In this short video, we're going to talk about transitions now, most of the questions I get about
networks are about transitions more correctly, problems with transitions that people are having once
they've set up their movies and already started their edit.
So if you have a look at the movie I'm making, it's only got three clips so far.
Start off with a short clip of a helicopter and it's going to jump to a clip over a city as if the helicopters
flying.
And the third clip is just kind of flying over the edge of an island or the edge of a beach, if you
will.
So what we're going to do is we're just going to add some transitions between clip one and two and two
and three.
So the way we would do that normally is go to the VFX button.
We would click on the plus.
And if it wasn't already selected, we'd go to that top and choose a mix.
Now, in this case, we're going to do a dissolve, which is a classic fade in fade out between one
clip and the other.
So what we're going to do, like we normally do, is we pick it up and we put it down.
And what we try to do is aim for both the starting and the end clip to be covered in the dissolve.
And you let go.
And once you let go, what happens is as you move.
One clip dissolves into another clip, which is perfect, so that's fine.
Now let's go between clips two and three and I'm going to zoom in just a little bit so that you can
see what happens here, because we're going to introduce a problem.
We're going to go back to the plus, we're going to go back to the dissolve and we're going to click
drag and drop it exactly in that same half and half and nothing happens, which kind of gets frustrating.
So let's go a slightly long way, which is here.
We're going to go to the duration and the bottom left.
We're going to click on 24 frames, which is standard.
We're going to without an esky, we're going to move our play head forward between clips two and three
and we're going to say apply effect.
Now, this is a warning that a lot of people write to me that they don't understand what's happening.
It says there is insufficient overlapping media to create a transition at this point.
So what does this error mean?
So we'll go back to edit.
We can now look at scenes two and three.
So two.
Is our clip of the city, which is this one over here, like so let's just move our plate around.
So that's going on there.
Now, what you can see as my end is somewhere around just past the halfway mark and my out is all the
way at the end, meaning that's really the last frame of that clip is my out.
Now, if you look at my island scene, you can see that the in and out are kind of in the middle of
the clip.
So if we go back to the error message that we had, it said there is insufficient overlapping media.
Know, what that means is if we apply a dissolve to any two clips.
Those clips need a little bit before or after the in and out, which means that this clip is fine because
there are some frames before the end and after the out.
So if we were to apply a dissolve, it would be no problem.
It would kind of steal a few frames from here or steal a few frames from here to create the dissolve
effect.
Now, if we go to clip number two and have a look there before, no problem.
So you can see where my mouth is right now.
That was clip number two with the city.
That's that one over there.
And that was clip number one with the helicopter, so where the dissolve was, was where my mouth is
now, it's stole a few of the frames from over there to create the dissolve.
When I go to this part over here, which is the.
Transition between 2:00 and three, you can see that there's absolutely no frames left of the city,
there's just no more frames for the dissolve to occur.
So the error message is really saying, I want to put the dissolve in there, but there are no more
frames for me to steal.
So what do we do?
So you've got really two choices.
You could move your out a few frames back to try and compensate for this.
But a lot of times when we filmed and we've cut out and that's really where the out has to be, we can't
move the frames backwards or forwards.
So in that case, let's solve the problem a slightly different way.
Let's go back to VFX.
Let's make sure that we're between clips two and three.
Let's go back to adding a dissolve now before we pick up drag and try to do that, what we're going
to do if I just zoom in a little bit.
So I want to show you in a slightly different way how to solve this problem.
So what we're going to do is we've got the dissolve selected.
We're going to go to the direction.
We're going to still make it 24 frames where it says the target region.
We're going to change it from centered here, which means make it exactly halfway between clip number
two and three.
What we're going to do is we're going to say to here, if we now press apply effect, you're going to
see what happened.
So you can see that the dissolve was overlapping both.
It was actually put into the city where there were enough frames.
And if we were to just play this.
You'll see the effect is almost the same, the only problem here is that I've lost more of my city clip
than I did of my island clip.
In this case, I don't care.
So if I just undo that for a second, there is a fast way to do that as well so we can grab to dissolve.
We know that picking it up here is just going to do nothing because there's not enough there.
What we can do is kind of compensate for that by picking it up and putting the dissolve right there.
And exactly the same as we did before, just drag and dropping it there.
Now, let's say you tried to do the following, which has put it there.
You'll notice it doesn't work because there are not enough frames in clip number two to run the dissolve
into clip number three.
So in this case, this is a good compromise.
I'm going to put the dissolve on clip number two completely.
It will steal a few frames from the island clip to create the dissolve, which works really well.
So I hope that answered the questions I've been getting about why dissolve is not work and transitions
don't work.
And I hope that gets you going on your videos and keeping out of trouble.