An Introduction to Using Keyframes in Premiere Pro

• December 19, 2017

• Jason Boone

Working with keyframes in Adobe Premiere Pro is quite easy once you learn a few of the basics. And thankfully, learning the basics takes no time at all.

Knowing how to add and manipulate keyframes will add a new collection of tools to your video editing toolbox. It’s an important skillset to have, and will help you stay competitive in a rapidly changing industry.

Overview

In this Premiere Pro editing tutorial , I’m going to show you how keyframes can bring life to your project and why you would want to use them.

In this particular project I’ll be working with four still images inside of Premiere Pro—a bus, a neighborhood, a city, and a background scene. I want to create the illusion that the bus is driving down the street while the neighborhood and city pass by in the background. Let’s see how we can achieve this in Premiere Pro with some simple keyframing.

Figure 01: The four still images we’ll be using to create this animation

First of All, What is a Keyframe?

Keyframes allow you to bring an attribute to life over a period of time. Think of when you zoom in on an object, or transition with a fade up from black. These are all things you can accomplish with keyframes. Essentially, you are creating an animation when you adjust these attributes. And to create an animation, you generally need two or more keyframes—one to start the animation, and one to end it.

Figure 02: Keyframes in Premiere Pro

Let’s take my bus image as an example. To bring the bus to life and give it the illusion of movement, I need to animate the Position property. First, I need to decide the length of time my bus will be moving and for how long. Then I can simply add two Position keyframes, one at the beginning of this time and one at the end. There are two places in Adobe Premiere Pro where I can add keyframes—the Ef