01 INTRODUCTION TO COMPOSITING AND INTRAFRAME EFFECT
Understanding compositing
In this course, we're going to explore the world of compositing. Compositing is the creative process of combining various image layers to form a cohesive scene. Let's take a look at what I mean. I have a sequence here, and I want to play it for you. And I want you to take a look at all of the elements that are working together to make this scene whole. (video playing) Okay, so we have some text, we have video.
We have these planets and stars, and an actor, we have lots and lots of different things, combined together to really put together this promo piece. And you can see that there's only two video tracks. And you might wonder how it all got put together. Well I want to show you this sequence, and you'll get a little bit of a better idea. We have here 9 video tracks and 10 audio tracks that are all basically layered to form the parts of this whole, okay? And so you can get a better idea of how this is all working together, I'm going to show you the source material bins where it all came from.
I'm going to just twirl down my Source Material folder, and open up these bins here. And I'll right-click and choose Open Selected Bins In One Window. And I just want to show you a couple. This is all the audio that we use. This course is going to be focusing on videos, so we'll go ahead and look at some of that. We've got some green screen here, so you remember that. We had the actor looking out the window, like right here. So this is one part.
And you can see that we have lots and lots of tracks here. All of these layers to form the outside of the ship, and the reflection on the window, the actor of course, the background behind him. So all of the things here are working together to form that little scene. And we have the other side of the spaceship, and that equals the scene right here. And let's take a look at our matte keys. We have our spaceship here. Again, it's just a still frame, but we were able to give it some nice movement, and it feels like it belongs in this world.
And let's take a look at our stars we have here. Video stars. This is our background for our title sequence and it's also the background that's behind Saturn here. And speaking of Saturn, you can go ahead and take a look at just a still image of Saturn. Not much to it. But it looks pretty majestic here. We just give it some movement and change the scaling, and give it a little bit of texture, and it really does, you know, pop out.
So even if you just have a couple of still elements, you still have the tools to really put together something pretty interesting. So as you can see, in the world of compositing, what you see isn't necessarily what you get. Rather, you're able to combine various layers and shapes and effects to create a whole new scene. Now this course will prepare you for that by teaching you how to use various compositing effects, like AniMatte, where we draw shapes to define layers, and matte keys where we use transparent layers called alpha channels to define layers, and chroma keys where we use color to define layers.
And by the end of the course you'll be able to combine all of these elements together using all of these techniques and more.
Before we jump into the deep end of advanced compositing effects, which we'll discuss later in this course, LET'S GO OVER SOME BASIC EFFECTS THAT CAN HELP YOU BEGIN BUILDING YOUR LAYERING TECHNIQUES. SPECIFICALLY, WE'LL TAKE A LOOK AT THE SUPERIMPOSE EFFECT, THE PICTURE-IN-PICTURE EFFECT, AND THE 3D WARP EFFECT. So if you've been editing for a while, you've probably worked with layered video tracks already and most likely you've used these common compositing effects before. Just in case though, let's take a look at each one. I'm going to load the Stars clip into the source monitor.
And I'm going to go ahead and mark an in and an out. And let's go ahead and splice this into the timeline by pressing V. And let's name or sequence immediately. I'm just going to call it Compositing practice. And then we'll go ahead and load the Earth clip. And we want to create another video track. You can do that by right-clicking in the gray part of the timeline and choosing New Video Track. But I like to use my keyboard, so I'm going to press Command+Y, or Ctrl+Y on a PC.
And we want to patch V1 to V2. And just turn off our audio. And I'm going to overwrite this in, so I'll press B. And I'm going to just trim that up just a bit. And this time I'll define the duration in the timeline and edit my Moon clip in. And I already have an in point there. If you don't, you can go ahead and make it. And I'll press B there and I'll do one more with Saturn. Okay. We're all set.
So, let's go ahead and take a look at our effect palette. And if you come to Blend > Superimpose, I'm going to drag the Superimpose effect on Earth 1. You can see that it automatically puts about a 50% superimposition on it. Then I'm going to put a picture-in-picture on the Moon. And you can see that it decreased its scaling by 50%, and we see the stars behind it.
And I'm going to put a 3D Warp on Saturn. And notice that nothing happens to that by default. We're going to have to adjust some parameters. So let's start over here with the Earth shot. I'm going to open up the Effect editor, and there's very little I can do to this (Superimpose Effect). We've just got Level as a parameter. And yes, it is 50%. Now let's go ahead and just take a look at what we can do with keyframing. We're going to be keyframing a lot in this course. I'm going to just place a keyframe at the beginning, and then one in the middle, and then one at the end.
And then we'll do something very simple in making it just appear from completely transparent to 50% and then we'll go 100%. So we're just animating this effect over time. Very, very easy. Very, very common. Right now there's really no other parameters that we can work with. Keep that in mind though. I'm going to get back to that concept a little bit later in this movie.
