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Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

How to use Auto Reframe in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hey everyone, in this video, we're going to look at Auto Reframe. What is it good for? It's great when you go from, this kind of horizontal format to a vertical format. It's going to do it automatically and track the important information, and keep it in the middle of our vertical, watch this, he goes all over the place here, off to the screen, off to the edges, but over here, my vertical, somehow he stays right in the middle, goes off a little bit there. Same with this one, we start with some cars, drifting across screen, but we need it to be vertical, check this out. They stay right in the middle, the whole time, that's Auto Reframe. I'm going to show you how to do it now. 

All right, first up, in your Exercise Files, there's a folder called Social, and you'll find Auto Reframe 01 and 02, bring those in. Let's make a sequence from Auto Reframe 01, and I'll just kind of scrub through. Can you see, this guy going round and round on a quad, he kind of goes off screen and it comes back in, but we need it to go into that vertical format that we saw before. So you actually do it to the sequence, so not the actual video. 

So anything that's in here will get adjusted, we're going to get one thing, and you just got to make sure then you go to 'Sequence', and you go to 'Auto Reframe Sequence'. If you have nothing like the program-- Project panel selected over here, it's going to be gray, so just have your sequence selected before you do it, and then kick back and watch it, reframe it. It get this guy in the middle for, I think, default is square, obviously, you can pick the different aspect ratios you need, we're going to flip ours up, normally it's 16x9, we're going to do 9x16, turn it up on its ear. 

You will see, depending on how fast your computer is, and how hardcore your sequence is, it might turn along down here, you'll see a little blue bar, mine went very fast, and ready? I'm going to hit 'L' twice on my keyboard to double time it, look at that, he stays in the middle. He kind of goes off for a bit because he does from the original shot, actually leaves the screen, comes back on, and picks him back up again, look at that. 

To really see what's going on, have it selected, make sure you can see your Effects Controls, and just click on the word 'Auto Reframe', and you'll see this blue box around it, and then just scrub, can you see the way it's moving it all around, cool, huh, all these little key frames. 

A couple of things to look at is that you will-- over here this was the original sequence we made, this was my, let's say, 'Horizontal', it's made a new sequence, but put it in here, see, there he is, using the same original video, there it is there, that's my mp4, but it stuck the sequence inside here, so it gets smart. So you got both of them, just so you know, might be a good time to rename them, it's done a pretty good job. Let's call it '9x16', but you might call it an Instagram story, or a fleet for Twitter, whatever you're doing. 

The other thing to note is, you do have some control, with it selected you can say, 'Motion Tracking', how smooth or fast, does it like track it instantly, or does it try and make it a nice smooth transition? Play around with that to see what works. My default seems to work for me every time, let's look at something that's slightly more harder. 

So 'Auto Reframe 02', let's make a sequence from it, this one's a bit loud so turn it down if you're playing it at home. I'll get the editor to turn it down for us. Sweet bit of BMW drifting. What we want to do now is select it, actually, we don't, we have to have the sequence selected, 'Sequence', 'Auto Reframe Sequence', we want to keep it 'Vertical', because that's what we're going out to, social media, and watch the little blue bar down here, flash. This one's going to kind of work. Watch, the black car eventually turns into tires, it's funny, oh, Adobe Sensei lost the black car, and picked up this group of tyres, so that happens, you can fix it. 

So the original, let's go back to the original, there it is there, the car goes along, and it just stays fixated on this even though the car goes past, so hey, it's a computer, let's help it. So let's scrub back until it lost the connection, I'm just using my left and right arrows on my keyboard, so it kind of gets to, yeah, it's kind of already picked it up, so it knows that's there. So I'm going to get to where it's still clearly in the shot, and I'm going to select the clip, and I'm going to say, this one here, I'm going to adjust position, turn the little timer on, to set a keyframe, there it is there, and I'm going to set it so it's right in the middle, just dragging these over here left and right, and then I'm going to move along, all the way to the end, because it goes around the corner and starts coming back, I've practiced this one before. 

You're going to have to do a bit of playing around with your particular clip, but I'm kind of going in about this far, and I'm kind of dragging it left and right, so he's in the middle, and at the end, he kind of goes back that way. So if you get to the end of your clip, you can go back one key frame, it's a weird thing in Premiere Pro, right? I'm at the end, nope, you're one frame past it, so you get ahead, backspace, '\', and then I'm going to make another one, and drag it back this way. 

Holding 'Shift', remember, will jump to these keyframes, so it's there, then I want them to be kind of there, I don't want to be there, so you can override these position ones, now that you're a master of keyframes, and hopefully, that didn't work very well. So that keyframe then is the master of keyframes, so I'm going to, about here is lost as well, so I'm going to adjust it, there we go, good work, Dan. There's a bit of manual adjusting. 

Now if I'm truthful, not every video works, the first one I picked for you, took a little while to find one, this one here took a while to find one that works perfectly. I love the idea and I hope it gets better and better, as the kind of, you know, machine learning artificial intelligence, Adobe Sensei gets better, but for the moment, if you do find mixed results, me too. So I'll have a--

I'll show you a couple of versions that didn't work. I don't-- these are not in the Exercise Files, because they didn't work, I just want to show you here. So let's grab these two, these two are like, ah, these would be perfect, and here we go. There's this one, actually let's do it, it's kind of rock climbing, I thought this would be cool, you know, we'll follow the guy up the wall, and get it run the middle, let's see what happens. 'Sequence', 'Auto Reframe?' Yes, please, and it follows a shadow, it's really weird, look, the shadow ends up being kind of tracked. 

I couldn't play with the settings here, click it, Effects, I couldn't make it work, so I just kind of do it myself, it wasn't a big one, because it wasn't moving much, but hey, didn't work. Let's look at the other one, that didn't quite work, this one here, 'Sequence', 'Auto Reframe', I don't know, I thought this would be great, and you just end up with this, some took a little bit longer to reframe but it's, it does some weird stuff, it's not bad, like if I click on it, and I hit 'Auto Reframe', and I kind of scrub back and forth, it tries, and it does a pretty good job, it's just not good enough to me to just go, "Oh, great." 

I'm going to have to go and do a lot of work to get it centered. The problem with this one, there's a bit of, like, I want to say generation, it's not a word, the camera actually jumps a little bit so it gets lost, and that's what happens, but that's true of lots of footage. So I did try and stabilize this video first, and then run it through auto keyframe, I couldn't get that to work, so just be aware, it works great, when it does work, but you might run into problems, and find that the video you're working on is not working, and saying that it's a newish feature for Premiere Pro. So with every update, I'm sure it's going to get better, that is Auto Reframe for Premiere Pro, let's get into the next video.