Jazz Up Your Premiere Pro Videos with Free Assets
I didn’t realize Adobe offered these until a week ago
Publishing online videos can be a great way to express yourself creatively, teach skills to others, or even build a career in content creation, but you need one critical skill: video editing.
I started editing videos for YouTube about 3 years ago. I started with Lightworks — a free application with a premium version available — but after a while I started to have problems with the audio and video becoming out of sync with one another when rendering.
From there, I decided it was time to start paying for more stable creative tools. I chose Adobe Premiere, which currently costs $20.99 a month with a single-app Creative Cloud subscription. It has basically the same feature set as Lightworks, but I found the interface easier to use and I rarely have issues that can’t be chalked up to user error.
Before I continue on to my revelation, I’ll mention that I’m completely self-taught, and that self-education has not been particularly thorough. I watched some videos on how to use Premiere’s interface, looked up useful keyboard shortcuts, and figured everything else out from there on the fly.
I have always felt like I knew enough about Premiere. My video creation process goes smoothly, and I’ve been happy with the quality.
That is, I was happy until a week ago, when I got a promotional email from Adobe with the subject line, “Animate titles and balance sound”.
I don’t usually read promotional emails, but I clicked in to clear it as “read” and saw some really nice animated titles with a simple call-to-action, Download Now.
I have peeked at the free title elements in Premiere before, but they’re pretty mundane. They are all some variation of text zooming in from the side and then zooming out. Boring.
The graphics in the email were completely different, with interesting movement, color, and style. One that caught my eye was called “Clean and Bold Aesthetic Glitch”. It was an animated title with a text blur and a cyberpunk glitch effect. Very sleek.
Fully called-to-action, I clicked the link and read through Adobe’s promotion page for their stock assets.
It turns out, Adobe has a whole library of motion graphic templates available on Adobe Stock, and they are free to use with a Creative Cloud subscription. I’d seen the “Adobe Stock” tab in the Graphic Essentials tab within Premiere, but I had always assumed that:
- Adobe Stock cost additional money, and
- they only had stock images or video
I was so wrong.
There are Adobe stock images and video, and there is a paid tier that allows you to access more exclusive, high quality assets, but there’s a wealth of free options as well. They have pages of motion graphic templates available for free that offer beautiful and professional-looking titles and transitions.
If you’ve been a content creator for any length of time, you might be wondering: can I use these free assets in a commercial project?
Any time you use a “free” image, font, or other piece of creative work, it’s important to determine what the license allows. Many free assets on the internet specifically disallow use in commercial works, or may require attribution.
I have good news for you: as long as you aren’t using an asset under an “editorial license”, which is specifically designed for journalistic purposes, Adobe’s free stock assets can be used in your money-making endeavors. There are some limitations that I’ve researched for you, but nothing too crazy.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, but I’ll explain how I understand the various Adobe stock licenses. If you don’t trust me to get the legal interpretation right (I wouldn’t), here is a link directly to their licensing page so you can read it for yourself: https://stock.adobe.com/license-terms
Standard License
This license allows for the asset to be used in various types of digital and physical media (including commercial projects) if the expected number of printings or views is less than 500,000.
There’s an exception listed here that the asset can be used on social media without a limitation on the view count. I don’t know if YouTube counts as social media, so if you have a channel that frequently gets over 500,000 views or if you are rapidly growing, it may be a good idea to have a legal professional review the license for you.
The license page mentions that most assets have a standard license, but I found that many of the motion graphic templates I reviewed were actually under the enhanced license, which I’ll talk about next.
Enhanced License
This license allows you to exceed that 500,000 view or duplication limit. That’s basically the only difference between this one and the Standard license.
Note that there is a rule attached to both of these licenses that you’ll want to be aware of if you’re creating any digital art for sale, or merchandise: neither license allows you to reproduce the asset “where the primary value of the product is associated with the asset itself”. They even list an example that T-shirts and coffee mugs that use the stock asset as the main graphic would violate this rule.
This shouldn’t be an issue for the motion graphics, since they would be used within videos as a stylistic element, and not the main value-add, but it’s important to note if you plan to use Adobe Stock for other types of media.
How do I use these snazzy things?
Once I dove into the motion graphics library, it opened up a whole new world of video editing. I haven’t hit publish on any new videos since making this discovery, but I’ve been playing around in Premiere and these templates are nearly effortless to incorporate into a new or existing project.
Within Adobe Premiere, there’s a window called “Essential Graphics”. Previously, I have used this window to add text to my videos, or basic shapes. If you click on the “Browse” tab in this window, you will see “My Templates”.
If you haven’t added any templates, the only ones you’ll see are the default graphics that I mentioned before. They are all pretty basic, nothing to write home about. I’ve used them once or twice but I generally preferred designing my own text animations to using the defaults.
Next to “My Templates” you can see “Adobe Stock”. This is the tab I never explored, because I mistakenly thought it was a portal to browse costly stock videos. You can check the box to filter for Free or Premium graphics, and you can even enter a search term to find what you’re looking for.
All the graphics have descriptive titles like “Professional Minimalistic Title” or “Wedding Photo Slideshow”. If you hover your mouse over the graphics and move from left to right, you can preview the graphic from start to finish.
If you prefer to browse in a larger window, you can also look for assets on stock.adobe.com and this will allow you to save it to your library. Then, when you open Adobe Premiere, the assets you’ve added will be available right there in your Templates panel. I spent about an hour browsing and saved several graphics to my Templates to use when I’m working on my next video.
To use the graphics, you can drag them right from the Essential Graphics window onto your video timeline. You can move and resize your graphic just like any other kind of clip, and if you select the graphic you will see options in the Essential Graphics “Edit” window.
What you’ll see in the edit window depends on the graphic, and if you want to edit motion graphics that include colors or image assets within them, you may need to make sure you’re updated to the latest version of Adobe Premiere.
Older versions of Premiere have a limited set of template features and may not even show a graphic in the library if it was designed for a newer version.
If there’s text, you can select the text to change its content, pick a new font that fits your brand, and change the text properties. Motion graphics that support images will have a section to set the image you want to use, and any relevant image properties such as opacity and size.
Each of the motion graphics can be customized, so you get a layer of polish without losing your personal touch.
I still can’t believe I went so long without realizing that I had this tool at my fingertips. These motion graphics, used responsibly, can add some flair to your videos and give them that extra-professional look. If you’ve got a budget to work with, you can also peruse the premium graphics, or even purchase motion graphic templates from other marketplaces and import them yourself.
Good luck, and go wild with your jazzed-up video creations!
