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A few weeks ago Oleg posted a thread in the forums containing some abstract photos. Around that time I’d been thinking of making a film burn tutorial, but after searching around a bit it was clear that everyone thought the effect was totally played out. Then I saw a couple of pictures that Oleg had taken of some colored balls, and I had a better idea. Instead of film burns, people could make unique transitions based off of their own abstract photos!

I’ll be doing this tutorial with Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, but you can pull it off in any editing program that has opacity controls and motion effects. If you know how to use keyframes this will be a breeze. This is meant to be a “here’s a cool idea and roughly how to create it” article, as opposed to a precise step by step deal.

Here’s how it’s done.

1. First you need a source photo to create the transition from. An object that has some shine to it makes a good choice. Look around your house and you’re bound to find something to shoot. For example, you could fill a glass will ice cubes and a colored drink, shine a light through it, and snap a photo.

Below is one of the pictures Oleg took. I saved a copy of it, enlarged it to be bigger than standard DV footage, then set to work in Adobe Premiere.

2. Import your clips and set them in the timeline where you want the transition to occur. Click the little arrows beside the track to expand the view. In case you’re wondering what’s in Audio Track 2, it’s the song for the clip.

3. Add your photo on a video track above your clips. Make sure it covers the area you want to transition over. Click on the “Show Keyframes” button, then set it to Show Keyframes. You need this enabled to easily edit the opacity of the photo.

4. Select the Pen Tool from the tools menu, or press P on your keyboard. If you place the cursor over the yellow line in the photo track, then hold CTRL, you’ll see an addition sign beside the Pen Tool cursor. Click to add keyframes like in the screenshot below.

5. Release CTRL, then use the pen tool to drag down the yellow line beside the left-most and right-most keyframes. What this does is turn down the opacity of the photo. You’re fading in the photo, letting it play at full opacity, then fading it out. On the previous step I was zoomed in a little too much and the effect only lasted a few frames. I corrected that by zooming out and dragging the keyframes to cover a larger area.

6. We’ve now got a very basic transition using the photo. To make it look better we’re going to add some motion. Select the photo clip, go up to the Effects Controls tab in the Monitor panel, then click the stopwatch looking icon beside position, scale, and rotation to add keyframes for each of these properties.

7. How exactly you adjust the motion is up to you. Tweak it however you like. The settings I’m using will appear in the example clip. From my own experimentation, I find that subtle is better. While still on the keyframes I just created, I’m upping the scale and changing the horizontal position of the photo.

8. Move the slider down to the end of the clip, then adjust the values again. Changing the values will automatically create keyframes for you. Notice I added a bit of rotation. With this particular photo adding rotation creates a really nice look. I also lowered the scale, and changed the horizontal position again. This will create a slight zoom and pan effect.

There we have our completed transition effect. Play around with your settings to get it looking just how you want it. Below is a screenshot of my final timeline. You can see that I added this effect in a few different places throughout the example clip. I made subtle differences between the motion and opacity effects to give it some variety. In all it was about a 15 minute effort that could surely be made to look better with some more tweaking.

Give it a shot for yourself and post what you come up with in the forums!

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