Let's move on to our full moon here and I'm going to open up the Effect editor. Notice we do have a couple more parameters here. I'm going to go ahead and just twirl some of these down. Okay. Again, I'M GOING TO JUST PUT A KEYFRAME AT THE BEGINNING, AND A KEYFRAME AT THE END. THIS IS A GOOD HABIT TO GET INTO. KEEP IN MIND IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO CHANGE SOMETHING ABOUT THE CLIP DURING THE ENTIRE DURATION, YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT ALL KEYFRAMES ARE SELECTED. SO JUST A REMINDER, WE CAN SELECT ALL KEYFRAMES BY JUST SELECTING ONE OF THEM, AND THEN PRESSING COMMAND+A AND WE'VE SELECTED ALL OF THEM.
And so if I wanted to actually move the location of that Moon, then that means that it's moved for the entire duration of the effect. If I only have one keyframe selected, and the other one is deselected, and I move, then we're going to produce a movement, an animation. Okay, so that is just basic keyframing technique. Let's go ahead and apply a border around it. I'm going to go ahead and do that through the entire duration. So again, I'm going to press Command+A to select both keyframes, and we'll go ahead and give it a border. In order to see the border, we need to give it a width first. And then we can come in and give it a color. We can sample colors around the frame here. We can have a Fixed Border, or we can have a border with a gradient, where it would move from one color to another. We can of course change the Foreground level. So if we wanted to fade it in, just like before, we certainly could. All right, so now we're fading in over time as we're moving.
You can explore other parameters that you want, but notice that for Scaling and Position, you can use the parameter sliders. But you also have onscreen manipulation. You saw me before change the position. But keep in mind you do have a scaling box as well. So if you want to just click on a keyframe and then manipulate it like so, then you've got a lot going on here. But it's very very easy to change any value, at any point in time. So this is 2D,
if we move to the 3D Warp we do introduce three dimensional space. I'm going to open up the Effect editor here. And you can see that there's lots of parameters. We won't be able to explore most of them now. But we will hit on a lot of them throughout this course. We can't see the background because it's at 100% scaling. So let's just twirl down Scaling and bump that down. Again we can use the onscreen controls. But the moment I do that, I'm going to form a keyframe, so again, I want to make sure that I get my keyframes at the beginning and end. It's just nice housekeeping to have keyframes at the beginning and end. You don't want there to be a random keyframe in the middle, because then something might happen halfway through and you might not like that.
All right, so again, I'm going to go ahead and just add a keyframe in the middle here. And I want to show you how this introduces our Z-space, our three dimensions. There are a couple of parameters in here that show that, namely Rotation. So, as we see here the X Rotation goes around the X axis, kind of like a roll of toilet paper. The Y Rotation goes around the Y axis, kind of like a turntable. And the Z Rotation goes around the Z axis like the hands of a clock. So let's just do some interesting manipulations here. And we've got just this keyframe selected so, as we go from the first keyframe to the middle and then back to the last, you can see that our animation is happening. And again, there's lots and lots of different parameters in here that you can explore, and that we certainly will explore throughout this course.
And many of them do contain an element of that third dimension. Now THE VERY IMPORTANT THING ABOUT 3D WARP, AND THE ABILITY TO ACCESS ALL OF THESE PARAMETERS, IS THAT MANY, MANY EFFECTS ALLOW YOU TO PROMOTE TO 3D. SO REMEMBER I SAID WE WOULD COME BACK TO OUR SUPERIMPOSE WHERE WE ONLY HAVE ONE PARAMETER? WELL, THAT'S UNTIL WE PROMOTE IT TO 3D. I'M GOING TO CLICK ON THIS LITTLE 3D BLOCK DOWN HERE. AND LO AND BEHOLD, IT'S NOW A 3D WARP.
And the superimposition, that level happens to be in the foreground category where we have the ability to control the Opacity here. So again, we have all these parameters available to us. We're going to be promoting to 3D a lot, because we have a lot of control here. And most effects don't have this element of control. But we can basically get to this point through any effect by promoting to 3D. Notice that there's no demote. Once you're in 3D, you're in 3D. So as you can see, applying compositing effects and adjusting just a few simple parameters allows you to effectively layer your video so that you can begin displaying different images, and parts of images, in your scene simultaneously.
Once you've mastered some of the more simple compositing effects, you may want to notch it up a few levels to gain more control and more customizability out of your layering capabilities. In this movie, we'll take a brief look at the various advanced effects that we'll be learning throughout this course. Okay, so in the last movie, we took a look at the Superimpose, the picture-in-picture, and the 3D Warp. And we were able to keyframe it and animate it over time. And there were several parameters we could change, but there was very little in the way of compositing that we had much control over.
