Adobe Premiere Pro – Panning, scrolling and scale images over time

It is often necessary to scale and move the images you have brought into your timeline. Often you will want to create a slow zoom in, zoom out or pan across an image to add a little movement to your video and have it look a little less like a slide show.

If you familiar with Adobe After Effects you will find this very easy as it’s a process of adding keyframes at start and end points to inform Premiere as to where motion should begin and end.

Start by creating an image in photo with dimensions (Understanding dimensions) bigger than your frame dimensions. Bring it into Premiere and drag it down to the time line. You will see the image appear in the window on the right.

Now place your playhead where you would like the animation to begin and then with the clip selected click on the effects tab in the first preview panel.

You will now see a mini timeline appear for your particular clip. Locate the symbol that looks like a stopwatch, next to the scale controller, click and you will see a keyframe appear on the timeline. Now move the playhead to your proposed endpoint either on the main line or the mini one, again hit the keyframe button and you will see another black diamond appear, signifying the end of the motion. Note that as you move the playhead away from this diamond it is no longer black. You must have the playhead directly on the frame in order to effect it, otherwise another keyframe will be generated. With the playhead properly aligned change the scale numbers to 80 percent. Now drag the playhead back in the main timeline and play your video, you should see a slow zoom out.

Change the scale to more than 100 percent for a zoom in. Exactly the same theory applies to motion the only difference being that you must change the x and y axis in order to create a pan.

It is possible to place as many keyframes as you like on the timeline in order to create more complex movement.