TRIPPY Light Trails Echo Effect in Premiere Pro CC

PREMIERE PRO TUTORIAL ABOUT MOTION BLUR LIGHT TRAILS USING THE ECHO EFFECT! | We’ll cover how to use a cool effect baked into Premiere Pro and also create the effect manually as well.

In this Premiere Pro tutorial, we will create cool long trailing lights that will add a nice touch to any high contrast video clip. In my case I used a clip of some traffic driving down a highway and you will see how the Echo effect in Premiere can really serve to stretch out a clip and add a trippy motion blurred type of effect to the head and tail lights of these cars. The effect has so many uses! Thanks for watching!

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Tutorial Recording Notes:

Disclaimer: these are the actual notes I used to record this video and are written in a language you may or may not understand. Hopefully, you find them useful or cool.

1. Show the example of the finished effect
2. To create these cool light trails (or add a trail of repeating steps to any video) we want to use the simple Echo effect in Premiere
3. Search for Echo and drag it onto your video.
4. Video will brighten, but use the Minimum or Maximum almost always to save the darker or brighter areas. Because of this limitation, you’ll notice that this effect works best when you have a video in which the object(s) you want to have a repeating trailing tail have a high contrast from the background
5. For the traffic footage we’ll set the echo time to -0.020 and tell it to echo 75x and leave starting intensity and decay at 1.00 and set the echo operator to Maximum to save all the head and tail lights to create this effect
6. We can also have some fun with this effect in footage that doesn’t have as much contrast and make the ballet girl look like a spider with many arms.
7. Lastly, let me share a method of creating these long tails of repeating footage that are more manual, but offer far more customization. You can simply duplicate your video track up to an empty track and nudge it down the timeline a couple frames. Then change the Blend Mode to get the look you want. Duplicate the video track for as many copies of the light tail that you want.
8. The great disadvantage with this technique is that you will not be able to get as smooth a light tail effect as you will be able to with the Echo effect, but you will have many blending modes available to play with and you could add a quick 3-4 frame cross fade at the beginning of each of the new tracks. (show how to adjust default transition length in Prefs>Timeline and also select multiple cuts and also apply the default transition with a hotkey)