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Adobe Premiere Pro - Advanced Training

Light Leak transitions in Premiere Pro

Daniel Walter Scott

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Hi there, in this video we're going to do this pretty looking Light Leak Transition. I go on a little bit of a tangent in this one, it is useful tangents, but the short version, if you're just kind of revising here, is basically you import a Light Leak bit of video, and then you change the Opacity Blending mode to 'Screen', and basically you're there, but there's other things I want to share in this video with you, so let's get into it. 

So to spice this one up, we're going to add a few little extras, as well as doing that Light Leak transition. So I'm working on the last project here, I want to bring in the sequence that we worked on earlier. So if you didn't work on that Irish Tourism sequence, just bring in the raw footage, just dump there, on a new Timeline, bring in A and B. If you did do it, I'm going to show you a little trick. So we're going to import by double clicking in this dark area here, or using 'Command I' on a Mac, 'Ctrl I' on a PC, and let's find that Tourism Island. For my one it's under 'Exercise Files', 'Tourism Island', and it's in our project files, there it is there. 

So I can import it, I can import the whole entire project, or just the selected sequence. If you bring in just the sequence, it'll bring in just the videos that were used in that sequence, which is kind of handy. Do I want to create a new folder with imported stuff, to kind of maybe separate them? I don't, and do I want to allow duplicate media? It might mean that you already have them installed, we don't, so it doesn't really matter, but for you it's probably off by default. It's nice that you don't have duplicates here, in your Project panel. It's going to show me all the sequences I have, and it looks like I have none, and I bet I know where it is, it's in one of these. 

Does everybody end up with their sequences in the wrong place? Ah, my file structure is meant to be great, but then the sequences end up wherever the raw footage is. So there it is there, so I can bring it in. So there's my sequence, and there's the footage, that came through, plus the audio, plus the folder structure; super handy. I'm going to rename this one just so I don't get confused, instead of Road Rising, this one's going to be my 'Light Leaks'. Let's also bring in, let's actually put all our mp4s into the footage, oh look, how tidy we are. 

So let's bring in, inside the ‘Footage’ folder, I'm going to double click down here, I want to bring in 'Exercise Files', under 'Transitions', and it's called 'Light Leaks', there it is. Now I've downloaded one for you, there is a bunch more that I found, these are kind of free ones that I found for you guys, from here. So Rocketstock a.k.a Shutterstock have this, just Google "13 free 4k light leaks" if you want all the rest of them, there's a bunch of them in here. You can see, think, oh, think inspirational, Wedding Travel. So there's some nice ones in here. I've just picked one for us, so you can go get the rest of them. You can obviously pay for them as well. I pay for mine normally through, something like Envato Elements, that's really good, and Adobe Stock has some great ones as well, and it's not so much a transition, right? It's more of a thing that you overlay over the top, so it's not going to be our nice transition, like in our effects, like a cross dissolve that fits in between it, basically there's a straddle, two clips. 

So let's open up my-- where is it, there, it's called Tourism, oh, I'm inside the footage, bin. Let's go up one, and where is it? It is that one there. So I'm going to open that up, and I'm going to put them across these two, under my footage here, Light Leaks, and you just kind of dump it in between the gap. Before I do that though, a nice trick. We're doing things like Light Leaks, where you're trying to, like do this transition, is let's open it in a Source monitor by double clicking it, and I'm going to scrub through. It's really handy if you find a Light Leak, or a smoke transition, or some, any of these sorts of video transitions. We're just overlaying it, where there's some sort of, like full coverage, because then it hides the join, if there's not, it works, but it's better when there's a full join. 

So I'm going to-- I found that full join, and did you know, I can hit my M key to add a marker to my source file, rather than just here on my Timeline, you do now. So I'm going to add-- I think this has audio, which has nothing on it, which happens a lot. I'm going to drag just the video down, and kind of lump it over the top here, and the cool thing about it is, it should be snapping, if it's not, turn your snap on, and maybe the marker should snap to that edge there. At least, I know where it is. So I'm going to zoom in a little bit, '+', '+', '+'. Let's have a little look. 

So it's already lined up, if it doesn't, who remembers the shortcut for kind of like nudging it left, nudging it right? Well, you kind of remember, something to do with the curse keys. Hold Shift key down, no, hold the Command key down on a Mac, Ctrl key on a PC, just kind of tap left and right, and it'll jump frame to frame. So you can kind of line it up nicely. Nice, full whiteness there. 

So let's move our Timeline along our CTI, to a part where it's a little bit more obvious. So I've got this kind of bluey thing, and all I need to do now really, is just change the blending mode. So with it selected, go to Effect controls, and under Opacity you'll find one called Blending Mode. It'll set to 'Normal', you can pick any of these. The one that works in this case is 'Screen', but you can play around with the rest of them, and basically the blending mode is the way that this top layer that you have selected blends with the stuff underneath, and screen will look different, depending on the top graphic you're using. 

In our case this Light Link versus what's underneath. So you're not going to get the exact same results every time, but Screen's a good one, another good one is Overlay, it'll depend on the colors and the mood you're going for, generally, not always, but the tops of these, like little groups , can be a good place to kind of jump through and start, but in our case we've already worked it out, Screen works nicely. Also double check that this one is the right size, but yours might not be, you might have to right click it, and say, 'Set to Frame Size'. It might get bigger or smaller, depending if your footage is 4K, you won't have to do anything, but if you're working with HD footage, or your Light Leak is HD, you might have to match them up. 

