hey what's up ladies and gentlemen I'm Ignace Aleya from toleratedcinematics.com
and today it's filmmaking Friday which means that we're going to talk
about something filmmaking related today we're going to take a look on how to
create us animated letter boxes that you see popping up and different kind of
YouTube videos
this is actually a really popular way on actually letting the audience know that
there is a cinematic sequence coming up so maybe you're talking to the camera
and then you see these bars closing in and then the next frame will be a
cinematic sequence so yeah that's a really fun technique I'm going to show
you how to create them how to animate them on and also how to smooth out the
animation because yeah that really helps you sell the effect and make it a little
bit more professional all right so let's jump into Adobe Premiere Pro and get
started
all right here we are in Adobe Premiere Pro and we're going to take a look on
how to create those a letterbox and bars around your video so we're going to
animate them in very smoothly also so you have these bars before when you're
talking in a vlog and then they close in and then the next shot is going to be a
cinematic sequence it's really cool way as I said to bring your audience to
attention there is a cinematic sequence coming on so it's actually really simple
to do the first thing that you do is just open your sequence with your
cinematic sequence and as you can see right here I'm just doing the vlog and
then the rest is cinematic sequence starting from here so as you can see I
already kind of positioned my frame and shot to be previewed as these black bars
come in but you can still do that later on so that's not a problem
but this is my cinematic sequence and then right here we go out of the
cinematic sequence and we have a vlog with some audio alright so I want to
animate them in and out so the first thing that I like to do and this is just
my technique on doing it a lot of people will probably have different kind of
techniques but this is my take on it and I find it very easy so what I like to do
is go to sequence and add a corpsman and then I click OK and I'll make it
completely black and click OK again so now I have a color map I'm going to call
this letter box and click OK and then just drag it into my sequence right here
so we'll drag it on the top layer right here and then just extend it all the way
until my video ends right here alright so now I have just a black solid on top
of my video which is not really what we want but now we need to mask it out but
what we'll do is go to the effects controls right here and you will see an
opacity tab right here I'll click right here on the create four point polygon
mask if you click on that you will see something like this going on and the
first thing that I like to do is I change my mask fatter to zero instead of
ten and then just select these two points bring them all the way to the
left and like these two points and bring them all the way to right right now this
latter box has been created in the center of our scene so now we can really
simply extend it by using the mask expansion right
here and that's a really way a cool way to animate it in and out but of course
the black bar should be on top and bottom not in the center so what we'll
do is just invert our mask and there we go we have some letter boxes the actual
size to have as a height when you're doing a cinematic sequence the best way
to go for it and my opinion is 800 pixels instead of 1080 so what about
what I like to do is go to the sequence and go to sequence settings and just
changing horizontal pixels to 800 and click OK and then I just like to click
OK again and then what I like to do is play with the expansion until we
actually touch and I'm doing this with the shift an arrow up key by the way and
try to touch the edges kind of plus/minus there we go so now we have a
perfect cinematic sequence maybe 260 will be perfect or actually 255 let's
say or 265 ok so now we have the perfect kind of size of our 800 pixels then I
will go back to seek sequence settings and just change this back to 1080 and
click OK ok and there we go so now we have these
black bars in there and we should have the exact size of a cinematic kind of
aspect ratio of course you can go a little bit lower and just lower this
until as something extremely widescreen it's completely up to you and this could
also look very cool so it's completely up to you you can just modify it but the
original kind of size is 265 about 800 pixels right here I like to do it a
little bit more as personal preference I like this kind of widescreen style so
what I'll do is just keep it as it is right here and now what I want to do is
just find that keyword I want it to be completely in here so right here we have
a vlog and then right here I wanted like almost at the start and if we zoom in a
little bit almost at the start of our cinematic sequence I'm going to click on
a keyframe for our letterbox so make sure that your letterbox layer has been
selected and click on the stopwatch for mask for mask expansion right here go a
few friends back maybe right here and then click for another keyframe if
he zoom in here in our effects control timeline you will see that we now have
two keyframes and we can actually make sure that this is increased until we
don't see our mask anymore in our screen so I think this is about right and now
we have our letterbox animating in just like this right now we have a quite very
linear kind of animation maybe you want to extend it a little bit more so it's a
little bit slower in animation but we have something like this and it's not as
smooth as it could be so what I like to do is just select my both keyframes
right click and go for a busy eight and now it's a little bit smoother but we
can still smooth it out a little bit more by just opening the arrow right
here and just extend these nuts right here so if we unselect everything so
like this one and maybe extend it out just a little bit not too much and the
same goes for this one extend it out a little bit like this now we should have
a very smooth animation so let's preview this okay and maybe at the end you want
to slow it down even more because the N is actually the most important and at
the beginning we can actually speed it up just a little bit and that's going to
come to a very slow and nice cinematic stop so that's really going to fit the
cinematic sequence especially if you're working with slow motion and everything
that is settle and comes and smoothly just works out of the batch so right
here we have a nice letterbox coming in and we have the rest of our scene as we
extended this layer all the way and on our video we will see that now the
letterbox is all the way across our video and then right here before we
enter in another vlog section we can actually create a new keyframe and then
just move it a few frames so let's say we do it like eyeball it a little bit
right over here and we can just increase it until we don't see it anymore our
just copy the first keyframe right here but actually just do it like this okay
there you go and now it's animating out and we have
our vlog going on so that's really cool by the way the audio that I used for
this cinematic sequence is actually from La Veta beats and he's a good friend of
mine he has a channel all about beats and the upload speeds that you can use
for free in your YouTube videos so go and check him out give them some love
with link in the description and from that I hope you enjoyed this
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the channel hope to see you in the next one and good bye
you