Welcome to another BizVid Communications video blog. Today I’m going to show you how to add a border to a video clip. I know from my personal experience, sometimes I need that option in my arsenal of tricks. Here, for example, is how I use that border look. As you can see, it adds visual interest to your project and clearly separates the clips within the overall video. So, how do you do it? Well let’s get started.
I already have a clip in the timeline and the first thing I want to do is resize it. There are a couple of ways I can do this. One way is to go the Effects Control panel, position my mouse on the “Motion” icon then position my mouse on one of the corner handles, hold the shift key down then click and drag to whatever size I want. Or, I can twirl down the and use the “Position” and “Scale” numbers….your preference. Now, the reason you want to resize is that if the clip is not smaller than the frame, you won’t see the border because the border will be outside of the frame…..makes sense, right?
Okay, next item of business is to add the “Radial Shadow” effect to the clip. That effect is easy to find. All you have to do is go to the “Effects” panel and type “radial” in the search section. Premiere Pro will bring up all of the radial effects and you can see here that there are only two. We want “Radial Shadow.” Next, click and drag the “Radial Shadow” effect onto your clip in the timeline. When you do that, the effect appears in the “Effects Controls” window and here’s where you can tell Premiere Pro what to do with the effect.
What we want to do first is to make sure the “Shadow Only” box is unchecked and the “Resize Layer” box is checked. Next, I want to set the opacity to 100%. So, I position my mouse on the default 50% and click. This will highlight the text so that all I have to do is type in 100 then click outside the box. You could have also clicked and dragged the numbers to 100%……your preference.
Next is to select the color that I want the border to be. The default is black and, obviously you can’t see it so let’s change to white. Position your mouse in the “Shadow Color” box and click. This brings up the color pallet. You can see that the numbers for black are 0000000. For white they are FFFFFFF or you can click and drag the color picker arrows to a color you like. For our purposes, I will stay with white.
Now, I still have some refining to do. The border does not look white and that’s because the radial shadow opacity is set at 50%…..let me click and drag to 100%. Next, the position look to be off so I’ll play with the “Light Source” numbers and click and drag them around until I am happy with the look…..Okay, that’s looking better, but for me, the border is too thick so I’ll position my mouse on the “Projection Distance” numbers and change it to “2”…..I know this is the thickness I want.
Next, if you don’t want a hard border, you can play with the softness and, as you can see, it softens up the border…but I’ll stay with the hard border. Let’s take it one step further and get fancy….I will go to the “Effects” panel, type in “Roughen” and then click and drag the “Roughen Edges” effect onto the clip. When I do, the “Roughen Edges” effect appears in the Effects Panel. All I will play with here is the “Border” setting. And when I do, look what happens…..a cool effect that gives that old fashion picture border look to the clip.
So there you have it. The video clip is one unit and can be clicked and dragged to any position within your frame or, it can be resized and your off and running. I hope you’ve enjoyed this tutorial and will want to subscribe to our channel for more of the same. Be sure to visit our other blog postings at BizVidCommunications.com/blog. Thanks for watching.