We're going to take a look at this Earth shot. And this time instead of simply superimposing it on top of the stars, we're going to draw an AniMatte shape around it. So this is more of a sit back and watch movie. I'm just going to demonstrate these various techniques so you can see how they work and we'll go into much more detail later. So I'm going to open up my Key category, and my AniMatte effect. I'm going to just drag it right onto the Earth shot. And you can see that it doesn't do anything. I need to open my Effect Editor to manipulate the parameters. And I'm just going to draw a shape around the Earth, and use the dots to better define the drawing. Okay, so we are now seeing right to the background. We're defining with a shape, exactly what we're seeing. So this right now is as big as the Earth. If I wanted to make the shape any other size, that would be what I saw. So we're going to learn how to obviously keyframe this over time as well.
And we'll be nesting effects inside of it. And lots of other fun stuff. But just to show you the very, very basics, this is an AniMatte. We're drawing a shape around an image on a video layer above another video layer.
And let's move to this one. We have an actor in front of a green screen. And where we defined layer with shape, in this one, we're going to do so with color, in this one. So we're going to stay in the Key category, but this time we're going to apply a SpectraMatte effect. And I'm going to just drag this right onto the clip, going to open the Effect Editor, and again, don't try to do, just watch for now. I'm just going to sample the color. And you can see now that we can see the background here. I'm just going to manipulate just a couple of parameters. So that we can get a nice clean key. And we've still got some green on him, so I'm just going to do some very quick color correction (with Spill Angle Offset).
And it looks pretty good. So now, we have defined the matte by color. So we've done it by shape, and we've done it by color. I want to come down here. I haven't edited this in yet, because I want to talk about what an alpha channel is.
AN ALPHA CHANNEL IS BASICALLY JUST A TRANSPARENT LAYER, THAT ONCE WE IMPORT IT INTO MEDIA COMPOSER, IT'S GOING TO ALLOW US TO DEFINE THE LAYER. So I'm going to hide Media Composer for just a moment, and I'm just going to show you what we're going to look at outside of Media Composer.
This looks like the same Saturn that we saw in the last movie, but you'll notice that we don't have a background. So everything around Saturn is actually a transparent layer. So when we bring it into Media Composer we'll be able to see through it to the video layer underneath. Let's open up Media Composer again, and I've actually already imported it. There are some special import rules that we'll go through in a future movie, but I just want to show you. Here it is. It looks like a black background, but when we edit it into the sequence, you can see that we have the ability to see through to the bottom video layer.
So these are the three compositing effects that we're going to explore in great detail. We've got the AniMatte effect where we define our layers by shape. We've got the SpectraMatte effect where we define our layers by color, and we've got the matte key where we define our layers through alpha channels. So as you can see, there are a lot of ways you can define exactly how you combine, section off, and blend layers of video together to form a cohesive whole.
One more tool you can put in your arsenal is Intraframe Effect editing. INTRAFRAME EFFECT EDITING ALLOWS YOU TO WORK WITHIN ONE LAYER AT A TIME AND DRAW SHAPES TO ALTER THAT PART OF THE VIDEO WITHIN THE SHAPE. Let's take a look at a few examples to see what we're talking about here. Now, the Intraframe effect that we're going to be dealing with in this course is called Paint. We open the Effect Editor, and we go to the Image category. We can see the Paint Effect right here. So it's not in with the Key effects, with everything else, because this is not a key.
This is an Intraframe effect. So I'm going to apply the Paint Effect to my track here. And you can see it doesn't do anything. We're going to need to go in and manipulate it a little bit. I'm going to open up the Effect Editor. And we have some shape drawing tools right here along the right. And again, this is more of a sit back and watch movie. I'm just demonstrating the Paint Effect. We will get into this in great detail a little later on in the course. So I'm just going to select my Oval tool, and draw a shape surrounding the Moon here, and don't worry, we're not going to leave it to be a big red circle, but we do have the option of changing this to a lot of different possibilities.
I'm just going to go inside the Mode menu here and while Solid is one of the choices, I'm going to choose Colorize and perfect the shape there a little bit more. And I'm going to go ahead and just blend this a little bit better into the background (Feathering – Hor). And let's change the color from red to a nice blue. So, we have defined one area of the frame, and we have changed the pixels inside of it.
Now this is just one of the many options that you have about how you change these pixels. Notice that many, many, many of them are color correction options. And so you can really just define one area of the frame with a shape, and then affect the pixels inside of it.
Some of them are not color correction options. And just to give you an example, I have an actor here and let's just pretend that WE NEED TO BLUR OUT HIS FACE. SO AGAIN, WE'RE GOING TO APPLY THE PAINT EFFECT, and going to open up the Effect Editor.
And let's go ahead and just draw a shape around this part of the frame. Again, we will get into all the shape drawing tools a little later. WE HAVE TWO OBSCURING POSSIBILITIES HERE: MOSAIC ALLOWS US TO KIND OF HAVE A PIXELATED BLUR GOING ON. And we can just fade this into the background a little bit more.
