any way to automate transitions?

drw wrote on 7/4/2012, 11:57 AM
I put together videos of my daughter's activities over the year and have a pretty simple approach. I combine several clips for a particular activity on the timeline, add a title on a separate track, and fade out/in from one clip to the next on both the video and audio tracks. I use the same fade on every transition, so I was wondering if there's a way to automate the insertion of transitions at every clip boundary in the timeline?

Did a quick search and found something that suggested there are scripts available for Vegas Pro to do this, but not for Movie Studio. Just wanted to ask again to be sure I read it right.

Comments

Steve Grisetti wrote on 7/4/2012, 1:56 PM
If you select all of the events on your timeline, you can drag a transition down and apply it to all of them at once. Will that help?

You can also add a cross-fade automatically between events when you add several clips to the timeline at once.

Just go to Options/Preferences and, on the Editing tab, check the option to Automatically Overlap Multiple Selected Items when Added.

(A couple of tips from my book.)
drw wrote on 7/8/2012, 1:12 PM
Well, now that I think of it I guess what I do isn't technically a transition, because I don't overlap the clips in the timeline, so the transition techniques don't apply.

What I do is adjust the clip lengths by dragging the left/right edge to get the edited content I want, but the consecutive clips are butted together, not overlapped. I then drag the corners of each clip to fade in/out at the boundaries. The end result is a 1 sec fade to black, followed by a 1 sec fade in for the next clip. I also fade in/out any text title that I might have added at a transition. Every transition has the same style, and duration, so it seems like it might be possible to automate it.

A few years ago I decided I liked the look of this better than cross-fades. I work with few enough clips that doing the steps manually isn't really a problem, but if there's a faster way, that would be even better.
Steve Grisetti wrote on 7/8/2012, 6:48 PM
Have you considered the Fade Through Black transition (in the Dissolve set)? It essentially does exactly what you're describing automatically.
drw wrote on 7/11/2012, 12:45 AM
Yeah, I think that would work, thanks.