Now with this thing as well is-- I'm going to zoom out a little bit, Kind of medium part or the middle part, where it kind of goes full white, and heights, "Well, let's actually look at it, Dan." I've seen it because I've practiced before, you haven't seen it. So what we'll do is, I'm going to-- I've got my cursor kind of here, I'm going to use my sweet shortcut, remember, 'Shift K', kind of jump back a bit, "…always be at your back, may the Sun shine, wind," I'm going to get rid of that noise that I did earlier on, we were just playing around with that. 

So here's my noise, hitting 'Del' on my keyboard to delete it. 'Shift K' again, you have to be on your Timeline, that didn't work. 'Shift K', "May the wind always be at your back," and see mine, loose looping. If yours isn't looping with the old Shift K, it's because, "…always be at your back." You'll notice my screen's changed since last time you saw it, because it's been the weekend since the last video. So I've kind of moved everything around doing other projects, so you can't see my looping thing, because I moved that around, there it is there. You can't see it looping, remember, '+', the looping one is that one there. I can't see it, hang on, that one there, drag it down to here, and turn it on, and that Shift K, will also loop it for a long time, which is cool. 

"May the wind always be at your back, may the sun shine, may the wind…" So I like it, but there's a lot more going on afterwards, so what we're going to do is, we're going to turn the opacity down. Did we do this earlier, I can't remember, let's do it again. You won't see these rubber bands on yours. So I'm going to use 'Shift +' to zoom in on my little video bar, so I can see a little bit better. I'm going to right click this top clip, and go to 'Show Clip Frames', no, I'm going to say, 'Show Clip Keyframes', go to 'Opacity', and even if it's got a dot next to it, click it again, and this will appear. 

So this little rubber band, you need to be zoomed in. See this rubber band, because it's so much easier adding keyframes, to this thing for opacity. So right at the beginning here I'm going to put in two keyframes, the beginning, this one here, I'm going to drag down here, just so there's a little bit more-- It actually starts, but I'm just fading it in, and at the end here I want it to kind of fade out a lot earlier. "So how is he adding those keyframes?," you might be asking. You hold down the 'Command' key on a Mac, 'Ctrl' key on a PC, and just click. You can add a keyframe, you can delete them, by selecting them, hitting 'Del' on your keyboard. 

So I'm just going to make mine just not go on for so long. I'm going to drag the edge there. Just to make it look quicker, even a bit further along. So that's that, 'Shift K', "May the wind always be at your back…" Bit better, cool. 

The other thing is, there's quite a strong tone in this one, and it's not what I need, it's blue, can you see here, it's quite blue. So to change the color of anything, there's two main ways, I'll show you both, because, because we can-- I'll show you why, one of them's not as appropriate now. So changing color is probably the easiest, and most common is to use Effects, and use something called Tint. So Effects panel, in my search, do Tint, dump it onto your clip, and say 'Map Black'. It's kind of made it black and white, so the black bits and the white bits, so I want to make the black bits my color, so I'm going to make it red, let's say. I'm going to leave the whites at white, you can change them, but that's how to kind of change everything, but it's very mono color, so that's not what I need right now, it's up to you. 

I'm going to get rid of my tint, click on here, goodbye. I'm just going to use the Lumetri, so find a bit of my Playhead, where it's gone strong blue, there we go there, because I don't want it to be all one color, I like that kind of variation in there. So I'm just going to use my temperature and tint, to find something a bit warmer, I want that kind of like, peachy warmness, just because, no real--

You can play with all of this tone on this color Light Leaks, to kind of get it to be how you want it. Turn it down a little bit. I'm going to use that in this case, but again there's lots of ways to do this, under 'Creative', you can play around with the tints, for both the shadows and highlights, maybe we did that earlier, if you want to do that, or you're not getting the right control, with the tint and temperature up here, again that appears in the Color Wheels, you can do the mid-tone shadows and highlights, and adjust the colors. There's lots of ways of doing the same thing in Premiere Pro, All right, 'Shift K', got to be clicking on the Timeline, 'Shift K'. "May the wind always be at your back…" 

To use it again, we're just going to copy and paste it, copy and paste it, obviously if you download a few more of the Light Leaks, you can have different kinds of Light Leaks, "May the rains fall soft upon your fields." Oh, it's a bit. I have no idea what we did to this earlier on, the opacity of this is down, I have no idea why. Probably in an earlier tutorial we're messing with it, but this one here as well, you might go, and let's say that you only have one transition, and you want to try and make it seem a little different. So my thing is waiting, come on, come on computer, catch up, there it is. 

So let's say that you want to change it, you can change the tint, right? That's a nice quick and easy way to say, actually, I want this to feel different without it being too different, and I might go in here as well, and go right click, and say, where is it, 'Speed/Duration', and we might reverse the speed. So it's completely backwards. "…rains fall soft upon your field," It's different. 

So that's a Light Leak, there are lots of them available out there online, and it's really the original footage, that's going to give you the most kind of benefit, in terms of the way it looks. It's not an effect created, it's pre-created by somebody else, and we just kind of stick them over the top, to straddle, and use as a transition. So Light Leaks, basically import Light Leak, change it, blending mode to screen, and that's it. Somehow I stretch this out for a very long tutorial. We learnt some extras in there, I hope. I'll see you in the next video.