Saturday, November 30, 2019

How to Create a Template With Premiere Pro for the Essential Graphics Panel

There’s no doubt that the real power of motion graphics lies in After Effects, but it’s not always convenient to use, or you might not feel confident enough to use it to its full potential. The Essential Graphics Panel lets you edit certain graphic elements of your project in Premiere Pro without having to flip back and forth to After Effects.

The Essential Graphics Panel is perfect for simpler motion graphics. You can even make your own templates within Premiere Pro, letting you can easily replicate and edit preferred styles across projects – in this tutorial we'll take a quick and simple look at how you can do that.

How to Create a Template for the Essential Graphics Panel With Premiere Pro

A note before we get started – you can’t export graphic templates in Premiere Pro that have been created in After Effects as .mogrt files, so make sure that, if you want to export your Premiere Pro template for use in future, you do everything within Premiere Pro.

OK, let's start. Open your Essential Graphics Panel: Window > Essential Graphics.

Essential Graphics

The Browse tab is to look through .mogrt files both locally on your computer, and via Adobe Stock. The Edit tab is where you’ll work on layers, keyframes and other properties for your template.

If you’re familiar with other Adobe graphic software, like Photoshop, then the layout will feel more instinctive to you – it works on a ‘layers’ premise – when you create a new layer, that gets added to your timeline. You can create graphic elements individually and then export them as .mogrt files.

Add Text

Let’s assume we’re creating some titles, and you want to add text. Use the Type tool as you would usually or you can always choose New Layer > Text in the Graphics menu.

add text

Clicking on your image will start the text. If you hold the click and then pull (drag), then you can create a box which the text will then automatically stay within.

With the Selection Tool you can then adjust the text layers, change anchor points, scale, dimensions and so on.

adjust text

An Easy Way to Keep Text Styles Consistent: Master Text

As a slight segue, if you’re creating titles, or something branded, then chances are you want that to look the same across all your projects anyway. This is where you’ll find Master Styles really useful.

You might, for example, be making a YouTube broadcast regularly and you want the same style of graphics across every video, for continuity. Once you have a text style how you want it, select the text layer and under Essential Graphics, click on Master Styles and select Create New Master Text Style from the drop-down menu.

master styles

Save it as something appropriate, like Main Title. The next time you come to make the title for a future broadcast, you can select Master Styles and your ‘Main Title’ will be there – apply it to your text to immediately replicate the look you’ve previously tuned. You can then do the same with any subtitles, credits and so on.

Add Movement

If you're adding movement to your text, then you'll need to add keyframes to your timeline, which mark the beginning and end of the transition. I'll demonstrate with a simple 'a to b' movement.

  1. First keyframe (start of movement)
  2. Timeline Marker that you will drag to set the duration of movement
  3. Second keyframe (end of movement)
add movement

If you click on the diamond shape to the far right in the circle above, that will add a keyframe to your timeline (1.) or, alternatively, when you adjust the position numbers (circled) a keyframe will appear where the timeline marker (2.) is set. The Position numbers (like coordinates) will let you create movement up, down, left and right.

Here's how that movement above would look:

 

The same method applies to other movement like scale, rotation and so on, just be sure that the stopwatch icon to the left of the thing you want to make changes to, is highlighted (lit blue).

Export Your Template

Once you’re finished and you’d like keep your work as a template to use across future projects, simply right-click  on your timeline and hit Export as Motion Graphics Template, or alternatively, select Graphics > Export Motion Graphics Template. This should export your layers, effects and any keyframes.

export as mogrt

And that's it, you've made a handy motion graphics template for Premiere pro.

More Premiere Pro Resources

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