5 Creative Transitions in Adobe Premiere Pro

Published on August 25, 2020

Adobe Premiere Pro Tutorials

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Creative Transitions in Premiere Pro

Editing is a creative process and often times we try to find new ways to spice up our edits. Now we can do this with cool effects but what we often forget is a way to go from one scene to another. There is the traditional way of just a simple cut or the overused way of using a zoom or whip transition. But we got creative and found 5 incredible transitions that are easy to make in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Time Transition

Inspired by The Umbrella Academy we created a kind of time jump effect. Or portal effect or whatever you want to call it. Basically you film a scene on tripod and you act like you create a portal to another time. Then you rearrange the entire scene or adjust the lights and shoot the scene all over again without touching the tripod. In Premiere you can then simply create a mask which you can animate overtime so that it looks like a portal opening up. If you then create an extra adjustment layer and add accelerated effects like a lens distortion and chromatic aberration, the transition effect will look amazing.

Window Transition

Ever wondered how they made the awesome transition of going through a window? Well it’s actually super simple. You just shoot while walking towards a window, then you go behind the window and from the exact point start walking in the room. Then you can head over into Premiere Pro and with a simple color matte and ramp effect we can create a fake glass look, a VR Fractal Noise effect to top it off and a final lens distortion effect will create the effect that you’re going through a window.

Bird Transition

Now this is a great transition when you’re making travel videos. Film a bird flying over and make sure that you have enough sky in your shot. Then make a second shot where you tilt down towards a subject or object and with a simple mask and ultrakey effect you can key out the bird and make a transition from the bird shot to your shot. It looks like one shot but it’s actually two!

Rock or Landscape Transition

This transition resembles the previous one, when you have two shots of a landscape and you want to transition from one shot to the other look for an element in the shot that you can mask out, like for instance a rock or a tree. Then mask it out and let it animate on screen when you’re still seeing the first shot, it will look like a movement from the first shot to the second in one camera take but just like before it’s actually two takes. This is once again a great and creative transition for travel videos.

Door Transition

Do you know Benn TK? He’s an amazing videographer who made a ton of travel videos with insane door transitions. Now these were probably all made in Adobe After Effects but we found a way to create an awesome door transition in Premiere Pro. What you need is a shot of a door and another shot. We’ll then nest the door clip, use the VR projection effect to change it’s position so that the door is in the middle of the screen. Then we can duplicate the clip, mask one of them so the door has an opening. On the other clip we can use the Basic 3D effect and that way we can open the door. If we then place our second clip behind it it looks like we open the door to a new scene. We can of course animate this, even zoom or make a rotation so we go through the door.

Dell XPS 17 & NVIDIA (ad)

We’ve edited these transitions on the Dell XPS 17, a wonderful laptop with some top notch hardware like an Intel i7 8-core CPU and the Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060. It also has a great touch screen which at first looks like an unnecessary gimmick but it turns out to be a great feature. Especially when you hate working with a touchpad and don’t want to carry a mouse with you all the time.

The NVIDIA RTX Studio drivers make it possible to edit more stable with better performance in creative applications like Adobe Premiere Pro.