Also we can change the size of those blocks. There we go. There's the Mosaic, and WE ALSO HAVE THE ABILITY TO, FOR EXAMPLE, BLUR. So there's lots of different options within Mode. We can alter the pixels within our shape however we want. We can keyframe these so that they can animate across the frame as our subject is moving. And we can even do something called performing a track, where it automatically follows the subject in the video frame. There's lots and lots of possibilities. I'm going to head back to my first clip here for just a moment.
And I want to show YOU THAT YOU CAN LAYER AS MANY PAINT EFFECTS AS YOU WANT. So for example, I'll open this up and we have one shape right here around the Moon. And I'm just going to go ahead and draw a shape around the gradient. Let's say we want to kind of change the color of this gradient a little bit. And it's still on Colorize, I'm going to go ahead and leave it on Colorize, and then just change the color down here. Say we want it to be more of a green. And let's just definitely dial that back a little bit. And we have the ability to kind of alter our shape a little bit. So bottom line, you can combine as many shapes as you want. You can even layer these shapes, which we'll get into in a little bit. And then of course we can blend this a little bit better into the background. So again, we have the ability to combine as many paint shapes as we want. Right now we just have two. You can keep going. IT'S NOT EXACTLY COMPOSITING, BUT IT DOES INVOLVE LAYERING INFORMATION WITHIN A SINGLE VIDEO TRACK, AND CAN REALLY OFTEN BE USEFUL FOR ENHANCING OR FIXING INFORMATION IN YOUR VIDEO.
02 WORKING WITH SPECTRAMATTE AND OTHER CHROMA KEYERS
IN THIS CHAPTER, WE'LL EXPLORE THE SPECTRAMATTE EFFECT, WHICH LETS US DEFINE LAYERS BASED ON COLOR. KEYING OUT AN AREA BASED ON ITS COLOR AND THEN COMPOSITING THE IMAGE OVER A DIFFERENT BACKGROUND IS CALLED CHROMA KEYING, OR CHROMA KEY COMPOSITING. YOU MAY HAVE HEARD THIS REFERRED TO AS BLUE SCREEN OR GREEN SCREEN. This technique is perhaps most famously used by weathercasters, but is just as often used in the film and commercial industry, usually to composite subjects over a computer-created background reality. Now there are several chroma keyers in Avid Media Composer, but there is definitely a superior choice; the SpectraMatte effect, which is the one we're going to explore in this chapter.
To use chroma keying, you need three things. FIRST YOU NEED A SUBJECT SHOT IN FRONT OF A WELL-LIT, FLATLY-LIT COLORED SCREEN OR WALL. AGAIN, THIS SCREEN OR WALL IS USUALLY GREEN OR BLUE BECAUSE THOSE COLORS ARE THE LEAST LIKE SKIN TONE AND ALMOST ALL CHROMA KEYED SUBJECTS ARE PEOPLE. Secondly, you need a background that you'd like to composite your subject against. This background can be anything, video, CGI, or even simply another colored or textured background.
Once you capture these two elements into your editing or compositing software, in this case Media Composer, you always edit the green screen or blue screen subject on the track above the background. Just like this. Third, you need a Chroma Key effect within an editing or graphics software program, which we will place on the top track, which is on the clip of your subject. A Chroma Key effect analyses the image for color and then keys through the area that falls within a specific color or color spectrum. When it does this, everything that was green or blue, now becomes transparent and therefore you see whatever is on the lower track, which is your virtual background. As you can see, the chroma key process is fairly simple but it truly opens up a world of possibilities when it comes to creating realities within Avid Media Composer.
A lot of amateur filmmakers love the idea of chroma keying but don't necessarily know the proper techniques to garner the best results. Unfortunately, this can result in some sloppy keys and unbalanced composites that even the most inexperienced viewers can detect. Therefore, in this movie we'll explore the nitty gritty details about the individual parameters within the SpectraMatte effect, so that you can pull the best keys possible.
Okay, so we have already edited our subject layer on top of our virtual background layer. And we have applied the SpectraMatte effect to our subject layer. Well, it's obviously not done yet because we still see the real background instead of our virtual background. And that's because when we open up our Effect Editor, we see that the color being keyed out is blue. If you look in the SpectraGraph right here, you can see that the wedge of colors that's being keyed out is surrounding the blue spectrum. This is Ultimatte Blue. It's just a very common blue shade.
So a lot of times when you have a blue background, this will pull the key and you will have a head start on the process. But in this case we're going to need to define the green color. SO I'M GOING TO COME OVER TO KEY COLOR AND I'LL GO AHEAD AND TWIRL THIS DOWN, AND I'M GOING TO CLICK IN THIS BOX UNTIL I GET MY EYEDROPPER, AND I'LL CLICK AND HOLD AND DRAG OVER TO MY BACKGROUND AND RELEASE. And you saw the SpectraGraph switch and now we're keying out a range of green colors. You can see that this is my Key Color right here.
