Today’s Plan:
- Refresh
- Designing an Animated Graph/Table in Adobe Premiere
- Homework
Designing an Animated Graph/Table in Adobe Premiere
Last class I went over the list of expectations for the final project. I want to add one more element to that list: that your video visual some data collected during your Just One Thing project. You can make a bar, line, or pie chart.
I examined a few different ways to accomplish a visualization. Many of them involved templates/instructions for working in Adobe After Effects, a program for motion graphics and animation. But the computers in the library don’t have After Effects, and I was skeptical that the computers in our lab wouldn’t have it either. So we need a work-around. (Here’s one that show you how to animate a two line bar-graph in Adobe Premiere).
I came across a tutorial that offers a nice, simple hack for animating a pie chart. It can easily be adapted to a bar graph or a line graph. The tutorial is kind of strange, with no dialogue, and, um, interesting background music. But it will work.
The hack here is executed by drawing a pie chart with different layered sections in Photoshop. You then import that image into Premiere, using a special menu option to import while maintaining the original layers of the .psd file.
To get started, we need to make a chart that we want to animate. There’s a lot of ways to do this. To save time, I’ve put together a sample data set in Google Sheets. Let’s work with that. Go ahead and make a copy of that document.
Once you make a copy, we are going to want to make a chart (insert > chart). If you are working on this later, here’s a handy dandy tutorial for making a chart in Google Sheets. When we are done, we’ll want to download our image as a .png.
Time to open that .png file in Photoshop! We are going to do two big things here–erase the background and then cut our chart up into different layers.
- First, we want to select and erase the white background so we have a transparent image. Make sure you are working in layer one (rather than a locked background) and select the Quick Selection Tool. Select the eraser. Erase. Deselect all.
- Crop the image
- Select the Quick Selection tool. Select the largest part of your pie chart. If there’s some text in there that didn’t select, you the lasso tool (while holding shift) to select that text too. Make sure you have also selected the shadow area. When you’ve got it all, right-click and select “new layer via cut”
- Make sure you manually select layer 1 from the layer menu. Repeat the previous step for each other section of your chart.
- We want to save this file as a .psd file. I’m going to save mine as “condiment sales layers.”
Now we are ready to open and edit this file in Premiere.
- After starting a new project in Premiere, we’ll want to select and import our .psd file. Because it is a .psd file, Premiere will give us a special option menu. By default it is set to “Merge Layers.” We need to change this to “Individual Layers.”
- Once we have imported the .psd, we should have a folder in our library. Open the folder. Select all the contents. Drag it to our timeline.
- By now I am sensing that you guess how this works. We now have a sequence that moves around a pie chart, with all the pie pieces on one video track. Let’s move them all to their own track. Let’s extend them all so that they are on screen for 25 seconds (or so).
- Now we have a pie chart that looks like it came out of a Sierra video game in the 1990s. Stiff. Let’s smooth it out.
- Switch to the Effects workspace. Find Video Transitions > Wipe > Clock Wipe. Apply the transition to every layer.
- You can click on a layer to adjust a transition
Homework
Remember that your pitch presentations are on Friday! Big, graphic presentation slides!
