- Starting the lesson
- What are transition effects?
- Understanding the importance of clip handles
- Adding video transition effects
- Using A/B mode to fine-tune a transition
- Adding audio transition effects
- Review questions
- Review answers
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Understanding the importance of clip handles
To understand transition effects, you’ll need to understand edit points and handles. An edit point is the point in your sequence where one clip ends and the next begins. This is often called a cut and sometimes simply called an edit. These are easy to see because Premiere Pro displays vertical lines to show where one clip ends and another begins (much like two bricks next to each other).
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When you first edit a clip into a sequence, you set an In point and an Out point to select the part you want. When you edit that selected part of the clip into a sequence, the unused sections at the beginning and end are still available but hidden in the Timeline panel. Those unused sections are referred to as clip handles or simply handles.
There’s a handle between a clip’s original beginning and the In point you set. There’s also a handle between a clip’s original end and the Out point you set. The time ruler in the Source Monitor shows you how much footage is available in your handles.
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Of course, you may not have used In or Out points, or you may have set just an In point or an Out point at the very beginning or end of the clip. In this case, you would have either no unused media or unused media at only one end of the clip.
In the Timeline panel, if you see a tiny triangle in the upper-right or upper-left corner of a clip, it means you’ve reached the end of the original clip and there are no additional frames available.
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For transition effects to work, you need handles because the effect creates an overlap between the outgoing clip and the incoming clip.
For example, if you want to add a two-second Cross Dissolve transition centered between two video clips, you need at least a one-second handle available on both clips (one additional second each that would not normally be visible in the sequence). In the Timeline panel, the transition effect icon gives a visual indication of the duration of the effect and, therefore, the clip overlap.
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