How to Create a Modern Lower Third (Premiere Pro Tutorial)

Modern Lower Third

First of all, what is a lower third? It's a motion graphic that tells more about what we see in the shot. This can be the name and function of the person or the name of the location.

To create a lower third, or any motion graphics for that matter, we first need to open up Adobe Premiere Pro of course. Once that's open we're going to add a next text layer which we can do with the shortkey CTRL and T. Then you select that layer in your timeline and head over to the Essential Graphics panel, this you can find in the window menu.

Essential graphics panel

From the essential graphics panel we can create an endless amount of possibilities. We can add titles, shapes, even video or photo files. We can place our effects in there, group certain layers, ... And yes, it works with layers. So that means that the top effect effects everything underneath and the upper shape or text layer is shown on top of the ones that are below. If we want to apply a certain effect to only one layer than we can group both.

safety margins

You can't just position your lower third wherever you want. From the program monitor we can activate the safe margins, this will show us two boxes. To be certain that our lower thirds are always visible we place them in the inner box. So if we watch our video on a screen that doesn't have a proper resolution or scales our video we always know that our lower third will be visible.

And that will cover the basic information about lower thirds and basic motion graphics. Start experimenting with it and stay creative.