is, you can't just end the clip, and start the clip, there needs to be some sort of pre-editing going on. There needs to be some extra stuff for it to use. So what I want in this case is, if you listen, "to design myself, it's for a forum, that I'm creating, called "No Dumb Questions." So I get to there, and then I want to trim, so "No Dumb Questions," and then I kind of like lose my, "then we will…" Do that all the time. So when you get to here, what's the shortcut to cut this bit off, remember? W, oh nice, and then, you can see, we say, "it's for a forum that I'm creating…" It's for a forum, then I say it again here, "for a forum…" So I want to get to that bit, "questions…" 

I'm going to trim this front bit up. So I don't use W because it's going to cut the end bit off. How do I get the front bit sliced off? Oh, that's right, the Q key, so this one here, Q. So let's go, "dumb questions, and I'm going to take you along the…" So the dialogue cuts nicely but the video is a really big Jump Cut, and I can't live with that. So Morph Cut to the rescue, kind of. 

So let's go and find it, it's under your Effects panel, let's find, type in 'morph', click, hold, and drag, and drag it across. If it says, like you can't apply this to a single clip, what that means is you haven't got that pre and post roll, you need some sort of before and after, and what it's doing is analyzing in the background, like forever. It takes a while for this to do it, it's doing some seriously cool stuff, and you also need to, like if you just leave it, and it's finished, it doesn't really work. 

What you need to do, because, you can see I'm like, "What happened?," "and I'm going to…" Kind of worked. "some questions, and I'm going to…" That worked okay. To get like a good sense of it, set your-- well, in this case we don't have to set in and out points, because we've only got one bit of red. So we're going to hit the 'Return' key on the keyboard to render it properly. "Hi everyone…" 

Let's actually set in and out points, so that we can look at the Morph Cut, ready? "questions, I'm going to take you along…" Oh, it wasn't bad. Man, I mock this all the time, I teach this class all the time, it never comes along. I bet you, if you're following along, yours looks more like, "questions, and I'm going to take you…" like Terminator, you know, the early Terminator movies, or the old Predator movies, where there's this, like weird bending. 

So check out your one compared to my one, "and I'm going to take you along…" That's not bad. “the design process," Okay, 'Enter'. "questions…" - One more time. - "questions, and I'm going to take you along," Make sure your loop's on. "questions, and I'm going to take you along…" "questions, and I'm going to…" Oh, it wasn't bad, huh? Let me show you a bad one real quick, because if you're just watching and not actually following along, naughty, but also, you're not going to see the bad stuff, so let me grab something. 

Actually, a little voice over here. I'm going to go grab a file from my machine, to something random. You're not going to have this in your Exercise Files, I'm just trying to find something else that's a little bit worse, in terms of the actual output, but yeah, so don't go looking for this file, you won't have it, carry on. It's a good excuse to show you how, I talk about this pre and post roll, and you need all that stuff, most of the time what you'll probably be doing is, actually just editing one big giant, you know, big giant. 

Sure, there are-- you know, you'd be like, "Okay, I want to cut that bit out,” so I'm going to go, I'm going to use my Slice tool, you and you, hold my 'Option' key on my Mac, 'Alt' key on a PC to delete it, and Ripple delete it. So I've got this chunk that I need to bridge now, right? "to explain…" So you can see, there's a pretty bad Jump cut. So let's go a Morph Cut, and let's hope it doesn't work this time. I'm not sure why I'm willing it to not work. 

Analyze in background, this is 4K, so it's going to take longer, is this 4K? Yes, it probably is. So I'm going to click on it, and you'll see that it's analyzing, actually analyzing in the background. I think you can see the background, 'Progress', does that work? Nope. All right, just waiting for it to analyze, here we go. Go back to my Effect Controls, there it is there, give it a second. 

All right, that took probably another 60 seconds, while-- it got sped up there. Let's hit the 'Backspace', uh, 'Enter', not backspace, 'Enter', so that, "Sure, there are…" Render the preview, let's go, ready, in and out. Looping is on, hit 'Enter' on the keyboard, "to explain to my toothpaste," "to explain to my toothpaste," "to explain to my toothpaste," "to explain to my toothpaste." There's normally, like some artefacts as well, that's not too bad. What are we on, Full, let's go and have a look. Often, like they're only small artefacts, when I say artefacts, I mean, I mean these, can you see these, like little weird things going on, and even though they're small they're really obvious, and make it unusable, so that's more likely, what's going to happen. 

All right, one thing you can do to sometimes, get it to be a little bit better, I'm going to go back to my Fit. Computer's totally stopped working now. Yeah, Premiere Pro. I'm going to restart my machine, I'll be back in one second, who am I kidding, one second? So I'm going to go get a, I'm going to go to the toilet and grab a drink, while this thing restarts. I'll see you in, well it's going to be real quick for you. Okay, like I was saying, there's ways to get it to be, feel a bit better, there's not a lot of control at the moment. I feel like this could be, like great, I hope they come back and address it, with their new, kind of like Sensei Adobe learning. 

You can analyze again, but there's not a lot of controls in here, I wish there was, like ways you could, I don't know, I don't know why I want to adjust it, because it doesn't work, but let's have a look, like the one thing you can control is, if I zoom in here, on this even, if you make it shorter, I find it's a better kind of look, it needs to analyze again. "Hello." 

So it's going to spend its time analyzing, let's go back to Fit, analyze in background, I'll speed it up. All right, again, probably another 60 seconds. So I'm going to hit my back-- I keep saying backspace, 'Enter', to kind of render this. If I am confusing you it's this one here, Render In and Out. That key there, the Enter key, render it, "to explain to my toothpaste…" "to explain to my toothpaste…" Oh, it's better. Not bad, huh? 

There's still some artefacts in there, can you see, I got a bit, a little bit Predator looking. It's not bad, that was, it's happening fast, is it do-able, is it possible for you? It's definitely better than the Jump Cut, is it better? It's different from the Jump Cut. I'm leaving this in here, Morph Cut, because A, you want to know what it is, and it might work perfectly for you. If the person never moves, say you've got an interviewee who's just like, so petrified at the interview, they don't actually move. When they mess up, then it works pretty well, but for me, because I'm doing, I don't know, a reasonable amount of jiggling around, it's a little bit noticeable, but it's doing better than I normally expect, and that's either Premiere Pro getting better, or I've just accidentally done some cuts, that actually work pretty well. 

Yeah, we'll leave it in here because Premiere Pro hopefully will be looking to update this, and in the future it might be working spot on, perfectly. So there you go. All right, I'll see you in the next video.