Premiere Custom Dip To Black Transition

Question

I would like to use a simple transition throughout a project in a large number of places.

The default Dip to Black transition gets me almost there, with one missing feature - there appears to be no way alter the duration of the out and in phases - I can set the duration of the transition, but what I need to do is to control the speeds individually. What I need is:

Clip 1 fades to black in 8 frames. Clip 2 fades up from black in 16 frames.

So given that the included Dip To Black doesn't offer this kind of control, what are my options?

Obviously I could individually set opacity with keyframes for every single clip, but given the number of places I need this transition, this seems like a great deal more work than using a transition (that i could copy/paste) would be.

As an added complication, I will be round tripping to Resolve for grading, so anything too non-standard will no doubt cause issues.

Answer 1

This is a surprisingly tricky question, as Premiere doesn't let you edit transitions like, say FCP does.

One way of doing it is to use presets:

First create a preset for your fade in. Set two opacity keyframes for your fade-in then in the Effect Control panel right click on the Opacity effect and choose Save Preset:

call it fade-in or whatever and choose Anchor to In Point, so that it will apply it to the start of the clip.

Then on a fresh clip with no keyframes do the same for your fade out, choosing Anchor to Out Point in the dialog.

Now you can apply both your presets to your clips to create your fade out / in, and the good thing is that the presets will add new keyframes without deleting the existing ones, so the fade in won't overwrite the keyframes of the fade out. Tip: you can select both presets in the Presets folder in your effects window by holding down Command / Control, then you can drag them both to a clip at the same time.