Welcome to another in the series of video tutorials presented by San Diego video production company, BizVid Communications. Today I’m going to show you how to make and use a vignette in Premiere Pro. The title of this tutorial is a little deceiving in that I am going to begin in Photoshop where I’ll create the vignette template and then I’ll switch to Premiere Pro to show you how to use the template in a video project. This template will be one I can use for every video project I do from this point forward. So let’s get started.
First up is Photoshop. I position my mouse on “New” and click. Next I’ll select the pre-set for “Film and Video.” Then I’ll change the width to 1280 pixels and the height to 720 pixels. This will give me a 16:9 aspect ratio. I’ll leave the “resolution” at 72 but I’ll change the “background content” to “transparent” and click “okay. Next, I want to create a second layer so I position my mouse on the little icon just left of the garbage pail and click. This will create a second layer…as you can see here in the layers pallet. Next, I want to select the elliptical marquee tool from the tool box and then position my mouse in the top left corner…a little way away from the edge, then click and drag to about the same distance in the bottom right corner. This will make an elliptical outline which you can see as little dancing dots. Now, I’ll position my mouse outside of the elliptical pattern, right click and “select inverse.” By doing this, only the outer parts of the elliptical form will be affected.
Next, in the tool box, I’ll select the “paint bucket” tool then double click the color pallet to be sure that black is selected. Once I am sure the correct layer is selected, using the “paint bucket” tool I’ll left click to drop black in the inverted section…like this. Next, I want to remove the selected portion of little dancing dots so on my PC I push control “D” and the dots go away. Next, I’ll position my mouse on filter and click, scroll down to “blur” then “Gaussian blur” and click. This opens a box that lets me adjust the degree of blur to be applied. For me, it’s right about here….100 to 150 pixels or so. Next, I can play with opacity to lighten or darken the effect or do it in Premiere….either way. And there it is.
Now let’s use this template in a video project. First, I want to save this as a layered PSD file….don’t flatten this….I go to “file” and “save as.” Next, save as a .psd. Now, I’ll open Premiere Pro and use this newly built template….back I a moment. Okay, here I am. I’ve dropped the clip in the timeline and have imported my psd file. Now I’ll click and drag the psd file to the track above the clip and there you have it. Easy and it makes the video look much more professional. We’re done. Be sure to visit our blog at BizVidCommunications.com/blog or our BizVid Communications YouTube channel for more educating blogs and tutorials. Thanks for watching.