- What's up, everybody,
Peter McKinnon here. And today, we're talking
about transitions. Now this is Part Three
in an ongoing series on stepping up your filmmaking. There's a lot to cover, so, let's go. (upbeat rock music) All right, guys, you've been
asking for it, so today, we embark on the journey
that is transitions. Now, there is a lot to cover with this. I'm gonna break this video
into several different videos over the next couple weeks
just because I could easily make this video over like
an hour and a half long. And some of you guys would be like, yay! And some of you would
be like, stop talking. So I'm gonna try and find
some middle ground here. But there's a lot to go
over, so in today's video, we're gonna look at only
a couple transitions. Specifically, I wanna show
you guys how to do the Masking and the FrameBlocking, which is where something covers the frame and you mask to a transition underneath. You guys have seen this on a couple of the videos that I've done. I did it in one of my vlogs, where I was at my friend's workshop and we were showing his wood
shop, that kind of thing. I did it at Left Field Brewery
a couple days ago in a vlog. But whenever I can find
a really good reason or I'm shooting and I can work that in, I 100% try to make the effort. So that kind of leads into my first point. My first point is,
transitions are more than just fancy edits and ways to make
your footage look better. Absolutely, that's what
they do, but to get the most out of your transitions and
to make them feel intentional and to make them feel
like you meant to do it, and they're perfectly
suited for each other, you gotta think ahead of
time, you gotta shoot to edit. Now I've talked about this before. You gotta plan those shots, you gotta shoot the
transitional clips ahead of time so when you bring those into post and actually start editing them, and adding the transitions
into those two clips, you're gonna get, it's like, aagh, you're gonna get such a better result because you planned for that transition. It's not just finding two clips
that happen to work together and you're like, oh, sic,
yeah, that worked out. And sometimes that happens,
but if it worked out because you shot certain clips to do
so certain transitions with, it's gonna be that, so,
so much better, okay? Now before we get into the actual tutorial of how these transitions work,
it's important to talk about screen direction and movement, because there's ways to transition clips without actually adding an edit into them. So when we're gonna do
Masking or FrameBlocking, we have to actually go into that clip and mask out clips underneath
and then move things around and actually edit the footage. But before we even get into the editing, like the meat of it, you can
still get great transitions just by matching clips together or matching screen direction. So if there's a car moving to the right, the next clip might be
someone running to the right. And the next clip after that might be something else moving to the right, but if you transition those clips properly between each other, and you
carry out that screen direction where all the movement is going one way, those are still transitions,
you're still keeping in mind, you're still editing
with that intentionality, so that when people watch
your films and your videos, it feels cohesive, it feels like there was
thought put into it. They might not
subconsciously pick up on it, some people might, but if
they don't, it's still, it's an easier watch, it's a better watch. So not all transitions
are fancy camera moves or fancy editing techniques, sometimes it's just
putting the thought into how you're gonna piece
those clips together. So screen direction, and the way clips move
in and out of each other, using intentional shots,
that's as every bit important as actually learning how to
edit in transitions in post. The two things need to work
together to get the best result, essentially, is what I'm saying. So, now that that's out
of the way, let's move on. So what Masking and
FrameBlocking transitions are really good at is making an edit feel really just seamless. Instead of just one clip
whipping into the next clip, which starts with the whipping, of being able to Mask that out, just makes it a lot more like, whoa, it just flows real nice and then give it as just like a nice flow opposed to some turbulence in that flow. We wanna remove all the turbulence and sometimes adding
these types of transitions just smooth it out for a much
less bumpy viewing experience. No seatbelt required. Now, if you're gonna do the FrameBlocking, you have to shoot something
that's in front of the Frame so that you can actually Mask it out. You gotta keep that in mind. So it could be someone walking by, it could be an object
that is just Blocking, where the term comes from, the Frame, and you pan through it
so that it is essentially the divider that moves across the Frame. That's the focus point, that's the anchor. That's what we're gonna use to blend away, so that we see the clip beneath. So when you're shooting,
