Get Creative with Premiere Pro Speed Ramp & Smooth Slow Motion and Time Remapping – 2023

Learn how to speed ramp your video and how to create smooth slow motion by using Time Remapping in Adobe Premiere Pro. Learn how to use a speed ramp to make transitions. Add motion blur to your speed ramp animation. Premiere Pro Speed Ramp can be used to enhance your slow-motion clips.

Premiere Pro Speed Ramp

In this tutorial, I’m going to be showing you how to speed ramp in Adobe Premiere Pro. Speed ramping is just speeding up or slowing down a clip’s speed for a specific part of your video. I’m also going to show how to make a transition between clips using speed ramping and adding motion blur to enhance the animation. In this example, I’m going to show you how to speed ramp slow motion footage.

But what if you didn’t create a slow-motion shot or speed ramp? Like the example that I’m using and you didn’t shoot your footage at a high frame rate? Adobe Premiere Pro will do its best to extrapolate that missing information. But artificial slow motion typically looks a little bit choppy. So if you’re planning to use a speed ramp to highlight action in slow motion, it’s best, to begin with a slow motion footage. Before doing any work with speed.

Go to the clip in your timeline and right here on the outside of the timeline, you can drag to increase the height of your video track just like this. You’re going to want to see what’s going on when we’re doing our speed ramping. Next step I like to do when working with speed, right click and then go to time interpolation and select optical flow.

That’s just going to make it a lot smoother. When you slow it down and when you speed it up, it’s going to blend frames a lot better. Next, right-click on the effects button on the clip and choose time, remapping and speed. Timing mapping is simply the act of playing the footage back at a different frame rate than when it was shot.

So this line across here is referred to as a rubber band across a clip. It represents the speed of the clip. Drag the line up to speed up the clip. Drag it down to slow the clip. If you starting with a slow-motion clip, drag the band up, typically about 250 to 300% to begin the clip at normal speed with a slow motion clip on the timeline.

We want to kind of scrub through it and you want to see where in the clip you want to go from slow motion to speed up to clip. So in this case, maybe this movement right here as she’s dancing. To create a speed ramp, you will need to add keyframes. In order to do that hold down command or control.

You’ll see that your cursor changed. And we’re going to create two keyframes. One at the start and one at the end, where we want our speed ramp to finish it, say right there. So this allows us to control the speed in between the keyframes. And now just click on this band and drag the middle section up because we’re going to speed it up and we’re going to go for about 250%.

Notice that you can also work in your effects Controls Panel under Time remapping. I like to work with the speed ramping on the clip itself. So if we play this back, it might be a little abrupt, and not very smooth. So we’ll take care of that right now. One thing to note is if you need to reposition the entire keyframe, you can hold down the alt or option and click on one of the keyframes and move it.

So you’re adjusting the whole keyframe. So to make a smooth transition. Just click and drag to the right to split the keyframes. Something like this simply dragging to split the keyframes creates an even speed increase between the keyframes. This is called linear interpolation. So when you click in between the split keyframes, you’ll see a lever. There’s one lever, there’s another lever, and these are called bezier handles.

So to create a smoother, more natural speed ramp, we’re going to use what’s called bezier interpolation. With the bezier interpolation, the rate of speed increase will also accelerate, creating a more ramp feel. So you just change these handles. See how that’s making kind of an S-curve? That’s what we want to help our speed ramp be smoother. Now let’s play this back.

I’m just going to come up to sequence and say render in and out just so we can see our speed ramp running a lot more smoothly. So now, after it’s rendered out, it’s a lot smoother. You see the one spot where we wanted our speed ramp, where this is the motion that she’s dancing. So the main idea here is to shoot at high frame rates, make the clip slow motion, and then add a speed ramp to certain sections.

How to Use a Speed Ramp as a Transition

Another use of a speed ramp is for a transition.

I’m going to speed up the action on the last part of one clip and then do the same with the second clip. Speeding up the first part of the second clip so that the transitions will connect. So I’m going to scrub through here to see somewhere in the video where I might want to make this speed ramp start.

I’m going to hold down command or control. This is my first keyframe and raise the remainder of the clip to 250. I’ll see how far I want this clip to go. Say about right here. I’ll hit ‘W’ to remove the rest of the clip. And I have another clip that I’m going to transition to click on the effects icon and go to time remapping speed.

You go over here to this other clip and decide where I want to start things. Let’s start things right about here. I think I’m going to remove the first part of this clip. I’ll hit “Q”. That’ll be the start. Here is the place where I’m going to make an end to the other half of my transition. Command and control there is my keyframe.

I’m going to raise this speed up to 250 also, move these clips together. I’m going to render this out again so I could see it better. So now here’s the first clip, transition. Now we can split the clips and get our speed ramp going. And just as before, click in the middle of the split-apart, speed ramps to make your S-curve making it smoother.

See this yellow line up here? I’m going to render this out so it’s green up there. And let’s see how our speed ramp with the transition looks. So it’s a lot smoother. So that’s using speed ramps as a transition between two clips.

How to Add Motion Blur to your Speed Ramp Transition

Faster motion means more action. We can enhance that with simple animation. But since this clip has been speed-ramped, we cannot just simply add animation to this clip.

You know the animation I’m talking about is motion blur. So what we need to do is come over here in the project window and select the adjustment layer and the adjustment layer where the same settings as our sequence say, okay. I’m going to drag that adjustment layer on top of our sequence and I’m going to make this adjustment layer about the same size as my speed ramp.

So there it is, the same size as the speed ramp. I’m going to go to my effects and search for transform and drag that onto my adjustment layer. I’m going to move my play head to the beginning of the speed ramp and come over here to my effects control and set a position and scale keyframe and move my player to the end of the speed ramp.

Now I’m going to scale this image up a little bit, and change position slightly just to get another keyframe. You now come over here, change my shutter angle to 360 and I’m going to render this out again. Then select my first two keyframes, right-click, and say these out. Select my last two keyframes here, right-click and say, ease in.

I’m going to render this out again. Now I’m going to play this back to have a speed ramp and we’re using it as a transition. And here we have an adjustment layer. And on that adjustment layer, we have the transform effect and we’ve added motion blur across this transition and speed ramp. So again, here’s what it looks like.

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Read the previous blog article here ➡️ How to Sample Any Color Outside of Photoshop 2023