From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Adding quick transitions - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

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Adding quick transitions

- [Instructor] For this tutorial, I'm using a new project called introduction to transition effects. We're about to launch on a journey into working with effects in Media Composer. And probably the best and simplest place to start is with one of the most common effects used in film and television. And that's the cross-dissolve, a simple transition effect that you can use to merge the end of one scene with the beginning of the next. I'm going to just use this simple bit of media here at the beginning of my scene seven version two sequence. And I've done just a tiny bit of work to tidy up this sequence, so we've got some easier clip and segments to work with. Adding a simple transition effect is such a common thing to do that there's a button for the purpose right in the timeline window. And the impact of the button depends partly on the tracks that you have selected. Right now I have several tracks selected, I'm going to deselect all of them, I'm pressing Shift + Control + A on windows that's Shift + Command + A on Mac OS. And in fact, this is a great moment to show you a useful shortcut. If you lasso across multiple track selection buttons, you'll see that they toggle often on and you can hold the Alt or Option key to do so right amongst the list. So it's a quick way to toggle the status for your tracks. Again, I'm going to press Shift + Control or Shift + Command A, and just to turn on video one. Now, I'm going to click this button and I should mention of course, this button is available on the command palette and you can assign it to a keyboard shortcut. I'm going to click the button and Media Composer pops up with the quick transition dialog box. And let's quickly run over these controls. First of all, we've got the option to apply this transition to specific tracks. You can see that if you've got multiple layers of media, you can turn these off and on. But using the track enable buttons works too. Next we've got to choose the type of transition that we want. We've got to a dissolve and a film dissolve, these result in different timing if you like, for the transition that's going to occur. The Film Fade is really for fading to black. Then we've got Fade to or from Color. And if we choose these, when you get into the settings, you'll be able to specify the color. Same applies to the Dip to Color transition effect. And then there's a stereo 3D depth transition, which allows you to pre-prepare the eyes of the viewer to the depth perception of the next shot that's coming. It's a pretty advanced feature in Media Composer that we're not touching on in this course. But let's stick for now with a classic dissolve. Then we can choose the position which is really the timing of the effect. In fact if I click away, we get a preview here, this is showing me my clip and my available handle. There's quite a lot of it available for this effect. On the A side, which is the left side of the cut, and the B side, which is the right side of the cut. And you can either type in numbers to specify exactly the timing for the duration, and the start time for the transition. Or you can click this interactive graphic, I can pull right the way out here. And if I keep going, you can see this is the available handle the leftover media from the clip on the left side of the cut. I'm getting the available handles there's quite a lot of media available for me to make a really long transition of fame but darker region here is the leftover unused media. What's important to note here is that this magenta shape, that's the duration of the transition effect we're about to apply that cross dissolve. And you'll notice that it overlaps the handles as the unused media in our clips. And so we're going to reveal media that was previously intentionally excluded from the sequence. And for this reason, it's really important that you check the contents of your sequences. It's very common, for example, for you to unintentionally reveal the slate as the scene begins. I'm going to set this back, let's go for 25 frames, and pressing tab here, let's have zero frames before the cut. In fact, I'll center on the cut and we can specify a target drive. A dissolve effect is a real time effect in Media Composer, which means that it will play without you having to pre process the results of the effect. You can tell that because there's a little green dot on the icon. It's very subtle, but you will start to recognize those green dots as being very important and most of the effects that you work with in Media Composer will have that green dot. If you want to though, you can choose to not just add the effect, which has this outline to indicate that this is what you'll get if you press the Enter key. But you can also add and render. And if you render the effect, Media Composer will pre process it, and it will create a new piece of video media that looks like the consequence of the effect. During playback, then Media Composer won't need to play back the original clips and calculate the effect. It'll just play the new piece of video that looks like the results of the effect. This is rendering of effects. I'm not going to do that for now I'm going to choose Add, and here is our effect applied. I'm going to zoom in a little in our sequence so you can see that icon. And the little diagonal line indicates the beginning and end of that cross dissolve. So I'll click back and let's play through it. - I see the boss. - [Instructor] Again, the cross-dissolve is the most common transition effect you'll encounter. If I go back into the quick transition dialog box by clicking the button, I can switch this to say dip to color. Click Add, and now this image dips to black. - The boss - [Instructor] And comes back up again. The keyboard shortcut for the quick transition dialog box is the backslash key. And provided your keyboard is set up in a way that Media Composer can use, you'll find it takes you straight into this dialog box. And if you're using something like a dissolve and you're happy with the default settings, you can just press the Enter key, and immediately a transition effect will be applied to the selected tracks. Notice I've just selected the video track here. I'm not yet working on the audio.

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