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Hey everybody, I'm Nathaniel Dodson from tutvid.com
Welcome right into this Adobe Premiere Pro tutorial,
where today, we are going to take a look at this trippy,
echoing, light trail effect in Premiere.
Pretty cool, isn't it?
We're going to take a look at how to do that. If you enjoy this video,
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Let's get this one on the road.
Alrighty, so here we are in Adobe Premiere Pro, and my first thought is
I want to take this video track of all these cars flying around the bend
here, and I want them to look like they just have these smooth light trails
following everywhere they go.
It's pretty simple. We're going to come over here to our effects panel,
and I'm going search for an effect called Echo.
Right here - Video Effects>Time>Echo, and I'm going to drag and drop that
there on my video clip. Here in my effect controls panel, I have this little echo
effect that's appeared. And we've got some stuff happening out here,
it doesn't necessarily look good, it just looks like we've kind of destroyed the clip.
Which we sort of have, but we're going to rectify that here.
What I want to do, first and foremost, is, change the number of echoes.
We want to stretch this out a little bit. So let's go with 25 echoes, that's almost
like 25 copies of this video, you can think of it.
And you can see it's just - (chuckle) now we're doing some serious damage.
Don't worry, we're going to - we're going to pull things back into place here.
Let's set the echo time here to like a -0.5 just to see how this works, and
what it's going to do for us. And then we're going to change the echo
operator here from add... we're going to set it to maximum.
Maximum is going to kind of take the highest - the highlights, the highest,
brightest parts of your frame and just kind of paste them over, almost like
a lighten blend mode would do in Photoshop, if you're familiar with Photoshop.
Now, you can see it still looks like - eh, kind of looks like we're doing some
weird stuff here, right? I mean, it's - I guess it's kind of cool, but we really want
this to be one solid chunk of light. At least as much as we can.
The goal here is to change the echo time in seconds to something less than
negative half a second. This stuff needs to be squeezed even tighter together,
I guess technically this is more. So I'm going to go -0.02, so this is going to
really squish everything together. And you're going to see here what we get is a
really interesting little effect. So I'll go ahead, I'll just play through this,
and you can see, sure enough, we get these really elongated headlights.
Now, I want them to actually be a little bit longer than that. So I'm going
to take us back to the beginning. Let's make them longer by setting like
75 echoes. Now this is going to be very CPU intensive, I'm just going to give you a
warning. I'm previewing this down here at a quarter quality, and I'm
recording my screen on a - a relatively powerful computer, I'm not like a -
I'm not working a monster here or anything. But we're going to get a
really cool effect here as I go ahead and play through this.
And it's going to stutter up, and jam up on me a little bit there,
but it's a really neat little effect. You can see the headlights come out,
and then eventually, they just travel on down the road, at the nice, slow
pace that they're going.
Now, if I want to pick this up, of course you can do something like right
click on your clip. Go Speed>Duration change, and we could boost this to
like 200%, it's going to 2x the speed of the clip, and we could play through
this. Now this going to be even more CPU intensive, just as a little heads up here.
And you can see we just get these nice light trails moving along,
and you can make them longer and longer and longer, if you want.
We could go with 150 echoes, and make them even longer, so they're
almost all just connecting to each other. That might be kind of interesting,
and look really, really cool.
There's just a lot you can do here with this echo effect. Particularly with a
clip like this where the - what we want to sort of echo and stretch out are
the headlights, and there's a lot of contrast within the headlights and the background.
Maximum is going to help isolate those headlights just as you see, and
by the way minimum would do the exact opposite.
It would take like the darkest bits of photo, and duplicate that, and pile
that up. And you just gotta give it a second here to render,
but you can see we get this really kind of creepy, almost empty, road-looking
effect. But you know, it's just different applications for whatever you want -
you may want to use this effect for. I'm going to set it back to maximum.
So I'm actually going to delete this clip now, because we don't need to mess around
with it. I'll come back to that later.
I'm going to bring in this clip of this ballet girl, I'm going to show you
something else we can do here with echo. So I'm going to go echo, and
this clip of this girl, you can see she's just doing her thing out there.
And what I want to do, I'm going to set the echo time again to negative half
a second, so we're going to go -0.5. I'll give this like 10 echoes.
So ten copies of this, and I'm going to set this once again to maximum.
Her dress is white, we want to kind of keep the highlight-y portion of her,
and you're going to see here as we play through this, we just
get this really creepy, 10x version of the video where she's appearing
and restarting, over and over and over again, and it kind of
transforms her from a ballet dancer to more of a spider wearing a tutu.
It's rather disturbing. But it's a really, really cool effect, knowing that you
have the ability to do this with echo. Alright, once again, I'm going
to delete echo, I'm going to delete ballet dancer. I'm going to pull in
one more clip here, and I want to show you guys something you can do here
in terms of having a little bit more control over what you're - what
you're working with in terms of your echo effect.
So one thing you can do, if you don't want to mess around with the echo
effect and it's just not really getting you what you want for your
particular frame. You can just duplicate your current video, hold down ALT/OPT
and we just drag a copy of the video up to the track above.