I'm going to move this over to the left just a little bit because I want to show you this white dot. This white dot is the color that is being keyed. And you want this to fall right in the middle of the spectrum of values being keyed. So what you can do is use your Red, Green and Blue sliders to move this around so that it's centrally located. It will produce a better quality key. So I know I need to go towards blue, so I'm going to drag my Blue slightly to the right. And, there we go. All right, now it's right in the middle there and that looks good. I'm going to go ahead and close up Key Color, and we're going to go on to Matte Analysis and Chroma Control. Now this looks very intimidating, but don't worry. I'm just going to show you some of the parameters, the ones that I feel will pull the best quality key. I'm first going to show you, Show Alpha. And I want you to take a look right here. When I click on Show Alpha, you can see that this breaks apart my background and foreground (the background/what is keyed becomes a hard black and the foreground/my subject becomes hard white).
My background is meant to be very stark black. And my foreground is meant to be very stark white. Well my background looks good, but my foreground has some issues. As you can see, we have some gray areas here, and that's representing areas that are partially not being keyed. So what this is going to result in, is some of the background shinning right through our subject, which is not desirable. SO WE'RE GOING TO USE THE PARAMETERS WITHIN CHROMA CONTROL TO FIX THAT. THERE ARE FOUR THAT I'M GOING TO SHOW YOU, AND THEY USUALLY DO THE TRICK; TOLERANCE, KEY SAT LINE, INNER SOFTNESS, AND OUTER SOFTNESS.
Let's start with Tolerance. Tolerance controls this wedge. So if it's wider, that means that you have a large spectrum of colors in your background. And if it's narrower, that means you have a narrow spectrum of colors in your background. Well if we take a look at our background, go ahead and bypass, we have a very narrow spectrum of colors. It's a very well-lit and flatly-lit background. So, we're going to probably be decreasing our Tolerance quite a bit.
I'm going to just drag over to the left. And the general rule is overshoot and then tweak back. I'm going to overshoot, and you can kind of see some of the white come into the background and then tweak back. And I'm going to release. And notice that my wedge of values got much narrower. That's all I'm going to need. We do not need all of these green colors keyed out. We really only need this spectrum of green keyed out. Okay, so we're done with Tolerance.
Let's go to Key Sat Line. KEY SAT LINE IS GOING TO REALLY HELP YOU GET RID OF A LOT OF THESE GRAY AREAS. So I'm just going to drag this over to the right. You notice already it's looking a lot better, and I'm going to overshoot and then tweak back. And take a look at the hair. I'm either including or discluding some of that hair in this value. And right now, like I said, we're processing the matte. We are defining the matte. So we are deciding what's being keyed and what's not. In general, it's nice to key stuff that was actually there. The hair is actually on his head. So you want to make sure that you include as much of it as possible without the background being compromised. I'm going to stop there.
AND THEN WE HEAD DOWN TO INNER SOFTNESS AND OUTER SOFTNESS. THIS IS GOING TO DO SOMETHING SIMILAR, AND MOST OF THE TIME THESE ARE YOUR FRIENDS WHEN YOU HAVE AREAS OF PARTIAL TRANSPARENCY. What do I mean by that? Well, if you have something in your key with glass, or liquid, or smoke, Inner Softness and Outer Softness are going to do wonders at defining your key. Here we are really just going to be affecting the hair. It's kind of a dance. I'm just going to kind of go back and forth and take a look and see how it's being affected. Not much there. And in the SpectraGraph, you can kind of see that it's controlling these areas right here. On the outside of the keyed area, and of course the inside of the key area for Inner Softness. So not too much change there, AGAIN, THESE ARE DEFINITELY YOUR FRIEND WHEN YOU HAVE AREAS OF PARTIAL TRANSPARENCY IN YOUR FOREGROUND.
Let's go ahead and deselect Show Alpha, and as you can see, because we did the work in defining our matte, we actually have more areas that are being keyed. Now right now they are green, so we do have some significant spill, which is green, or background color on our subject. But don't worry about that. We're going to fix it in a little bit. I'm going to close Matte Analysis and Chroma Control, and I'm going to move to MATTE PROCESSING. THIS IS GOING TO DEFINE THE EDGE BETWEEN THE FOREGROUND AND BACKGROUND.