you gotta keep that in mind. You gotta look for those things. Maybe it's a telephone pole, maybe it's a car that drives by the Frame and completely blocks
the Frame, like that, but you want something
that goes right in front that you can Mask away,
that's the kind of thing you wanna look for when you're shooting. So if we're in my office,
for example, right now, and we just wanna hand-hold a clip, just for explanational purposes, and let's say we start the
clip moving to the right, and then we film another clip, if we just put those two clips together, you can see how it doesn't
seamlessly, it's just not, it works, but it's
whatever, it's forgettable. You're not gonna think anything about it. But if we FrameBlock and we move the camera
in front of something and then the next clip, we continue that transitional movement, but now we're gonna Mask
away that first clip to reveal what's underneath, look how much better that clip looks now as a seamless, just cohesive,
saying that a lot today, but it's the best way to describe it, but look how much better that looks. It looks so much better,
it's visually appealing, it makes the edit flow, you don't feel like anything
is broken or skipped, nothing like that, it just works. So let's get into how we
can do that in Premiere Pro. Okay, so let's jump into Premiere. This is how we're gonna do this. We're gonna be using this clip and it's going to Mask into this clip. Now, how do we do that? Well, by creating a Mask. But this kinda goes back to
what I was saying originally, when you need to make sure that you shoot these types of clips so that they work for
you when you're editing versus just trying to find something through stuff that you've
already shot or old clips. And if you go and shoot intentionally to make this transition, it's
gonna be way, way easier. What I mean by that is this clip here is what I shot at the Brewery. I went from the left side
of this Control panel, panned to the right side and made sure that it passed in front
of the Frame completely so that I could Mask out this section and put a different clip underneath, okay? And that's what we've done
when you see the clip here. All right, so how do we
do that, pretty easy. We're gonna go to the first frame, where you see that right side
starting to peek through, which is right there, and
you're gonna cut right there. Let's zoom in on this. So that is the first frame we're gonna do. So make sure that your screen
size down here is set to about 75% so you have a
little bit of room to work, and then come over to Effect Controls, and select the Free Draw Bezier, and what you're gonna do is
you're gonna make a little shape around that little sliver
of life that we see there, boom, just like that, and
come over back over here, click Invert, and then we're gonna toggle Mask Path, Feather,
Opacity, and Expansion. Now essentially what those do, if you keep your eyes
on the right side there, if we move Mask Expansion,
see how it whoop, makes it a little bit bigger, so we can kinda play with that, expand that a little bit more. We can Feather those edges
so that it's not so harsh. We can expand it ever so slightly more so that it's nice and covered. And just like that, that is our first Frame of
this section Masked out. Now what we need to do is
come over at this point, and select this little
Play button that says, Track Selected Mask Forward One Frame. We're gonna do this
Frame by Frame by Frame until the whole clip is masked out. All right, so with that being done, make sure this is selected, make sure your Mask is selected up here. And then what I like to
do is just go back a Frame to make sure I can see
it, and I can go forward, and then I like to click so
I can get that Mask back. Now you're just gonna drag it back up and you're gonna make a new shape. You can do that by adding
a new Pen Point here. It's just your cursor right
here, if you select this, it gives you another Pen tool, and we can click another
point and drag that back up, drag this back down. I like to just pull
this back a little bit, just so I can see where that edge is to make sure it lines up nice. Same thing with the top corner, make sure that lines up nice. Boom, happy with that. And we're gonna track forward one Frame. Go back down here to the Timeline, make sure that's selected,
and go back a Frame to see. Go forward one more Frame, come up, actually click on the window,
which selects the Mask. And then we can drag that over. So essentially, we're just adjusting this, dragging this out, these
little handlebars here tweak the roundness and stuff like that. So if you've got a shape that's curvy, or you're masking something out that isn't just a straight line, you can use the Pen tool
to really kind of curve, and get jagged lines and stuff like that, so it's really, really helpful. But again, we're just
gonna peel this back, make sure that everything
is selected nice and neat. And same thing, I'm happy with that. And we can track forward one more Frame. Go back, make sure that looks good. Forward again, come back up here. Click on the Mask. And drag that out to continue
