Premiere® Elements 8 For Dummies®

Chapter 9. Using Video Transitions

In This Chapter

• Reviewing the video transitions that come with Premiere Elements

• Selecting effective transitions

• Adding transitions to your movies

• Fine-tuning video transitions

Anyone with a DVD recorder and a cable can dub desirable bits of video from a camcorder to disc. This is movie editing at its most basic; it's also inefficient and crude. By using a program like Adobe Premiere Elements, you can fine-tune your edits frame by frame, apply your own musical soundtrack, dub in narration, and add special effects.

In previous chapters I show you how to capture video onto your computer's hard drive, sort through clips, pick out the parts you want to use, and assemble those clips in the Timeline. If you've done those things, you're ready for the next step in your video-editing adventure: dressing up your project with transitions between scenes. You can use Premiere Elements to add transitions that fade in or out, pull open like a stage curtain, spiral down into a vortex, and more. Transitions provide visual breaks between scenes that help the viewer understand changes in the movie's setting or mood. This chapter shows you how to choose, apply, and customize transitions.

Checking Out the Transitions Library

One of the trickiest aspects of movie editing (for me, anyway) is making clean transitions between clips. Sometimes the best transition is no transition at all, but a simple, straight cut from one clip to the next. Other times you need a fancy transition, ...