Effects in Premiere Elements

Below is a screen shot from Adobe Premiere Elements.


Audio Effects and Video Effects are located in section (4).

To apply an audio or video effect simply drag it on top of the clip in the timeline.

Once this is done, you can make adjustments to the effect by using the controls that will appear in section (5).

For example, let’s say that we clicked on Audio FX in section (4) and then dragged the Dynamics effect on to an audio clip in the time line. When the play head is on that clip, section (5) will now show that the Dynamics effect has been added and will allow you to make adjustments to it. See below:

Clicking on the “eye”, the icon on the left of an item in the properties box will turn it off (or back on). Clicking on the arrow next to the name will allow you to access the parameters that can be adjusted.

There’s a few special things to note when you use audio effects. There are a few special icons that appear at the bottom of the Properties box.

  • the arrow with a musical note means: play only the audio portion of a clip
  • the arrow that forms a circle means: loop the audio (play it over and over) while you work on the adjustments.

A few Effects to remember

In class we will go through several of the effects and if you have time, you are encouraged to try out others on your own. There are a few that I find most useful that I’d like to mention.

Audio Effects :

  • Channel Volume - this allows you to adjust the volume of both channels (left and right) of a stereo recording.
  • DeNoiser - a bit complicated but if you can “tune it in” correctly it may help reduce the noise in your audio.
  • Dynamics - there are several things going on with this effect. One is that it can “gate” the audio. A “gate” is kind of like a door. So to “gate” audio means to only let certain parts of the signal get pass. This combined with compression and expansion make the Dynamics effect a good effect to try when you want to clean up your audio signal.

Video Effects:

  • Under the “Adjust” section you will find various effects that can help to make your picture look better. For example, try “Auto Color” or “Brightness & Contrast” and after working with the adjustments in the Properties window, see the effect.
  • The “Image Control” section has effects to change the color of an image, make it black & white and tint it.
  • The “Keying” section has effects that are useful when you have one video clip playing on top of another.

Key Frames

The term Key Frame comes from animation to indicate a frame in a sequence of images that was drawn by the user. For example in Flash you could draw a picture of a person on one key frame and then a larger picture of the person on another key frame later in the sequence. Flash can use these two points to create an animation of the person getting larger.

In Video Editing, Key Frames are points that are set in a clip to indicate that something happens to a setting. If you go back to the picture at the top of the page, you will see on the top right of the properties window an arrow to “Show Key Frames”. If you do this a mini timeline appears in the properties window. For any effect in the properties window, you can now click on the round circle to the right of the effect name to set a key frame. Here’s something to try. Add the twirl effect to a clip in the time line and then show the keyframes. Create a keyframe at the start of the clip. This first key frame will have the value of zero for the angle. Now go close to the end of the the clip and add another key frame. On this key frame set the angle value to 180. Play the clip and see what happens. You will see the effect gradually applied to the clip.