masking out this clip. Make sure that corner is not cutting in. We want that whole Frame to
be selected, so we're good. And we Mask forward one Frame. Make sure it looks good
by checking, go back, select your Mask and drag that out to continue masking. Okay, and you do this, basically, for the entire thing until it's done. Now if you did make any mistakes, you can always come back and you can look. Like, see right down in here, there's a little bit of a hole there. I can select this, make sure
Mask is selected over here, and you can just adjust that. You can bring it a little bit back, you can bring it a little bit forward, to make sure it's good and then you can check that out again. Then you can Frame by Frame
to make sure it looks good. And once you're happy with that, you can select and you can
change that Mask at any time. So once you've done the whole thing, it should look something like
this, let's disable that, once you've done the whole thing, every Frame should be masked
out so that the whole clip just goes black and then at the very end, your Mask covers the entire Frame. So when you enable the clip
underneath it, essentially, you've got a beautiful new
FrameBlocked transition. All right, another really
easy transition to do, and this one doesn't take a lot of work, it's just panning into
that is the same color and panning out of something
that's the same color. So a lot of the times,
I'll do this with black. I'll pan into someone's shirt, and then all I have to
do for the next clip is start somewhere that's
black, and pan away. So when you add those two clips together, it looks like this weird
transition just happened and you think to yourself,
well how did that, that's cool. You don't necessarily pick up on it, but it's just another
really, really cool way of seamlessly blending clips together. The same thing is done, which you guy see a lot
of probably, on YouTube, is when someone puts
their hand on the lens and then they come away
in a different area. That's the same thing,
all you're gonna do is put your hand up to the lens,
and then you're gonna go to wherever you're gonna
go, you put your hand back on the lens to start
the clip, take it off, and when you edit those
two clips together, boom, it just looks like you put
your hand up to the camera and you're suddenly in a new place. The same thing goes for
the whip transitions. If you just hold the camera, and you whip around to your left, and then wherever you're
going, you get to your spot, you begin that clip by
continuing a whip to the left, and then you cut those two
frames together in post. The same thing goes for
when I do the transitions where I move the camera
down and I start the clip doing the same thing, I prefer that one, because I can add a
little body motion to it. I feel like it looks more realistic, like I just actually landed in some clip. The downwards motion combined
with my acting skills, they're not very good, but
(laughs) whatever, it works. It just adds for a more
enjoyable experience when you're watching, it's
just one of those things that you're like, oh that was cool. It kinda looks like this. ♫ So gone in you - But you can see how my body
reacting to the transition kind of introduces a new dynamic that goes beyond just that of an edit. Now it's kind of like I
was physically affected by the transition that happened in post. You guys know what I mean? It's like you went one step further, and instead of just visually
watching something happen, that transition actually
affected what was on the screen. That's why I prefer to do it that way. So that's it for me today, guys. I hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and got something out of it. There's a lot of really good
information in this video. It's a lot of stuff that
I'm really proud of, it's a lot of stuff that I feel is important that you guys learn. It's not stuff that I invented. I did not create FrameBlocking or Masking. That is not, it's an old
technique that's been used by so many filmmakers
and so many filmmakers and content creators teach
it and use it because it's awesome, so you
should be doing it too, because it will help
improve your films 100%. If you use it the right way. So hopefully you get
something out this insight. If you did, hit that Like
button, show me some love. Hit that Subscribe button
if you wanna see more. I upload videos several times a week, trying to ramp up the, you
know, trying to ramp up the amount of videos that
I'm posting for you guys. So you guys have a good stream of content. So hit that Subscribe button
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when I upload a video. And other than that, I will see you guys, hang on let's rewind, I did that wrong. And, and, I will see you
guys in the next video. Thank you for watching. Still missing my hat,
we'll use my sweater. ♫ Fallin', I'm fallin' ♫ I'm fallin' I'm fallin' for you ♫ I'm fallin' for you ♫ I'm so gone, I'm so gone ♫ I'm so gone, I'm so gone in you ♫ I'm fallin', I'm fallin' ♫ I'm fallin', I'm fallin' for you ♫ Fallin' for you ♫ I'm so gone, I'm so gone ♫ I'm so gone, I'm gone in you
