This guide is for UT students editing JobPop videos for Land Grant Films. It covers the three basic graphic packages: 1) Machinist Style, 2) Environmental Scientist Style and 3) Ripped Paper. To use the graphic packages, you will need to use a mix of motion graphic templates and After Effect projects. All files used in the example are available on the JobPop shared drive in the “reusable graphic assets” folder.
Machinist Style
This first graphic look is the most complex to use. We’ll walk through how to use the open, the close and the left and right super. We’ll deal with the open and supers first, because they can all be created via motion graphic templates (MOGRTs) in Premiere.
I’ll already made a walkthrough on how to use MOGRTs for the Medal of Honor Coverage. Give it a quick read and then come back here.
Step One – If this is your first time using this graphics package, download the “machinist style graphic” folder from the Google Drive. After you have the files, install the three MOGRTs (open, super left and super right), following the directions in the above post.
Step Two – Next, we need to choose a color palate. Our graphic packs use a total of three colors. Here are a handful of color sets you might want to use.
| Yel-Org-Blue F2E206 FF940D 068ABF | All Purples DD6C83 CADCFF 7478FF | Org-Red-Grn FE9F1D E71F36 2DC4B6 | Grn-Blu-Pink A9FF82 78F1FF FF68F8 |
| Red-Pur-Grn F2634E BF2FA7 16C274 | Blu-Blu-Pur 2DA7F2 005059 BAA8FF | Grn-Grn-Brn CEF574 0A8F08 4A3501 |
Step Three – In the essential graphics tab, search for the machinist style open. Once you find it, drag it down to your timeline. When you select the graphic in the timeline, your essential graphics tab will change, showing you the attributes of the graphic that you can change (see below). Now just change the colors, based on the color palette of your choosing.
Step Four – There is no step four. It is that easy. Your open is done.
Step Five – Now let’s move on to the super. Start by choosing if you need the super on the right or left side of the screen. Then search for it in the essential graphic and drag it to the timeline.
Note: Make sure you drag it onto a video track that is under the open, which includes the box around the screen.
Step Six – Now just change the colors to match your color palette and change the text. Depending on the length of the name and title, you might need to change the font size to make it fit in the super.
Step Seven – That’s it for the open and supers. Shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to deploy them. Unfortunately, we still have to do the close, which is a bit more complex. We have to go into After Effects to complete it. Specifically, we will need to do the following:
- Change the colors to match the color palette you chose earlier.
- Change the text to match the job title.
- Adjust the location of the job title outlines that pop out from the job title.
Step Eight – We are going to start by changing the color. When you open the After Effects project, you will see a folder called colors. We are going to go in there and change the color of each of the three compositions to match our color palette. Double click on “Color 1.” The composition should open up on the bottom part of the screen. Click the carrot (>) a little bit to the left from the “Shape Layer 1” name. Next click the carrot (>) next to the “Contents” option. You might also need to click a carrot to open up the “Fill” options. You should then see the fill color option.
Now you just click the yellow box next to the Fill 1 > Color attribute and change it to match your color palette.
Repeat the process with Color 2 and Color 3.
Step Nine – Now we are going to change the text to match the current job. You will need to change this in two places. First, open up the “Close Generic” composition. You will find a text layer called “Arborist.” Go up into the workspace and double click on the arborist text and change it to the new job title.
Note: Make sure your playhead is somewhere on the timeline where the text is visible.
As you’ll see, you might need to change the font size. You can adjust the font size in the character panel on the right side of the screen. Remember what you change your font size to, because you’ll need that again.
Step Ten – Now we need to change the font of the outline versions of the text. To change that, go to the “Machinist Stroke” composition. Again select the text layer (it will be hard to see since it is just and outline) and change it to the text you need and change the font size to whatever you used in the last step.
Step Eleven – If you changed the size of the font, we are now going to have to tweak the position of the outlines as they move out from the center of the screen. To do this open the “Close Generic” composition. Select the five “machinist_stroke” layer and then hit “p” on the keyboard. This will reveal the position controls for the layers. You will the each of the top four layers have two keyframes. The first one is where the text starts; the second one is where it ends. We need to adjust the location of the second one.
Move your playhead to the second keyframe of the top “machinist_stroke” layer. You can do this by just moving the playhead or by clicking the little filled in triangle on the far left side of the screen (right next to the diamond). You will have to click the triangle twice to get to the second keyframe. Once you are in the right spot, you should see all the outlines revealed in the workspace.
While only having the top layer selected, move your mouse over to the second of the position coordinates – the first one controls horizontal location, the second controls vertical. When you mouse over that number – 387 in the example above -, you mouse will turn into a double-sided arrow. When you click and drag one way or the other, you will see the number change and in the workspace you’ll see the text move. Move the job title to the edge of the screen and then repeat that process with the other three layers until all the outlines are evenly distributed across the screen.
Step Twelve – You have finished the end graphic. Now you just need to export it. With “Close_generic” selected, go to File > Export > Add to Render Queue.
In the render menu, you will have to adjust the “Output Module” and the “Output to” options. Start with the output to. Click the “not yet specified” and choose where you want it to export to.
Next click the “H.264 – Match Render Settings – 15 Mbps” or whatever text is there. Because we want our file to wipe on over the existing video, we need to include an alpha channel that will make parts of the video transparent.
To make this happen, you will have to change two things in the output module dialogue box. First, you will have to change the “Format” which probably defaults to H.264 to Quicktime.
Then in the second box (Video Output), you will change the “Channels” option from RGB to RGB + Alpha.
Once you have made both of those changes, you can click OK, and you should be ready to render. Just click the Render button in the top right corner of the render queue. Then go back to Premiere, import the video you just create, and drop it into your video.
Now you should should be done with the graphics. If the script calls for a custom graphic screen there is a prebuilt grid background for this graphic set. It is also connected to “Color 3” composition. So if you already changed your colors to your selected palette, your background should also be ready to use.