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SW style 'soft wipes'

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Hi people,

I'm working on an edit in Premiere (CS3) and I need to recreate some wipes. What's the best way of doing this? Is there a plugin I can grab, or is this best done externally in after effects?
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Here's the easiest way I can think of:

First you want to create your wipe effect as a black and white animation. Black will represent what you're wiping from and white will be what you're wiping too.

Create an image in a photoshop-like program that has horizontal and vertical size of about three times the horizontal resolution of your movie. So for standard def make it 2000x2000, for HD do about 6000x6000. Make the upper half white and the lower half black. I've created one you can use here: blackwhite.tif

1. Import your black and white image to premiere.
2. Create a new sequence with 1 video layer, call it SWWipe-UP2DOWN
3. Drag the your image into that sequence. By default it creates a 5 second clip.
4. Shorten that clip to whatever length you want the wipe. 1 sec?
5. Open the Effects Controls for that clip.
6. Click on the stopwatch next to it's position settings. This turns on position keyframing for that clip, which you'll need to animate the image.
7. Now while you're on the first frame of that clip, move the image upward so that all that's showing is black. You can do this by either adjusting the position settings in Effect Controls by hand, or if you don't need to be that precise you can just drag the image upward in the monitor window with your mouse. In your Effects Control panel you'll see a keyframe (a diamond shape) was created there on the first frame.
8. Now slide to the last frame of that clip and adjust the image position downward so it's all white. It will create another keyframe at the end of the clip.
9. Play the sequence and you'll see that the computer figures out all the frames in between your two keyframes. You should have a vertical wipe from black to white.
10. Add a blur effect, adjusting blur amount to taste. This will give your transition a soft edge.

Then whenever you want to use that wipe:
1. Put the end of the clip you're going to wipe from on the second track
2. Put the beginning of the clip you're wiping to just below it, on the first track, having them both overlap by 1 second (or however long your wipe is).
3. Drag the SWWipe-UP2DOWN sequence to the third track, directly above where the other two overlap.
4. Make it invisible by clicking off it's eyeball symbol.
5. Add the "Track Matte Key" effect to the clip on track 2.
6. In the Effect Controls menu, make these changes to that Track Matte Key effect:

Matte: Video 3
Composite Using: Matte Luma
Reverse: Checked

You're done.

When you make new wipes, use new sequences. And if you name them SWWipe-DESCRIPTION, they'll be easy to recognize as Star Wars style wipes.

If you want to wipe sideways, set the clips rotations to 90 or 270 degrees in the Effect Controls. For diagonal wipes it would be 45 or 135 degrees. Or, if you click the rotation stopwatch, you can animate the rotation to create one of those radial wipes.

Let me know if I haven't explained that very well....

Have fun,
-T

Working on: Superman: Son of Jorel

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Many many thanks - works a treat!
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Sorry to dig up an old thread... The maximum size that Premiere seems to accept for an image is 4096x4096 - which means on left/right wipes you see the wipe on go out of one side and appear on the other. Any ideas?