How to Use a Fade In/Out Transition in Your Property Videos

Here's another great tip for all the DIY media geeks in our audience.

VScreen's latest ReelRebel episode shows us how to create a fade-in/out transition. This simple video effect is exactly what it sounds like: transitioning the viewer from a black screen to the opening scene, or from the closing scene to black again.

Because this transition is more pronounced than, say, a cross-dissolve, it should only be used to punctuate the beginning and end of your property videos. It can also be used, sparingly, for major scene changes, like transitioning from outside to inside shots.

The video below shows us how to create fade effects in iMovie, Final Cut Pro, and Adobe Premiere. Use a different program? Let us know and we'll walk you through the steps!

Fading is about as simple an editing technique as you can get. But for those of you unable to wrap their heads around the concept, let me break it down. Fading refers to the idea of slowly transitioning from black into your footage or vice versa. So essentially, you're adjusting the opacity or transparency of your footage.

The fade is most commonly used at the beginning and end of pieces to help ease the viewer in and out of the video. It just helps create a softer introduction to the footage for your audience rather than just smacking them in the face with it. You can however use it for other reasons. Much like the cross dissolve, which you can see explained in another of our amazing videos here, fading out to black and then back in can show passage of time, change in location, or just simply be a way to get from scene to scene.

So now that you understand the concept, let's get into how to pull it off in your editing software.

In iMovie, open up your transitions browser, find "Cross Dissolve." And the next and final step is just to drag that effect to the end of the clip you want to have fade, as long as it is not touching another clip, and then as if by magic, you have yourself a fade in or out.

For the people working on more professional software like Final Cut Pro or Premiere, it's just as easy.

For FCP users, you can use the Cross Dissolve effect by right-clicking on the edit you want to have fade in, or for more control over your fade, open your effects tab, open the Video Transitions folder, and drag the Fade In Fade Out transition to your edit point. This will give you more control over your fade than the standard cross dissolve.

In Premiere, it's very similar. You can use one of two built-in transitions; cross dissolve or film dissolve. Both give you the control to adjust the speed of the transition, as well as allow you to control whether or not you want the clip to fade out completely, or just partly for whatever artistic reason you genius self may have come up with.

As you can see this isn't rocket science, just simply knowing what to click and where to drag it. But now you've got even more editing tools to help you with making videos.

See our other Video Production Tips and give us feedback about what you would like to learn next!

To view the original article, visit the VScreen blog.