How To Add The Perfect White Frame With Drop Shadow In Premiere Pro

In this video Colin Smith (from VideoRevealed see video above) takes a look at several different ways of creating a white frame with drop shadow around an image (or clip) in Premiere Pro.

Creating a White Frame with Drop Shadow

It would make sense if PP had some sort of built-in tool for creating a white frame but at least at the moment it doesn’t appear to have one, We typically find PP lacking severely when it comes to building in effects and templates, Adobe seems to work under the assumption that 3’rd party developers need to fill these needs – we tend to disagree, but that is a different story.

Back to our topic for today. If you want to create a frame that has the same size on every side and add drop shadow you are going to have to work a bit harder in PP. Smith explores 4 different ways of doing this and shows how each of the first 3 has its own unique set of problems.

Set matte + radial shadow – the problem with this version is that the white outline is not proportional and you need to set everything manually and it will not always appear symetrical.
White Solid background – the mask expansion will make the corners round which is not what you might want to see. You are also getting too many layers with this version.
Opacity mask + transform + set matte (negative expansion) + Solid composite – here you also get round corners but you can’t add drop shadow and you are using layers.
Transform + set matte (negative expansion) + Solid composite + set mette + drop shadow – the nice thing about this is not only that it works but that it does not require extra layers and you can copy it to other clips and it accepts the drop shadow just as it should.

This last one that actually works was created by Sasa Jokic (from Massive Workshop). He was kind enough to share it for free and you can create it yourself or download it from the videoRevealed website.

Bonus video: Smith on creating a halftone/dotted video effect in Premiere Pro

You can find more Premiere Pro-related videos on this link here on LensaVid. We will continue posting more interesting videos from Smith’s channel (see a few previous ones that we published – here).

Iddo Genuth

Iddo Genuth is the founder and chief editor of LensVid.com. He has been a technology reporter working for international publications since the late 1990's and covering photography since 2009. Iddo is also a co-founder of a production company specializing in commercial food and product visual content.