Creating visual effects is a lot like cooking: your dish is the effect you're wanting to make and the ingredients are all of the tools inside your video editor. If you think about it, designing an effect from scratch is just like trying to make a dish from scratch, and if you don't really know what each tool or ingredient does, it's almost impossible to put them together successfully. That's why it helps to have a recipe, which, in the world of VFX, would be a tutorial, and in this one from Cinecom, Jordy Vandeput shows you how to cook up not one, but five pretty nifty visual effects in Premiere Pro that won't require a whole lot of time or expertise. Check it out below:

This video is a great primer for those who haven't really worked much in visual effects. Vandeput breaks down perhaps some of the most popular and useful effects used in videos and film, which include:

  • Car crash: Every filmmaker eventually hits one of their subjects with a car. This part of the tutorial not only shows you step-by-step how to do just that in Premiere Pro, but also gets you acquainted with clean plates, Mask Paths, and keyframing.
  • Set extension:  Since shooting against a beautiful mountain range or famous city skyline isn't always in the cards, it helps to learn how to do a simple set extension in order to sell the illusion that you did. This will get you more familiar with using stock footage and masks. Quick note: Understand that if you want to shoot handheld or add camera movement in post, you'll have to do some extra work to create a parallax effect so your background moves independently from your foreground...you know, because objects closer to the camera move faster than objects further away from it.
  • Time warp: This effect is great for many different applications, and you'll get a much-needed intro to the Video Effects tools that come right inside Premiere Pro.
  • Harry Potter light wand: Because who doesn't want to take this effect for a spin? It's fun! Plus, you'll learn a little bit about using Premiere Pro's Lens Flares.
  • Gunshots: And of course, what VFX compilation tutorial would be complete without the ever-useful gunshot effect? Every VFX artist does this differently, so have some fun when searching for the right muzzle flash and smoke assets, as well as blending and scaling them to fit your comp.

What are some other fast and easy VFX that newbies should try? Let us know down in the comments.

Source: Cinecom

vfxvisual effects
Editing & Post-Production