Highlighting items in a instructional video

[Harry Lender]

Help needed:
I am using Adobe premiere CS6. I am doing an how to video for a client. I need to know how to highlight items on the screen with circles or squares. I am thinking that it can be done with the titler in cs6 but I can't figure out how to do it. Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Harry

[Battle Vaughan]

I'm reposting a procedure I showed several years ago from the dvinfo.net archive, unfortunately the screen grabs were not kept, will try to find them, but I think this describes the process:

"You can make the ellipse with the shape tool in the titler, and animate it using the travelling matte effect in PPro....use two copies of the clip, one (on the bottom track) darkened, one normal, on the next track up. Matte the normal clip so only it shows up inside the ellipse, letting the darkend clip show through elsewhere...read about it here: Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 * Move or change the transparent area with Track Matte Key (Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 * Move or change the transparent area with Track Matte Key) /Battle Vaughan

PS: added some screen grabs to show you the setup; in the fx window for the track you are highlighting, use the title track as the matte and use matte luma in the setup. You can vary the background brightness and contrast to suit using brightness/contrast on the lower track. Your ellipse in the title is full white, what is white will show from the top track, what is not will be transparent and show the lower track. Click the stopwatch in the position and scale motion items to keyframe the ellipse as you need. It helps to make the field for the title larger than the field of the image so you can move it around. (select in viewer, click to get size box and just drag to the size you want) /bv
"

[Battle Vaughan]

If you don't need to animate the highlight, the same procedure is still valid, just position your highlight circle where you want it. Here are a couple of frame grabs: The effect box shown is the box for video 2 track. The lower track uses brightness and contrast reduction to create a difference between the highlight (video2) and the background (video1).

P.S.: Ignore the Mosaic filter shown in the first grab's effect list, you don't need that. It was left over from a demonstration of using this technique to create a "witness mask" by applying the mosaic filter to the video2 track. But maybe handy to know.

[Harry Lender]

Battle
Thank you for your reply. I was able to get a picture of what I was thinking about. Do you have any idea how to create this? Notice the red circle and the red rectangle square.

[Battle Vaughan]

Ah-ha, I understand a little better. It's easy. In Titler, pick your circle or rectangle or whatever. Stroke outside with the color you want and select Fill > eliminate to make the area inside the stroke transparent. Put the title on the video track above your desired area. If you create the title with the time bar on the image you want to highlight you can position it easily in Titler, as Titler will show the underlying track.

You can also animate the outlines, enlarge, reduce, keyframe zoom, and do other neat stuff with them using the motion functions in the fx window for the titler track. Add drop shadows, use opacity to fade in and out or flash on and off, or maybe that's overkill.....

[Harry Lender]

Battle
Thanks so much for that. Your explanation made it so clear. I was banging my forehead saying to myself "Why didn't I think of that". Much appreciated.
Again..Thank you
Harry

[Battle Vaughan]

Happy to help, best wishes!