Hold down CMD/CTRL key and tap the right arrow key,
let's go like 1-2, and if I hit the plus button on my keyboard there,
I can zoom right in on this. You can see that we've just nudged this
two frames to the right. So boom. Two frames to the right for this clip,
now, this clip I'm going to change the blend mode.
So you could do all kinds of stuff. You could try - what does it look like
if I set it to multiply? How does that look? Well, I'm not going to see anything
because my playhead is over here at frame 0, we've got to move out
over the actual video. Okay, that's not really doing what I want it do,
what I want to do is I want to save the headlights, I want to create those
headlight trails again. So, I'm going to go, not with screen, because
screen is going to brighten everything. I'm going to go with lighten,
lighten should just kind of preserve the uber brightest areas of
my image. And I can see the image is being offset, maybe a little bit
more than I want. So I think maybe I'll set this back one frame.
So, hold down the CMD/CTRL key, tap the left arrow key, and now
we're getting much less overlap.
And then I'll just do this all over again, so hold down ALT/OPT,
drag that clip up, hold down the CMD/CTRL key, and tap the
right arrow key once. And then I can now select both of these clips
holding down ALT/OPT, and then select both of them, CMD/CTRL
and tap the right arrow key.
Now, I already set this one video clip to the lighten blend mode,
so as I duplicate, of course, every new video clip is also going
to have the light blend mode. So you don't need to worry about that.
I am going to, I think, make these very, very skinny here.
And I'll just grab the top one here, hold down ALT/OPT,
drag this one up, CMD/CTRL and tap it over one frame, and then
just keep repeating that process over and over - oops!
wrong video clip. Make sure you select the correct video clip.
And just keep selecting and nudging, and selecting and nudging,
and eventually, you're going to get a nice, little effect here if I start
playing through this, you can see we've got this really cool little
effect where we have these growing light trails that just kind of
come out of nowhere. I'm going to duplicate this up, just a couple more
times, and just think of each of these layers here that we're working
with - this is like one step in that echo effect.
I'm going to grab here a bunch of these clips, and I'm going to hold
down my ALT/OPT key, and I'm going to duplicate them up
and now I'm going to scroll up. I've got to select all of these,
hold down CMD/CTRL, and just nudge that arrow key.
And I'll do it maybe one more time, and I think that'll be enough
in terms of - we have a complete enough, a long enough effect
here. I'm going to just hold down my SHIFT key and scroll with
my mouse wheel over here, just shrink all of my - all of my tracks
down. Make them all skinnier, so I can see them all.
Alright, and once more, if I begin this at the very start here,
and I play it through, you can see we're just getting these really
long light trails. Now, maybe you want the light trails all to sort
of fade in. I'm just going to drag my timeline up a little bit so
we can really see what's going on here.
I want to select the starting point of all these clips. I can do that
by holding down CMD/CTRL key and dragging out a selection
over all of the clips. You can see I got all of them except the top one,
so let me try doing that again. CMD/CTRL and drag out over all
those top clips. I'm not selecting the beginning part of the bottom-
most clip. And now, up here under effects, I'm going to get rid of
my search query. Under Video Transitions>Dissolve, I have my
default clip transition set as cross dissolve here, so this is the
default video transition in Premiere for me. I can apply that
to these video clips by hitting CMD/CTRL+D, now that's probably
a little bit too much of a cross dissolve, but maybe not.
Let's just, I don't know, we'll see what it looks like - let's see.
Maybe it'll actually look cool. I was going to say you can change
the duration of the cross dissolve in the Premiere Preferences.
Nah, you know what? I think that actually kind of looks neat.
And you can basically do the same thing here, we can fade all
of these out at the very end, as well. Of course, we just want to
preserve the topmost clip. So hold down CMD/CTRL and drag
out a selection here over everything, except the topmost clip.
And then, once more, we'd hit CMD/CTRL+D, it'll apply a cross
dissolve to the very end. And I'm just going to drag my timeline
back down, make it a little bit smaller, and I'll play through here
to see what happens as the light trails come to an end.
You can see how they just kind of fade away. So the effect happens,
and then at the end of this whole thing, it's just going to fade right
away. And oh, by the way, if you wanted to see how to change that
setting in terms of how long the duration of your default transition
is, you can come up here to Premiere Pro Preferences - it should be
Edit>Preferences for Windows - Premiere Pro Preferences>Timeline,
and then right here, video transition default duration. I've got mine
set to the five frames, maybe this should be more like two or three,
but whatever. Who's counting? I like the way it looks just the way it is.
So, there you go, ladies and gentlemen, that is how you go about creating
that trippy, echo-y, light trail type effect in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Pretty useful. You can use it for all kinds of different things,
it's just a really neat effect, that can be used to set off all kinds of
different things. And I think you will really enjoy messing around with it.
If you enjoyed this tutorial, well, you can check out our group
over on Discord - discord.me/tutvid, if Discord is your thing.
Or, if Instagram is more your kind of thing, you can follow me over
on Instagram @tutvid, where I do a live show just about every day,
and all kinds of other cool stuff goes up over there, as well.
Guys, for messing around with echo effect, and even manually
creating our own stuttery echo here in Premiere. That's it!
Get it? Got it? Good!
Nathaniel Dodson, tutvid.com, I'll catch you in the next one.
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