Making Social Media Videos with Premiere Pro and Motion Graphics Templates

Have you been searching for ways to elevate your brand’s presence on social media? Look no further! With the power of Adobe Premiere Pro and Motion Graphics templates (MOGRTs), which let you conveniently add professionally designed graphics, titles, and animations to the video in your projects, you can create stunning video-based ads that captivate your audience and drive engagement. The best part? The workflow is intuitive, and working in Premiere Pro will feel familiar if you already know and love other Creative Cloud applications. Follow along with an example project.

The Interface

When you launch Premiere Pro, the Home screen will offer quick links to recent projects, online tutorials, and the option to start a new project (Figure 1). 

Once you click the New Project button and give your project a name in the upper left of the Import workspace, you can locate the video files you’d like to start with. You can navigate through folders on your computer and select video or still images from your files or from the tutorials that come with Premiere Pro. I selected videos downloaded from Adobe Stock, then clicked Create. Premiere Pro switches to the Edit workspace, with video clips automatically added to the timeline.

Project panel

When you import video, audio, or graphics into Premiere Pro, those assets are listed in the Project panel (Figure 2). This panel, with its overview of your digital assets, works much like the Links panel in both InDesign and Illustrator. 

Timeline panel

A sequence acts as an individual video project within your main project. Your Premiere Pro project can consist of a single sequence (as we’ll create in our example) or a series of sequences. Tip: Think of sequences as analogous to pages in an InDesign document.  You can have a single page as your document or a multi-page document.  If you followed the steps for importing videos, Premiere Pro will create a sequence for you and place your assets along the timeline in the Timeline panel. Check out this page at Adobe.com for an introduction to working with timelines in Premiere Pro. You’ll spend most of your time in Premiere Pro working on sequences in the Timeline panel (Figure 3), where you’ll move your assets, adjust In and Out points (start and end points) for videos, and apply MOGRTs. You can drag any of your assets from the Project panel and drop them into the Timeline panel to begin editing your video.

Essential Graphics panel

The Essential Graphics panel (Figure 4) contains everything you need to search, browse, apply, and customize your MOGRTs. The Browse tab allows you to quickly locate and apply MOGRTs that you have imported, or you can use it to search for new ones on Adobe Stock. 

Tip: You can also purchase MOGRTs on other stock media sites (see “Get Even More Motion Graphics Templates”).  The Edit tab of the Essential Graphics panel will give you access to different customizable properties (Figure 5), depending on how the MOGRT designer set up your template.

Editing Video

Once you’ve imported your video clips into Premiere Pro, you can simply drag them from the Project panel to the timeline in the Timeline panel (Figure 6). If you followed the import workflow above, then Premiere Pro will create a new sequence for you and import the video onto the timeline automatically. Once your videos are on the timeline, you can begin to create your final project.

Tip: Video clips work in Premiere Pro much like layers work in InDesign or Illustrator. You can drag video clips to different tracks in the timeline, as well as drag clips to new positions along the timeline to rearrange their order. You can alter their start and end times, and you can apply special effects, including color adjustments, transitions, scale, and opacity.

Trimming clips

One of the first things you’ll need to decide is when you should start and stop a video clip, and how much of the clip you want to use. For most clips, you’ll need only a portion. The Selection tool (arrow) changes into a Trim tool (bracket arrow) when you move it to the beginning or end of a selected clip (Figure 7). When you see this icon, click and drag to the right to trim the beginning of the video clip and set a new In point (starting point). Drag the end of a clip left with the Trim tool to set a new Out point (ending point). The original video is not affected, but the final render will show only the portion of the clip visible on the timeline.

Tip: When adjusting the duration of your clip, think of it as cropping your video, much as you would crop a still image in a graphic frame with InDesign. After trimming a clip, you may see a gap between adjacent video clips or between the beginning of the timeline and the first clip. To close any gaps in the video, simply drag the clips to move them back together. If you use the Ripple Edit tool (keyboard shortcut B), Premiere Pro will close the gaps for you. With this more advanced editing tool, you once again drag to trim a selected clip. When you release the drag after changing the In or Out point, however, the other clips in the timeline automatically move to close the gaps (Figure 8). After a little practice, you will probably make the Ripple Edit tool your editing tool of choice when working with multiple video clips. 

