Now I encourage you to continue adding more clips in this fashion, cutting away using video track to different shots depending on what Jim is talking about. And you will be seeing the version that I cut later on in this series. But for now let's move on to adding transitions. Let's go back to the beginning of the Timeline and playback the first edit point where we jumped from one part of Jim's interview to the next.
[Clip Playing]
Okay, well that was a little bit awkward, it just jumped cut like that and we can soften that by using a transition. Everything that we have been doing to this point has been straight cuts. It just cuts from one shot to the next to the next, which is a really useful thing and in fact it's the most common type of cut there is, a straight cut. But to make things more interesting or in this case to achieve a certain effect, we are going to want to use Transitions.
Let's come over to the left side of the interface and click on the Effects tab. In the Effects tab, there is a whole host of different Effects Presets, Effects and Transitions for Audio and of course Effects and Transitions for Video. Go ahead and twirl open the folder for Video Transitions and let's apply a Dissolve to soften the cut between those two bits of Jim's interviews. So twirl open the Dissolve folder and let's add the Cross Dissolve on the cut point between the first and second shot. So simply click and drag the Cross Dissolve directly on to the first edit point in Video track 1. Now you want to make sure that it lines up to the center of the cut, and now let's play back the results. So go back to the beginning and play back.
[Clip Playing]
Now that transitions pretty nicely and it softens it up, but we might want to make some quick adjustments to this. So let's roll the CTI to right over where the transition is, the cut point on the Timeline, and now let us zoom in a little bit on the Timeline to see what we have got. The easiest way to do this is by hitting the plus (+) key on your keyboard. Let's hit it a few times, and that's perfect right there. You will see the Dissolve is overlapping that cut point and you can make the Dissolve longer or shorter simply by trimming it, just like you would trim a clip.
So let's start by taking our cursor and putting it over the left side or the beginning of the Cross Dissolve and you will see that the cursor turns into a Trim icon. Let's click-and-drag that to the right and trim this by a few frames, and let's stop when the indicator below tells us that we have trimmed this ahead by 10 frames, and release the mouse button. Great. Now let's do the same thing on the right side of the transition. So let's go, bring the cursor to the right, you will see it turns into a Trim icon once again, this time let's click-and-drag to the left. And again let's trim it by 10 frames.
Let's roll it back to CTI and see what we have got. This time we have an AL combination.
[Clip Playing]
Okay very nice, a quick transition and most viewers won't even notice that it was two separate shots. So this was an example of a Cross Dissolve which is the most common transition. But there are literally hundreds of different possibilities with all the transitions that come included with Premiere Pro. Let's go back to our Effects panel and twirl up the Dissolve folder and let's give ourselves a little bit more space to see the Effects panel just by clicking-and-dragging it at the top.
So you can see, there are several different categories of transitions including things like Wipes, which we can take a look at here, and if you want, you can scroll down, see different types of Wipes. There are different types of Slides and Peels, Iris Effects, 3D Effects as you can see. I encourage you to experiment with these different transitions here on the cut and see what you can come up with. Try adjusting the duration to see what you get and also I want to advise you not to overdo it with transitions. It's actually a very common mark of an amateur to overuse transitions. So use them tastefully and judiciously whenever you decide to do so.
So now let's remember to save the project. If you are on the Mac, hold down the Command key and hit S and if you are on Windows hold down your Ctrl key and hit S.
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