Getting videos to react to music is a great way to tie audio and visual together. Music a lot of times can be the force that drives the piece forward. Because of this, we often want the visuals to react to these auditory changes. We can do this in Premiere Pro, it just takes a little bit of finesse to get it to work correctly. Today we go over how to Zoom Footage to a Beat in Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
How to Zoom Footage to a Beat in Adobe Premiere Pro CC
Set up the Sequence
- Create a sequence, or navigate to the spot you want to add the effect.
- Click the footage you want to do the effect with. Hold the alt key, click and drag up. This will duplicate the layer.
- Take the duplicated layer and drag it up to the 3rd video track. So from top to the bottom it is: footage, empty, footage.
- Go to file->new black video. Take this black video and put it in between the two footage layers.
Create the Change
- Go into effects, and look for the Strobe Light effect. Put this onto the black video.
- Find the effect Set Matte and put it on to the TOP layer of footage.
- Go into the effect controls of this top layer, find the set matte effect.
- Change the “take matte from layer” to video 2.
- Change “use for matte” to Luminance.
- Now whenever the center layer is white, the bottom layer will be shown, whenever black, the top layer. We now have control over the changes….sort of.
- Next we need to hide the middle layer by hitting the eye button next to that layer.
- Premiere Pro doesn’t recognize the strobe color as an actual color. (I think a bug with Premiere Pro). To fix this, right click on the middle layer and hit “nest”.
Create the Effect and Add Audio
- Set the top layer to scale 110. Leave the bottom at 100. The effect should now be working.
- Grab the music you are using and put it into the sequence.
- Now we need the song’s BPM. I use a website getsongbpm.com to do this.
- Once you have the bpm, take 60 and divide it by the bpm. So for me, I take 60sec/125bpm = .48 seconds per beat.
- Double click on the nested footage to bring back up the footage with the strobe effect on it.
- Go to that strobe effect, change the “strobe period” and change that to your number. So I changed it to .48. Change the strobe duration to .10 less. So I changed it to .38.
There you go, now you have the ability to change the top layer to whatever you want, and have it switch back and forth. This means you can sync up really any effect you want to a beat! This technique gives you a lot of control!
If you have any questions or comments, let me know in the description below or on the video itself!
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