So, I got this great question last week about creating a freeze frame in Premiere Pro. You would think it would be butt easy, right? Well, it ain’t. (Ironically, it IS butt easy in Premiere Elements, though) So here’s one way to quickly create a freeze frame. Of course, we could render out a frame, but that’s way more involved than we want to be. The way I recommend doing this is to duplicate the clip that has the frame you want to freeze (which you can do by copying/pasting another instance of). Next comes the only slightly tricky part, but it’s still really cinchy. You’ll need to get the frame that  you want to freeze to be the in point of the clip, the out point of the clip, OR you’ll need to put a numbered clip marker (making sure it’s Marker 0 [zero]). If it helps, I usually use the out point, because I’ve already trimmed the original clip’s out point to be the freeze frame. Thus, by duplicating it, the out point should still be the frame you want to freeze.

Then right click on the clip in the Timeline panel and choose Frame Hold. In the dialog box that pops up, check the Hold On box. This tells Premiere to hold on a frame. You select which frame to hold on in the drop down menu next to the Hold On option. Your choices are In Point, Out Point, and Marker 0. So just select whichever point you would like the clip to hold on, and then click OK. This clip will then become one long still frame. Note that if you were to apply this to the original clip (i.e. not the duplicate), then the original clip would be completely replaced by the hold frame.

Alternatively, you also might be able to apply the Time Warp effect (which is the “Timewarp” effect in After Effects - it’s only one word there; weird?), and take the Speed parameter to 0. This way, the frame hold can be animated by clicking the stopwatch, and then changing the Speed value over time.

Hope this helps!!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 6th, 2009 at 11:43 am and is filed under Premiere Pro.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.