SO YOU MIGHT NEED TO BLUR IT A LITTLE BIT, as I think we probably do in his hair. So I'm just going to bring my slider to the right just a little bit. And let's actually show the alpha a little bit here. YOU CAN SEE RIGHT NOW THAT I'M ON ERODE, WHICH MEANS THAT IT ADDS BLURRING TO THE INSIDE OF THE MATTE EDGES ONLY. THIS USUALLY PRODUCES THE CLEANEST MATTE PROCESSING. IF I CHANGED ERODE TO BLUR, IT'S GOING TO BLUR BOTH THE INSIDE AND THE OUTSIDE. And so he kind of looks like he's glowing, which is not desirable. And the other one is Dilate, which means just from the edge to the outside. AGAIN, ERODE IS USUALLY THE BEST OPTION, IT IS THE CLEANEST RESULT. And I'm going to go ahead and just see what introducing a little bit more erosion will do here, show the alpha. You can kind of see that eroded area on the outsides, and I think this is going to look just fine.
Okay, so we've defined our matte. We've gone through the process, making sure we have a good clean background and a good clean foreground, and a nice crisp edge going all the way around. I'm going to go ahead and go to probably the most important parameter of all, Spill Suppression. SPILL SUPPRESSION REMOVES THE KEY COLOR THAT'S BEEN REFLECTED ONTO THE FOREGROUND SUBJECT. NOW THIS IS REALLY COMMON IF THE SUBJECT IS STANDING TOO CLOSE TO THE BACKGROUND, OR IF THE SUBJECT CONTAINS ANY SORT OF REFLECTIVE MATERIAL.
In this case, he's a little close to the background, so he's getting a little bit of green spill all through his hair, on his neck, and also on the seat here. All right, so I'M JUST GOING TO DRAG MY SPILL ANGLE OFFSET. So there is two parameters sliders here, but we're going to deal with Spill Angle Offset. And I'M GOING TO DRAG IT TO THE RIGHT AND I'M LOOKING, I'M LOOKING UNTIL THE GREEN GOES AWAY. And right there I think most of it is gone. YOU WANT TO MAKE FAIRLY SUBTLE CORRECTIONS, BECAUSE IF I GO TOO FAR, YOU CAN KIND OF SEE THAT HE'S GETTING PURPLE THERE.
So you want to make fairly subtle corrections so that the green goes away, but as you can see, it works really, really well. We've removed our spill. We've suppressed it. There's a lot to know about all the parameters within the SpectraMatte effect. It may seem daunting to begin with, but as you pull more and more keys, the process will get easier and faster. In the next movie, we'll go through every step of the workflow in a faster and more efficient manner.
Now that we've gone through each parameter in the SpectraMatte in depth, let's just go through the entire process end-to-end. You'll find that once you perform it a few times it gets easier, and faster, and more intuitive. Now just so you know, the last movie and this movie feature several of the SpectraMatte effects that we are putting together for the final sequence. So in the last movie, we basically went over this one right here. And if I go down to his level, you can kind of see the gradient behind him.
And we of course have some other elements there as well. But that's the basic premise of that shot. And then, if I come over to here, this is the one we are about to do right now. So he's looking out the window at Saturn. Okay so, I'm going to show you on V1 that there is Saturn, and on V2 here is our subject. Okay, now here's the green screen, and he's not as well lit here and it's going to make a difference.
If I come into the Effect Editor and apply the SpectraMatte on V2, we obviously don't key it out first, because by default we're keying out blue. So I'm going to go through the entire process. And I'm going to reference everything, but I'm not going to explain it in such detail. We're going to start up here at the Key Color. I'm going to go ahead and sample the key color, drag it over to my green and release. And we're now keying out the green area. Now take a look, we have some definite issues here. We basically see Saturn through the plane right here, which is not desirable, and everything is looking pretty muddy. So we're going to have a lot of work ahead of us. First of all, we want to center our key color, so I'm going to twirl down Key Color here. And we want to just go a little bit toward green here, and try to center this just right. Okay, that looks good. I'm going to go ahead and twirl up Key Color. We're done with that, and on Matte Analysis, we're going to show the alpha. All right, we definitely have some problems. We're looking for nice crisp black and nice crisp white and we certainly don't have that.
So, we're going to go down to Chroma Control and we want to try to achieve that. Again, I'm going to kind of go to the left on Tolerance and then go back. So we want to overshoot and then tweak back until all of that area is completely black. And we're definitely running into some problems, but I'm going to stop about right there. We definitely have a wider range now of Tolerance, and that's because all values to the left of where I released, you can see introduce that gray graininess. So I'm going to release about right there.
Now we're going to attack it with Key Sat Line. This again is going to control the area where keying begins, so I'm going to overshoot and then tweak back. And we're actually reaching a point where we're probably going to need to overshoot so that we get a nice crisp white. And then I'm going to go back with Tolerance, and kind of get rid of that.
So sometimes you kind of have to dance between these parameters. All right, so it's much less of a wide wedge as we had originally thought, but we just basically are in the tweaking stage here. Now let's go ahead down to Inner Softness and Outer Softness, and see if we can get rid of the rest of that problematic area with that, which you can see that I am. I'm going to go ahead and just go to the right on Inner Softness a little bit. If I go too much, you can kind of see that it's defining the edge around that window a little bit.
