Centring Text in Premiere?

make sure you haven't clicked any position property keyframes stopwatch by mistake,

this will keep on changing your text position value whenever you change it on where your

playhead is on the timeline. 

Gareth,

This can be very confusing. If you get lucky, it just works. If you get unlucky, it can seem impossible.

If you don't get this with Ann's method, try this:

• Make sure you have Snap turned on in the Program Monitor: Program Monitor -> Wrench icon -> Snap in Program Monitor.
• Select the text item in the timeline. Be sure you have the Arrow/cursor selected, not the Text tool.
• Click once on the text.
• Drag it until the dotted red lines snap it to the middle.

Answers to your questions:

When you hover over the anchor point in the Program Monitor, it turns into the Pan Behind tool. (Let's ignore the fact that they don't call it pan behind in PR, only in After Effects. And notice that in the help file they don't call it anything; they just say the cursor changes.)

> I apparently have the text centred at 480 and 270 according to the “transform/position” settings but as you can see neither the actual text or the text box are centred and both are in different places. Does anybody know what’s going on here?

You probably moved it using one of the "other" transforms - Vector or Video Motion.

Stan

I don't know that I'm completely understanding your question(s)... but maybe these things might be helpful?

For your final question, the default graphic length is 5 seconds, you can go to your timeline and extend the graphical element for as long as you want by dragging on the end of it.

There's a few different ways to change text position. One changes where the text is in the "frame" of the graphic, the other one changes where the graphic is, relative to the video frame.