Transitions

Transitions let you quickly add visual interest to your video as you switch between clips in your project. The default transition between video clips is a jump cut, in which one video clip abruptly changes to the next, but Premiere Pro offers a variety of transition styles beyond the jump cut. (Technically, this common edit isn’t a transition—it’s the lack of one!) To view the available options, choose Window > Effects to open the Effects panel, then open the Video Transitions folder within that panel. Here you’ll find a series of transitions that you can drag and drop between two video clips. In the timeline, a transition is represented as a light tan box that overlaps the end of one clip and the beginning of another. In Figure 9’s example (next page), I used the Iris Round transition to match the shape of a bicycle wheel. The Iris Round transition creates a circular mask that reveals the upcoming clip within an animated circle that starts from a single point and opens up to reveal your clip on the full screen. 

Applying Motion Graphics Templates

One of the most time-consuming aspects of a video project is creating animations of text and graphics. Creating consistent animated titles can take up valuable time—especially if you need to repeat the same animation with slightly different text throughout your project. This is where MOGRTs come in. They work like other templates you may be familiar with; however, their additional superpower includes animation. To demonstrate, I’ll use a template named Modern Title with Border, which is available for free on Adobe Stock. You can search for, download, and install it right from the Essential Graphics panel (Figure 10).

Apply the MOGRT to your video by dragging the template to the timeline and releasing it onto a track above the video. Move the playhead—the visual indicator of a point in time in your project—over the MOGRT to see the default animation (Figure 11). In our example, a main title animates in while a border draws on the screen, then additional text animates into view. After you place the MOGRT on the timeline, you can adjust its duration, making it longer or shorter to adapt to how long you want the title to appear on the screen. The template behaves like any other clip in the timeline, and you can use the Trim tool to drag the edges to any length in your sequence.

Editing text and colors in a MOGRT

To reveal the customizable properties of your chosen MOGRT, select it in the timeline and open the Edit tab in the Essential Graphics panel. For some templates, like our Modern Title with Border, you can change the text by double-clicking and editing the text directly in the video preview. To change the color, select the text object in the list at the top of the Edit tab, then locate the color option below (Figure 12).

To change the color of the box behind the text, select the Top Text Backing object of the template and set the new color; I chose a teal blue. To change the border color to the same teal color, select the Border object and use the Eyedropper tool next to the border color swatch (Figure 13). You can also create a secondary stroke effect by adjusting the Color, Distance, and Shadow settings.

Disabling elements of a MOGRT

If your template contains a list of objects, then you can also individually hide those objects to give you even more control over the final look of the template. For instance, I decided I didn’t want the bottom text and the break in the border in our example, so I hid both the Lower Text and Bottom Border Mask objects (Figure 14). This resulted in the same animation, but without those graphic elements.

Each time you place a MOGRT in your timeline, it is referred to as an instance of the template. You can adjust the properties of each instance independently. This means you can use the same template numerous times in your project and change text, colors, and visibility each time in ways that relate to the underlying video. For example, you can use an instance to overlay the name of the person who’s talking or the name of a city as it appears in the video.

Rendering Your Video

Once your project is built, there’s one last step to perform. Rendering is the process of converting the video, graphics, and text into a final, ready-to-view file suitable for sharing, uploading to social media sites, or importing into presentations, among other uses. One of the most popular digital video types in the MP4 format. This is technically a video container format, which stores the media files, including video, audio, and more. (It is sort of like a PDF file that contains images, text, vectors, and other components of the printed page.) To render your output file, follow these steps:

1. In the Edit workspace, choose File > Export > Media, or choose the Export workspace instead.
2. In the left sidebar, enable Media File. Select a location on your hard drive, then choose a preset in the Preset menu.
3. Under Format, select H.264.
4. Choose one of the Match Source options with a High or Medium Bitrate, then click Export (Figure 15).

Tip: Just as you can balance quality versus file size when saving a JPEG, you can conserve digital resources by selecting a lower bitrate when given the option to do so—but the quality will degrade.  You’ll find many more options in the Render workspace, including automatic uploading to social media channels and settings for video and audio. You can explore all of these options as you get more comfortable with the editing and rendering process. The last step: Write a compelling description with all the appropriate mentions and hashtags.

Roll ’Em!

While this article has been a streamlined look at the video editing and motion graphic process in Premiere Pro, our whirlwind tour has taken you through a majority of the key concepts you’ll need as you embark on your journey in video production. As you add video editing and production to your skill set, keep experimenting—and have fun along the way.