And I think I'm going to release about right there, and I'm just going to go back and forth with Outer Softness to see what I get. Here you can kind of see if I go too far what happens. All right, so that's looking nice and crisp. I'm going to go ahead and toggle off Show Alpha and it's a good sign that we do not see Saturn through the plane anymore, so that's good. And we're not going to have to do too much in the way of spill suppression. There is not really much green on him, but let's continue on through the process anyway.
Okay, so I'm going to twirl up Chroma Control, and take a look at Matte Processing briefly. I'm going to go ahead and see what my Matte Processing does. Again, this is going to define the area that is between my keyed out area and my non-keyed out area. So Erode usually produces the best results. I'm going to go to the right, and you can kind of see that it's blurring that line. So it's not so crisp, and that might work.
I'm going to go ahead and just see what that looks like. It's a nice blend. I think I like that. Again we want to use Spill Angle Offset. Just so you know, Spill Angle Offset is always used when you use Key Sat Line. Key Saturation does something similar to Key Sat Line, and that's when you would use Spill Saturation. Again, that's too much information really, I'm just here to tell you that we're really only going to use Spill Angle Offset most of the time. All right, let's see if introducing any Spill Suppression does anything.
And it really doesn't too much. I mean, he has pretty decent skin tone here. We're definitely going to need to color correct the shot anyway. But if I just increase the Spill Suppression, he's just getting purple and he doesn't look good at all there. So, let's go ahead and leave the Spill Suppression off. He really doesn't have much green spill because he's being protected by this wall. And he should be in good shape. Okay, so as you can see, once you get started working with SpectraMatte and as you pull more and more keys, it's going to get easier and faster and more efficient.
BELOW ALL THE MAIN PARAMETERS IN THE SPECTRAMATTE EFFECT ARE SOME DVE CONTROLS THAT INCLUDE SCALING, POSITION, AND CROP. SO IF YOU NEED TO MOVE YOUR FOREGROUND SUBJECT, YOU CAN MOVE THESE BASIC 2D CONTROLS, OR YOU CAN ALSO ACCESS A VARIETY OF 3D CONTROLS. Let's take a look. Right now I have a sequence and I have two video tracks. On the top is this shot of a rocket, and then I have our stars on the bottom. And my goal is to make the rocket appear like it's flying through the stars.
So while we don't have a blue screen or a green screen, we actually do, because we have the blue sky and we'll be able to key out the blue sky. SO OFTEN TIMES ALL YOU NEED IS A FLAT COLOR, AND YOU'RE GOING TO BE ABLE TO KEY IT OUT. Let's take a look at how. I'm going to apply the SpectraMatte effect to my V2 layer, and as you can see this is really rough. It's just automatically taking that Ultimatte Blue key out, and we're going to need to fix that significantly. So I'm just going to open up the Effects Editor, and let's go ahead and click on Bypass so that we can see our sky and sample.
You can see, my white dot is really pretty centered, so I think I'll leave that where it is, and I'll turn bypass off, and let's show our alpha by selecting it. And we're just going to try to define this a little bit better. When I don't show the alpha, you can already see that it looks a lot better, except right around the rocket. So, let's go ahead and try to define that better. We're going to do that in the Chroma Control parameters. So let's see what Tolerance can do. I'm basically kind of getting rid of that fuzziness along the outside.
So I'm going to overshoot and tweak back and I think I'll stop about right there, and then, don't think Key Sat Line is going to do much for me in this case. Let's go head down to Inner Softness, and Outer Softness. All right, so it looks better around kind of the tail of the rocket there, but the actual shaft of the rocket still needs to be defined.
We're going to go ahead and take a look at the Alpha Offset parameter. And that can probably add just a little bit of definition, which it is here, but I'm going to need to tweak back on a couple of others. So again, this is often a little bit of a dance. We're going to go through and get it exactly right. You can see the changes happen both in the image as well as in the SpectraGraph. Notice that we now have a very wide range of hues, because we didn't have a well-lit green screen or blue screen background, we're using the range of hues in the sky.
So we're going to need to key most of those out. And as you can see we also have a fairly blunt edge between the area being keyed and not being keyed. I'm going to see what that looks like. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the alpha. And we might need to do a little bit more tweaking. But the next thing I want to do--the point of this movie is to show you how to animate your foreground subject. So, just like before, I'm just going to put a keyframe at the very beginning and at the very end. And I want to move this throughout the entire effect.
So I'm just going to select one keyframe and press Command+A, so that they're both affected, and if you come to my Scaling, Position and Crop parameters, you can see that I have a fair amount of control over where I place this, so just so you can see, you know, you can make it as big as you want. I'm going to return that back to 100 because what we want to do is actually rotate this. You can see that the stars are traveling horizontally and our rocket is going against the grain here.
