Animate a LOWER THIRD: Advanced Premiere Pro Tutorial

Published on February 16, 2022

Graphics Animations

Creating Lower thirds

To start what are Lower Thirds? Well it’s an identification graphic in an area of the screen the is commonly used to display contextual information. Such as a name, location, job function and so on. Of course you can use a simple static text, but if you want to stand out you can create an animated lower third.

But how to begin with this? Well by opening up Adobe Premiere Pro for starters. And here we will be using the Essential Graphics panel. This panel is especially made for creating and animating graphics. From Logo reveals to simple moving shapes.

And with using the essential graphics panel we will have a lot of options to our exposal, giving us full control over certain properties, like position, scale, fonts, font size and more.

But something we also explain in the video of today, is that you can also add certain effects to your essential graphics panel. Like for example the transform effect. This is actually an effect to control the position, scale and rotation, something that the essential graphics panel also can do.

So why use the transform effect then? Well because of the motion blur. When animating the default position property you never have motion blur. You can fake it with a directional blur, but that’s it. However the transform effect has a special property called shutter angle, when enabling this and setting it to 180 degrees, you will get a natural motion blur.

Now one last very important thing you always need to do when animating is smoothening your keyframes. When animating your lower thirds, your keyframes will start out being linear. This means the if they stop, they will do a hard stop.

But we want smooth animations, like slowing down towards the end of the animation of speeding up in the beginning. You can compare it with a car, to get to full speed it first needs to accelerate. And to come to a complete hold, it needs to break and decrease it’s speed. This principal we need to apply to our animations, making them much more attractive to watch.

Custom Templates

Now when you have you awesome lower thirds all done and ready, you can make a custom template of it. This will give you the option of using it in the future in other projects. But it will also make your workflow a lot easier, because you can alter the text and maybe the logo without completely remaking the lower third.

You can create such a custom template by right clicking on your finished lower third. Then we want to export it as a motion graphics template. Save it where ever you want and now we can start using it in every project.

And the best thing is that we will save such much time, because we can easily swap out our text with something different. Are you using it for a different company then just swap the logo. And because the lower third is build in such a genius way, every animation stays the same and you won’t have any extra work.

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