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Tutorial: Red Giant Universe 3

This tutorial walks viewers through a number of cool new effects, transitions, and text animation tools in Red Giant's omnibus plugin package, and shows how to navigate and customize the preset options available with each effect.

Text Animation and Title Effects

At the end of the clip I've got two different options for the text. I've got one that brings up the website kind of in a swinging sign form from the top. For that one, I'm using the Title Motion effect from Universe. And there are presets again already built in for however you want it to come onto the screen. Some include blur already set up, some don't.

My other option is to go with my original graphic, which is where the URL comes in using the same template that I used for the title graphic. Both are interesting; it just depends on your personal preference.

The other nice thing about Universe is it has a lot of new title effects. So if you look under Text, you'll find some of these newer ones (Figure 10, below). There is Hacker Text, which, makes a bunch of kind of random characters and then ultimately your final text come on screen. There's Screen Text, which is like an old school terminal effect so it can write-on text like a computer. (Much easier than trying to do something like that in After Effects.)

Figure 10. Text effect options

Then there's Text Title, which is sort of a falling-text-on-the-screen effect, kind of like The Matrix. And then there's Type On effects. There are similar things in After Effects, but this one has a lot of presets built in with colors and glow that will make it easier to make the titles a lot more creative rather than just one letter at a time appearing on the screen.

Switching Between Premiere Pro and After Effects

With the new Universe version 3, you get the Dashboard both in Premiere Pro and After Effects, so you can work with the same types of things in both programs depending on your preference. The nice thing is that it's uniform. It doesn't matter whether you're in Premiere Pro or After Effects. You can have essentially the same experience and the same workflow. Most people would be more comfortable doing some of these things in After Effects simply because of the nature of what they're doing with their video projects at the same time.

Since I used almost exclusively transitions or basic animations, I was able to do everything in Premiere Pro and not have to work in two different applications, saving me lots of time.

Vertical Video

Do you want to know one other beautiful thing about Universe? All the effects and transitions that I've gone through so far work pretty much perfectly even with vertical video. For those of you unfortunate folks out there like me who have just started to have to create professional video in vertical formats for platforms like Instagram, don't worry about it.

That's an overview and a tutorial of what's new in Universe version 3.0 from Red Giant. It's a plugin set that I recommend, having been a user for several years. It's an excellent value at only $200 a year. And it can greatly increase the efficiency of your workflow and postproduction.

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