Working with video
Premation is a motion-graphics compositor first. It also does the things motion designers actually need to do to a piece of footage, and each one is designed to need as few decisions from you as possible.
| I want to… | Use | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Cut, trim, slip and roll clips, or build a rough cut | Cutting clips | The timeline’s tool row, the Source panel |
| Pin a graphic to something moving in the shot | Motion tracking | The Tracker panel |
| Ease a clip into slow motion (or speed it up) | Speed ramps | Playhead + Ramp to 25% |
Subtitle a video, or import an .srt | Captions | Composition menu |
| Turn a 16:9 edit into 9:16 / 1:1 / 4:5 cuts | Auto-reframe | Composition ▸ Auto-Reframe |
Everything on this page group shares one principle: the result is ordinary layers and keyframes. A track becomes keyframes you can re-ease. A ramp is two keyframes on a curve you can grab. A caption is a text layer. A reframe is a new composition with a pan keyframed onto it. Nothing produces a special object with its own rules — so everything you already know about the timeline, the graph editor and undo applies.
What it is not
It is not a replacement for a dedicated video editor on long-form work. The clip tools are real — razor, slip, slide and roll, ripple delete, a source monitor, multicam, text-based editing from a transcript — but they sit on a compositor’s timeline, where every clip is a layer with its own row. For a feature-length cut, edit in a video editor and bring the result in as footage.