In this lesson from David Bode’s FREE Ultimate Premiere FAQ course, you’re going to learn how to create some basic but really nice-looking titles in Premiere using the Essential Graphics panel.
What Is the Essential Graphics Panel?
The Essential Graphics panel was added to Premiere a few years ago, and it enables you to do a lot of things from very simple titling in text and graphic elements to things that are really pretty complex, without ever having to go to After Effects.
One of the cool things about the Essential Graphics panel, however, is that it does have a link with After Effects; you can build some really complex-looking graphics, lower thirds, and titles in After Effects and make templates of them so that they work with the Essential Graphics panel.
How to Use the Essential Graphics Panel
The Essential Graphics panel can be found by going to Window in the menu and choosing Essential Graphics.
The Essential Graphics panel has two tabs: Browse and Edit.
Browse Tab: Store and Search Templates
The Browse tab is where you can store and search all of the templates that you want to use for titles and other kinds of graphic treatments that you might have. Some of these you can create yourself in Premiere, and some you can buy from resources like Envato Elements.
Edit Tab: Creating a Simple Title
To create a simple title, grab the Type Tool (T), click on the video in the program window, and type your text.
Hit Escape, and then press V, and you can switch back to the Selection Tool, and then you can grab your text and position it where you want and scale it up and down however you want.
As you move your text around, if you want to activate the “snap to” feature, you can hold Down and Control to temporarily enable snapping, which is perhaps a little better than having snapping on all the time.
In the Edit tab in the Essential Graphics panel, there are a ton of options for modifying this text. Start with Align and Transform to align, anchor, scale, rotate, adjust opacity, etc.
Below these controls are Styles. If you create some text that you want to reuse, you can create a master text style and then name it. This will enable you to recall it at any time you like.
Under Styles, you have Text, where you can choose fonts and modify their styles however you like by adjusting the tracking, lettering, line spacing, etc.
Next, there is the Appearance section. You have a bunch of options to change the colour of the fill, add a stroke, a shadow, a background box, mask with text, etc.
You can create shapes via the New Layer Button in the Edit tab or create your own unique shapes that you can use as a background for your text using the Pen Tool.
Finally, you can Add Effects to any of these layers. Just choose your effect in the Project panel, and double-click or drag it over to your text in the Edit tab of the Essential Graphics panel. This will open up the Effects control in the Source panel, where you can make the changes you want.
In summary, you can do a lot of really cool things in the Essential Graphics panel and make some really great-looking text treatments.
More Premiere Pro Resources
Here are more top Premiere Pro tutorials and resources to try from Envato Tuts+:
