Premiere® Elements 8 For Dummies®

Chapter 11. Compositing and Animating Video Clips

In This Chapter

• Creating blue-screen effects with Videomerge

• Using keys for more precise compositing

• Animating clips and objects across the screen

• Tracking moving objects in video

You can hardly watch a movie or TV show today without seeing impossible scenes. These scenes may involve superheroes flying among skyscrapers in a major metropolis, giant monsters chasing hapless humans through a jungle, or even a TV weatherman hovering in outer space as he describes the swirling weather patterns down on planet Earth (just off the coast and poised to ruin your weekend, of course). Scenes like these are created using a bit of movie magic called compositing.

Guess what? You don't have to be a Hollywood movie mogul with a multimillion-dollar budget to use compositing. With some simple videography tricks and Adobe Premiere Elements, you can create composite scenes with the best of 'em. In this chapter, I show you how. This chapter also shows you how to use the powerful animation features that come with Premiere Elements; these features allow you to move video scenes, titles, and other graphics across the screen. The last section in this chapter shows you how to use Motion Tracking mode in Premiere Elements. This mode tracks moving objects in video images, and then lets you apply effects, clip art, or mattes to those objects.

Compositing Video Clips

Modern movie viewers have come to expect sophisticated visual illusions — starships flying into a space ...