Dive into Premiere Pro: Dynamic Tools Make Motion Graphics Easy

[Editor's note: In this series, we will be exploring Adobe's approach to several aspects of post-production, and how Creative Cloud can help elevate your work.]

Whether it's an animated title, lower third, or end credit sequence, motion graphics play a pivotal role in making any project look stylish, interesting, and professional. And while there are several programs on the market that allow you to design motion graphics, many of them require a lot of experience and expertise that beginners and even intermediate users may not have. However, Adobe Creative Cloud aims to give Premiere Pro users powerful native video editing and motion graphics tools that are accessible to video editors and graphic designers of all experience levels.

We were able to chat with Bronwyn Lewis, Product Manager over at Adobe, about Premiere Pro's new graphics tools and workflows, including upgrades to the Essential Graphics panel, Motion Graphics templates (.mogrt files), and the very exciting Responsive Design features that allow users to adjust the duration and location of their clips without it affecting keyframes. Here are some of the features Lewis detailed.

Introducing Motion Graphics templates

Motion Graphics templates (.mogrt) are a new file type that was introduced in the April 2017 release of Premiere Pro and After Effects. You can think of a Motion Graphics template as a new kind of export format—it allows you to bundle up all of the complexity of an After Effects project, with all of its assets, pre-comps, expressions, and controls, into a single file with easy-to-use controls that can be consumed and customized in Premiere Pro. An editor never has to open After Effects (and in many cases, doesn't need it installed at all!) to work with a .mogrt file in their project.

If After Effects isn't your tool of choice, editors working in Premiere Pro can use the Type Tool and graphics features directly in Premiere Pro to develop titles and motion graphics (more on that below). These graphics can also be saved as Motion Graphics templates (.mogrt) for future reuse.

Essential Graphics panel gets an upgrade

Premiere Pro has a completely new graphics workflow that puts more control in the hands of users by allowing them to create and customize text graphics with the brand new Type tool, graphics options, and Motion Graphic templates. 

The new Essential Graphics panel gives users the power to work with text right in the Program Monitor with the Type tool, an upgrade from the previous Titler tool. Users can now simply click on the Program Monitor and type up their text. Text can be customized with many different options, including Align, Transform, and Appearance options, which give you the option to adjust the font, tracking, kerning, leading, fill, stroke, and shadow on a particular text graphic.

Premiere Pro also has tools for creating shapes in your graphics: the Pen, Rectangle, and Ellipse tools allow you to add shape layers to your graphics by drawing directly in the Program Monitor to build up a graphic clip, similar to how you are used to working in Photoshop.

If you're working with a Motion Graphics template that was created in After Effects, Premiere Pro's Essential Graphics panel will reveal all of the controls the author included, giving you the ability to make dynamic changes to text, color, size, layout, position, and even sound of the template.

"Now you can set responsiveness and protect keyframes. Your graphics can evolve. You don’t have to be locked in."

Responsive Design

If you've ever worked with graphic animations inside an editor before, then you know the frustration of having to manually move your keyframes after you adjust the duration or position of your video clips, but Premiere Pro's new Responsive Design feature for graphics makes that hassle a thing of the past. Adobe took a two-pronged approach to Responsive Design: time-based controls and position-based controls.

Time-based controls allow users to define durations for intro and outro segments of graphics created in Premiere Pro, effectively preserving animations even when the duration of the overall graphic segment is changed, while position-based controls enable pinned graphic layers to adapt to other layers or the video frame itself. In other words, when you enable Responsive Design-Time, your animations won't be cut off by ripple edits.

Once you've defined the time relationships in a graphic, save it as a Motion Graphics template (.mogrt); when you use it in a new sequence, the intro and outro animations will be protected, and the relationship between elements will be preserved, even in sequences with different aspect ratios. Just think, no more manually adjusting keyframes every time you want to edit your animation—meaning your graphics can evolve as your creative vision develops.

Access Adobe Stock directly from Premiere Pro

Adobe Stock was already a great resource for filmmakers to find and license beautiful stock video footage, but Adobe has now made getting your hands on professionally designed, quality Motion Graphics templates and workflows a whole lot easier by not only adding .mogrts as an offering to Adobe Stock, but also adding native support for Adobe Stock in Premiere Pro. Users can now access professional graphics templates—including titles, lower thirds, bumpers, and credits—directly from Adobe Stock right through Premiere Pro's Libraries panel. This means you'll never have to leave Premiere Pro to search for the high-quality assets you want, and powerful search options make sifting through the hundreds of Motion Graphics templates a simple and time-saving process.

Even though Adobe has a dedicated motion graphics editor with After Effects, the new tools in Premiere Pro make it a whole lot easier for editors to create simple (but dynamic) motion graphics without ever having to leave the program. If you want to add a quick text graphic or lower third, you can do that right inside Premiere Pro, and you're not only going to have tons of beautiful, high-quality templates to choose from, but, thanks to the Responsive Design feature and the powerful tools inside the Essential Graphics panel, you're going to be able to customize and work with your assets like never before.

See all parts of this series:
Dive into Premiere Pro: Dynamic Tools Make Motion Graphics Easy
Dive into Premiere Pro: Adobe's Obsession with Color