Video Tutorial: Creating an Animated Swipe Transition

Improve your swipe transitions by animating a still image in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Top image via Shutterstock.

When it comes to video transitions, I’m always trying to step up my game. To me, a good transition cuts a scene seamlessly without making the audience feel like something was there in the first place. In today’s tutorial, I show you how to create a seamless swipe transition by animating still images. I also demonstrate how to create the famous car swipe transition common in Edgar Wright‘s films.

Creating a Premiere Pro Swipe Transition

Your first step is to find the two shots you want to transition with one another. Layer them into your timeline.

Now get your transition element. In this example, I use a post. Take a screen cap of the frame and place it into your timeline, above and between your two shots.

Now mask your transitioning layer.

From here, we animate the post’s position. Remember if your footage moves in one direction your animation moves in the opposite. The camera pans left to right, so we animate right to left.

Keyframe and crop your footage to track with the animation.

Finally, apply a Gaussian blur and darken your animated image to better integrate it with your footage.

Creating a Premiere Pro Vehicle Swipe Transition

Now, let’s move over to our car animation. Luckily, it follows similar steps. Find the two shots you want to transition. Layer the first shot above the second by about ten frames.

Next, grab an image of a car, layer it above the two other shots, and mask it.

Scale and position your car image so that it fills the screen. Make sure the wheels are off-camera.

Move your image’s position to one side of the frame. Then click your keyframe marker. Move up ten frames and slide the image to the opposite side.

The next step is to apply a crop effect to the shot bellow your animation. Create a keyframe and track the moving animation with your crop. This effect will reveal the shot below your cropped video.

Do you know other tips for using animated stills in video editing transitions? Let us know in the comments.