Dissolve Impacts

Welcome to the first In-Depth-Video by Film Impact

This episode we’ll be talking about the Mother of all video transitions: The Dissolve. The default cross dissolve built into Premiere Pro has an issue that becomes visible in certain situations. To overcome this, we’ve built a new tool for you to use. 

But what exactly is wrong with the built-in Cross Dissolve?

I’m going to demonstrate this using a sequence with a white color matte placed on top of a black background. We are rendering in Linear Colorspace. This option is set in the sequence settings. The Lumetri Scope Panel is open to visualize the color information. Now, look what happens when we apply the default cross dissolve to the white color matte. I’m using the arrow keys to play back the transition frame by frame. As you can see there is a huge jump from zero to about 22 percent during the first frame of the cross dissolve. This is quite a leap which doesn’t feel smooth at all.

I can try to fix this issue by changing the length of the transition – Let’s make it twice as long. But still, the first frame goes from zero to about 16 percent. This is undesired behavior if you like to create a smooth dissolve. One of the reasons why the default cross dissolve feels rough is because it works with a linear curve. A linear curve is basically a straight line that goes from zero to a hundred percent. We would rather like to use a smooth curve like so.

Dissolve Impacts

This is the reason why we’ve re-created the cross dissolve and called it: Dissolve Impacts.
So let’s exchange the Cross Dissolve for the Dissolve Impacts and see what is happening in the Lumetri Scopes. The scopes indicate a more graceful start and ending of the video transition. Compared to the Cross Dissolve the Dissolve Impacts will feel far more elegant. 

Dissolve Impacts comes with an added option for doing a ‘Film Dissolve’. If we apply a dissolve in between two clips, colors may become a bit dull right in the middle of the video transition. To keep the colors more vibrant, select the video transition, go to the effects controls tab and change the dissolve type to ‘Film Dissolve’. 

Change the default

I would say: from now on your default video transition should be Dissolve Impacts. Let’s change that right now.

Right-click the Dissolve Impacts in the effects browser and select ‘Set as default transition’. Next time you would like to add a dissolve, just select a cut and press Command ‘D’ (Control ‘D’ for Windows users). This will apply the Dissolve Impacts. 

And here is the best part: It’s is free!

You can get 30-days Free Unrestricted Access to the entire Film Impact plugin library

The free trial comes with a couple of free transitions including the Dissolve Impacts.

Thank you for watching and stay tuned for more Essential Editing tutorials by Film Impact.