How to Add a Circle to a Highlight Video in Premiere Pro

The Premiere walkthrough starts below, including the panel Adobe retired in 25.0 and where its controls went.

First, the panel that moved

Adobe retired the Essential Graphics panel in version 25.0. Its contents were split in two: everything you use to style a title or a shape now lives in the Properties panel, which changes what it shows depending on what you have selected, and the browsing side — motion graphics templates, stock audio — moved into a separate Graphics Templates panel. The controls did not change. Their address did.

Then in January 2026, version 26.0 dropped the word "Pro" from the product name, so what installs on your machine is now branded Adobe Premiere. Point releases have continued through the year, with 26.3 arriving in June. None of that alters the technique on this page, but it does explain why a tutorial recorded two years ago will tell you to open a panel that is not in your Window menu.

If you are on an older install that predates 25.0, everything below still applies — read "Properties panel" as "Essential Graphics panel, Edit tab" and the fields sit in the same order under the same headings.

Draw the ring, hold the frame, animate the travel

Figure on ten to twelve minutes for your first marked clip while you find each control, then four or five for the ones after it. Add another three or four minutes to any clip where the ring has to chase a player instead of resting on a held frame.

1. 1

   Trim to the play before you draw anything

   Bring your footage into a sequence and cut it down to the single play you want marked. Doing this first is not tidiness — a graphic you position over thirty seconds of footage has to be repositioned the moment you shorten that footage, and every second you leave in is a second you might have to keyframe through.

   • Six to ten seconds per play is the shape most college coaches expect: a little setup, the action, a little follow-through.
2. 2

   Pull the Ellipse tool out from under the Rectangle tool

   The shape tools share one slot in the toolbar. Click and hold the Rectangle tool and the Ellipse and Polygon tools appear underneath it; pick Ellipse, then drag inside the Program Monitor to draw. Hold Shift while you drag to keep it perfectly round rather than egg-shaped. Premiere creates a graphic clip on the video track above your footage as soon as you release.

   • Draw it roughly the right size and fix the exact placement later — you have numeric controls for that, which is most of the reason to be in this application.
3. 3

   Clear the fill so the athlete shows through

   With the shape selected, open the Properties panel and find the Appearance controls. Clear the Fill checkbox, turn Stroke on, and raise the stroke width until the line is genuinely heavy. Premiere offers Outer, Inner and Center strokes, and you can stack more than one; Center is the safest default, since it grows the line evenly in both directions instead of creeping inward over the player.

   • Check both jerseys before you choose the stroke color. Whatever either team is already wearing is the one shade that will not read as a marker.
   • A stroke that looks bold on a 27-inch monitor can read as a thread on a phone. Judge it at the size a coach will actually watch.
4. 4

   Insert the pause, and pick the right kind

   Park the playhead a beat ahead of your involvement, right-click the footage clip and choose Insert Frame Hold Segment. That splits the clip and drops a still of roughly two seconds inside it, with the action resuming afterward. Drag its edge in until the pause runs nearer one second. Do not reach for Add Frame Hold here — that one freezes everything from the playhead to the end of the clip, which is what you want at the close of a sequence and not in the middle of a play.

   • Frame Hold Options, reached under Clip and then Video Options, opens a dialog whose Hold On checkbox lets you name the exact frame to keep — the playhead position, either end of the clip, or a timecode value.
   • A held segment adds runtime rather than replacing it, so your sequence gets longer with every one you insert.
5. 5

   Align the graphic to the held segment

   Drag the ends of the shape clip so it starts and stops with the frozen stretch underneath it. This is the step people skip, and the failure mode is specific and embarrassing: the picture stops, the coach looks up, and the marker has already gone or has not yet arrived.

   • Nudge the graphic a few frames earlier than the freeze so it is visibly on screen the instant the picture stops.
6. 6

   Keyframe Position only if the ring has to move

   Select the shape clip and open the Effect Controls panel. Under Motion, click the stopwatch beside Position — its tooltip reads Toggle animation — to record where the ring sits at that frame. Move the playhead forward, pull the outline back onto the player, and Premiere writes the next keyframe by itself and interpolates the travel in between. Repeat until the marker keeps up.

   • Two keyframes per second holds a running player on a fixed wide shot. A panning camera wants more.
   • Correct a drifting ring by adding a keyframe between two you already placed rather than by dragging the existing ones around.
7. 7

   Copy the finished graphic to the next clip

   Copy the shape clip and paste it above the next play instead of drawing a fresh ellipse. Reusing one graphic is what keeps stroke weight and diameter identical from play to play, and that evenness is what makes a reel look deliberate rather than hurried.

   • Reposition the pasted copy over the new player, but resist resizing it unless the camera distance genuinely changed.
8. 8

   Judge the delivery file, never the sequence

   Export an H.264 MP4 at 1080p, then sit through the whole thing at playback speed. Timing you approved while stepping frame by frame can fall apart the moment the video runs, and this file is the only version a coach will ever see.

   • Total the runtime after your holds are in. Each pause you inserted made the reel longer than the timeline suggested when you cut it.

Will the AI follow the player for you?

For a ring, no — and this is worth understanding before you spend an evening looking for the setting. Version 26.0 shipped Object Mask, which lets you hover over a subject, click, and have Premiere generate and track a mask around it; Adobe puts the tracking speed at up to twenty times faster than earlier versions, and it genuinely is impressive on a moving person.

The catch is what kind of tracking it is. Premiere tracks masks, and what comes out the other side is Mask Path keyframes belonging to the clip the mask lives on. Those keyframes describe a shape rather than a location, and Adobe documents no route for handing them to the Position property of a separate graphic. On the evidence available, then, the tracked data will not drive your ellipse. Editors who need a graphic bolted to a moving subject are generally pointed at After Effects, which does motion tracking proper and which sends clips back to Premiere through Replace with After Effects Composition.

What the tracking is excellent at is the other version of this effect. Put an ellipse mask over yourself on a duplicate or an adjustment layer, track it, then darken everything outside it — and you have the spotlight look, moving with you, built almost entirely by the machine. That effect has a name and a history in recruiting film, both covered in our explainer on what a spot shadow is. So the honest summary is a split one: the spotlight can be automatic in Premiere, and the ring is hand work.

When it is not worth opening Premiere at all

Everything above is worth doing when you need the marker glued to a player through a developing play, when you want a specific stroke weight in a specific color, or when the reel is going somewhere that will be watched closely more than once. None of it is worth doing when all a coach needs is to know who they are supposed to be watching when a clip begins.

That narrower job is what CircleOn was built for. Hand it the address of your film and the video loads in a browser tab; click yourself once wherever a viewer would otherwise be searching, and the file you download afterward has already stopped the picture at those instants with an animated ring drawn on you. No toolbar to dig through, no Appearance section, no stopwatch, nothing to align, because one action produces both the pause and the marker. Why that stop does so much of the work is the subject of our page on how long to hold a frame on recruiting film, and the pillar comparison of every route to a circled player puts the manual approach beside the automatic one and beside Hudl.