Web Development: How to Create a Template for Premiere Pro's Essential Graphics Panel (in After Effects)

How to Create a Template for Premiere Pro's Essential Graphics Panel (in After Effects)

In this article, you'll learn how to create Essential Graphics templates that bring the power of After Effects graphics to Premiere Pro.

What is the Essential Graphics Panel?

You probably know that Adobe makes two pieces of software used in the video workflow, Premiere Pro and After Effects. They each have a place in producing and creating great videos: Premiere for the edit, After Effects for awesome graphics and animation.

It used to be that the two programs were very separate tools, but that's not so much the case anymore, especially with the Essential Graphics panel. The Essential Graphics panel is all about giving you enhanced graphic animation and editing options in Adobe Premiere.

In the past, if you wanted to bring advanced animation to your Premiere project, the workflow went something like this:

Create your animation or composite in After Effects
Export it as a flat video file
Add it to your Premiere Pro project

That workflow is cumbersome! Not only is it time-consuming, but it's also inflexible. If you need to make a minor change, you're back at step one.

Enter the Essential Graphics panel. It helps you create semi-flexible graphics in After Effects that you can customize in Premiere. That helps you avoid a lot of round-tripping back and forth between the two apps.

Let's learn how to create a flexible graphic in After Effects that you can customize inside of Premiere. If you want to learn more about essential graphics, make sure to check out Adobe's official page on the Essential Graphics panel and our tutorials.

How to Create a Template for the Essential Graphics Panel in Premiere Pro With After Effects

This tutorial starts in Adobe After Effects. We're going to go through a few key steps to create an Essential Graphics template for Premiere. Here's how we'll do it:

Opening a template in Adobe After Effects that's ideal to convert
Set the options that you want to make customizable in Adobe Premiere, like font colors and text selections
Export the template to a compatible format that's ready for use in Adobe Premiere
Open the template in Adobe Premiere Pro

1. Open a New Project in After Effects

You can start from scratch with a new project in After Effects, or adapt an existing project. I'm going to use a template from Envato Elements, an all-you-can-download source for video templates: we'll take a template that's intended for After Effects, then get it ready for use as a Premiere-friendly template.

I'm going to use Titles and Lower Thirds for Adobe After Effects to demonstrate. It's a perfect example of a template the works as a Premiere Essential Graphics version, we just need to export it as such.

I'm going to delete everything but the layer titled Title 01. Then, let's open up the Essential Graphics panel on the Window > Essential Graphics menu.

2. Set the Options to Adapt

Now, we're ready to add the options that we want to be customizable in Premiere. That might include options like the text color, shape color, and the text itself. Basically, you're telling After Effects, "here's what the user can control in Adobe Premiere."

On the Essential Graphics panel, click on Solo Supported Properties. Now, you can expand layers on the timeline and right-click > Add Property to Essential Graphics. This makes that part adjustable in Premiere. Stick to basics like font color and shape color, otherwise, you might get an "unsupported" error.

Add property to Essential graphics — Right-click on the layer option (like color) and choose **Add Property to Essential Graphics.**

Youll see options added to the Essential Graphics panel. Don't forget to drag and drop the text option to the panel as well so that the text is editable. This shows as Source Text with a placeholder box.

Drag and drop text — Make sure you add the **Source text** layer to the Essential Graphics panel by dragging-and-dropping the layer onto the panel.

That's all you have to do to enable these layers for editing in Premiere Pro. Now, you need to export and prepare it for use in Premiere.

3. Export the MOGRT Template

Once you've added all of the properties you want to include, it's time to export the template for use in Premiere.

Click Export Motion Graphics template. You might need to save the Premiere Pro project first. Pick a destination for the MOGRT file, then click save.

That's it! this file is ready to add and use in Premiere Pro. Let's open it up.

4. Open the Template in Premiere Pro

Jumping over to Premiere Pro, make sure that you can see the Essential Graphics panel. Switch to the My Templates tab on the panel. Then, click and drag the MOGRT file we just created into the panel.

My templates added — Click and drag the MOGRT file into the My Templates panel.

Now you can add it to your timeline. Click and drag the template thumbnail onto the timeline. Then, double-click on the new layer to drill through and open the options to adjust on the Essential Graphics panel.

Update options in Essential Graphics — Use the controls that we enabled on the Essential Graphics panel to make adjustments.

Use the simple options on the Essential Graphics panel to update and adjust your specifics. Change text and shape color and update the text placeholder in just a few clicks! This is the magic of Essential Graphics; You have this easy building block that's ready for another, very popular platform with minimal effort.

The Best Source for Unlimited Video Templates

Maybe you don't have time to create your own Essential Graphics; Even with the help of After Effects it takes time to create Premiere-friendly graphics.

In that case, we can start with MOGRT templates that are already prepared to drop into Premiere Pro. On Envato Elements, there are hundreds of MOGRT templates that are ready for use. And you can download all of them for a flat rate.