In this tutorial we’re going to take a look at creating and animating a lower third graphic in Premiere Pro which you can use for titles, identifying who is on screen or even to promote your social media profiles. We have the option to create a lower third graphic either in Photoshop or Premiere Pro and we’ll cover both options in this tutorial so you can do what you want the way you want!
Create a Lower Third in Photoshop & Import into Premiere Pro
If you decide to create your lower third graphic in Photoshop (almost always my preferred method) you’ll want to make sure that the image size of your graphic is the same size as your video size so it will automatically be placed in the same exact place in your video as where you placed it when you designed it. You also will want to shut off any background layers and export your file as a PNG24 by going File>Export>Save For Web(Legacy) and choose “PNG24” from the drop down. Import this file into Premiere by dragging the .png from your file browser into the Project bin for your project.
Create a Lower Third in Premiere Pro
Over in the Project bin there is a “New Item” button at the bottom of this panel. Click that and choose “Title.” Here you can use the shape and type tools to the left and create the perfect lower third graphic as you need. Leave a comment below if you’re interested in me doing a tutorial on how to duplicate the “CNN” lower third graphic in Premiere Pro and I’ll get that tutorial out ASAP!
Place the Lower Third
Once you create your lower third in Premiere simply close that “Title” dialog box and then drag that title out of the Project bin onto a new track in your timeline above your video where you would like the graphic overlay to appear. Drag the end of the graphic to adjust for how long the graphic will appear over the video.
Transitions to Get it On Screen (and off screen!)
Once you’ve got your lower third graphic in place, open the Effects panel by going Window>Effects and double click to open the Video Transitions folder and double click to open the “Slide” sub-folder and then drag the “Slide” transition out to the timeline and drop it on the front end of that graphical overlay that we placed on the timeline. Add a transition to the end of the graphical overlay as well if you think it fits your style and what you need for your video.
For even more info and detail and a visual example of what I do, be sure to check out the video at the top of this post and you’ll be the video graphic master before you know it!
Leave a Reply