Premiere - Adding Audio Transitions

Now that I have the basis of my DVD trailer created in Premiere I began to look at adding some of the transitions which I had previously experimented with in an earlier blog post. I decided that in order to make the audio of my trailer run smoothly I would add transitions to the beginning and end of every clip.

The first clip I began to add transitions to was Breakeven. To add this transition to my audio clip I simply dragged the transition over to the beginning of my audio. The transition I used can be found in the Effects Panel which can be seen below.

 

From here I then used the Effect Control Panel to adjust the transition. This was in the form of its length. I adjusted the length of the transition so that it was noticeable without being too long. I wanted you to be able to hear the transition but I didn't want it to run through half of the clip. The length I set can be seen in the below screenshot.

 

 

You can see this transition added to the beginning of my first clip in the screenshot below. You can see from this that the music doesn't start at the beginning of my trailer. This is because the first clip is of the appropriate audiences guideline, on all of the other trailers I watched there was no music to this aspect at all and hence I have followed suit.

The second transition I added was to the end of this clip. This time I opted for the Exponential Fade. This was added to the clip in the same way that I did above however this was simply added to the end rather than the beginning. This transition fades the clip out, again I wanted this to be noticeable without it being too prominent and hence the settings below show how I have set this transition to achieve this.

 



As you can see from the screenshot below the transition is now added to the end of my first audio clip. This music now fades out rather than just cuts out at the end of the clip which is much more professional.

 

With this clip now faded out I wanted to add a transition to bring in the next clip. This clip was much louder and prominent than the previous and hence the transition was even more important as I didn't want the clip to suddenly start. I decided I would add the Exponential Fade only this would fade in this time rather than out. I added this transition in the same way that I mentioned previously. The screenshot below shows the effects panel for this clip, I changed the length of this transition which made the transition into this clip much quicker which was the intended. This is based on the fact that I really wanted the music to start before the title finished.

 



As you can see from the screenshot below the transition is now added to the beginning of my second audio clip. This music now fades in rather than just starts at the beginning of my second clip which is more professional and makes the change over less noticeable.

 

From this point I then wanted to add a transition between two clips. I wanted Girls Just Wanna Have Fun to change to Best I Never Had. Before I added my transition this change was much too noticeable and hence it sounded really cheap and unprofessional. I decided that I would use the Constant Power transition. This kept one clip playing while the second clip played over the top until the first clip had finished. This seemed to be the best transition to use when moving from one clip to another straight away. To add this transition between the two clips I simply dragged the transition from the effects panel and hovered over the join of the clips until it clicked between the two. The screenshot below shows the Effect Control Panel from which you can see how I adjusted the length of this transition, this time it was because I wanted to make the transition noticeable. I wanted you to be able to tell the song was changing.

 

 

As you can see from the screenshot below the transition is now added to the beginning of my third clip and the end of my second. The second clip keeps playing at a constant volume while the third clip also plays so they merge together.



 

 

The final audio transition which I added to my DVD trailer was exponential fade. The aim was to have the music fade off as the trailer came to an end rather than just stop all of a sudden. I added this to the end of my final clip in the same way that I have added all the rest of my transitions to my audio. I then used the Effects Control Panel to change the length of this transition. This transition wasn't too long or too short, it was just an average length. The music then faded nicely without taking up too much of the final audio clip. This can be seen in the screenshot below.

 

 

As you can see from the screenshot below the transition is now added to the end of my first audio clip. This music now fades out rather than just cuts out at the end of the clip which is much more professional.

 



 

With all of my audio transitions now added I decided I would look at adding video transitions. This will follow in my next blog post.