How to Create a Photo Montage Quickly - Premiere Pro

Do you need to create a simple photo montage? Let me show you how.

Create a new sequence

New bin

Import your photos

Can change to icon view

Mouse over project panel, hit ~ and get a full screen view of your imported photos, and then you can see them all and place them in whatever order you want for your montage

If its not working for some reason, go to the 3 lines and make sure User Order is checked

Command A to select all the photos

Right click and go to Speed Duration

Change timecode to whatever you wish - I’ll choose 5 seconds.

Hit the ~ key again to see your entire workspace

Drag your photos onto the timeline

As you scrub through the timeline you see they aren’t all framed correctly

So select all the photos on the timeline, right click, select Scale to Frame Size

Every photo is scaled to the frame, but you can see some of them have black bars on the sides

Go to the Effects Control panel and scale up the photo until it fills the frame

Copy and paste the scale to every photo on the timeline

Most people want some kind of transition between photos, so today we will do a cross dissolve

These are the steps to take to apply the exact transition to every photo at the same time

Premiere Pro, Preferences, Timeline, Video Transition Default Duration, 1 second

Effects, Cross Dissolve is set as default, if not right click

Select all the clips on the timeline, Sequence, Apply Video Transition

Now be sure the delete the 1st and last cross dissolves

Now let’s apply the class Ken Burns push in effect to every photo

Effect Controls panel, move playhead to the beginning of the clip, click the stopwatch by scale, move the playhead to the end of the clip, and I’ll change the scale by 5%

Right click on clip, Copy, select all the photos on the timeline, right click, Paste Attributes

Now we still have black bars on some photos

Select all the photos on the timeline, hold option to copy them, and drag them up a layer

Select all the photos on the 1st layer and nest them into their own sequence

Find a photo that has the most black space

Highlight the nested sequence, Effect Controls panel, scale up that entire nested sequence until the black is gone

Effects panel, search for Gaussian Blur

Apply that to the nested sequence, in Effect Controls bring up the blur and check repeat edge pixels

To export, click End on your keyboard, hit O to set an In and Out point on the timeline

Export