So what we want to do is rotate this, and we can easily do that by promoting our SpectraMatte to 3D. So we will promote to 3D, and here we go, 3D Warp. We have our Rotation parameters, and we have all the parameters that are going to allow us to work in the Z space. So if you come down to Foreground, you'll notice that in Foreground are all of my SpectraMatte parameters. So if I need to do any further defining, it's here. We need to turn it around the Z axis so I'm going to make that adjustment.
Let's see what that looks like. We probably need to keyframe it a little bit. And we're going to need to hide the fact that we don't have a tail right here, so I'm also going to reposition it. I'm just going to park on one keyframe, Command+A to select them all, and then just kind of position it down like so, and rotate it, and let's see what this looks like. (video playing) All right, not bad.
Again if we wanted to keyframe it along the way, we could just place a keyframe here, and then move it back, and then give it more rotation, like so, so we can kind of keep it fit in the frame and we could keep doing that. So I definitely think that you should keep tweaking it and if we need to come back again and define the matte, we certainly can. Those parameters are available in the Foreground category, and you can come back in and tweak that further. So as you can see, the sky's the limit for how you manipulate your image once you pull the key.
You can use as many 2D or 3D effects as it takes to create your own perfect reality.
WHILE THE SPECTRAMATTE EFFECT IS THE MOST EFFECTIVE CHROMA KEYER, SOMETIMES A LUMA KEYER IS A BETTER OPTION. YOU USE A LUMA KEY IF THE AREA THAT YOU WANT TO KEY OUT IS BASED ON LUMINANCE VALUES. THAT IS, IF YOU CAN KEY OUT EITHER BRIGHT OR DARK AREAS. FURTHER, YOU CAN WORK WITH THIS KEY IN 3D JUST LIKE SPECTRAMATTE. Let's take a look. NOW THERE ARE TWO WAYS THAT YOU CAN ACCESS THE 3D LUMA KEYER. ONE WAY IS TO PUT ON THE 3D WARP AND THEN OPEN UP THE EFFECT EDITOR, AND COME DOWN TO FOREGROUND AND SWITCH YOUR KEY, TO LUMA KEY.
And now we're working in the Luma Keyer, but we also have 3D space. And I'm just going to remove that. I want to show you the other way. If you go to Key, you can see Luma Key, and apply that. And right now we're not in 3D, but if you promote it to 3D, we end up in the same place. So two ways to do the same thing, but let's take a look at what we have down here in the Foreground. YOU WANT TO SAMPLE THE BACKGROUND COLOR JUST LIKE WE DID IN SPECTRAMATTE.
So I'm going to disable Foreground and then I'm going to come in to Color, even though this is black, you can't trust that this is the true black that you're actually keying out, which is about right here. So I'm going to press down with my Eyedropper and then sample. And as you can see, it's now enabled. And SO THE FIRST THING THAT WE'RE GOING TO DO IS MAKE SURE THAT LUMA RANGE IS SELECTED. WHEN LUMA RANGE IS SELECTED, MY THRESHOLD IS MY MIDPOINT OF LUMA VALUES BEING KEYED OUT. So because our background is black, we're going to want have our Threshold around the value of black, which is 16.
16 is the value of video black. If we were keying out white, we would just drag the slider up near 235, the value of video white. So this does allow you to key out either black or white values, or anything in between. You can see as I drag this up nothing happens. That's because we haven't made any manipulations on Range yet. So I'm going to just return this to 16, and now we're going to actually control the range of values that are going to be keyed out. So as I drag up with Range, you can see that more and more values are being keyed out, and we want it fairly close to the rocket here, because we want some of this glow but not all of it.
I THINK MAYBE I WANT ABOUT THAT MUCH GLOW. AND OF COURSE IT LOOKS TERRIBLE, BUT THAT'S WHERE SOFTNESS COMES IN. I'M JUST GOING TO UP MY SOFTNESS, AND NOW WE'RE ACHIEVING THE EFFECT THAT WE WANT. We have the stars behind it. We still have this nice beautiful orange glow. And as we go through, it looks like a rocket flying through space, except for this giant crop line. So it's a good thing we're in 3D Warp. So we'll come back up, and I'm going to add a keyframe at the very beginning and at the very end.
And then I'm going to select both of them, so Command+A, and let's just alter the position for now so that we can hide these crop lines. And I'm going to just go through here, maybe we can get a little bit further up. Okay, fantastic, and then because the stars are going more horizontally, I'm going to just add a little bit of rotation to this. Again we're going around the Z axis. I'm going to just hold down Shift so I can get a fine movement there. And we're going to actually need to change the position just slightly more because of that rotation.
Okay, so there we go. And as you see here we have a crop problem at the very end. What I would probably do is just trim the shot to end about right there. So I'm just going to make a quick extract, and now I think we should be good throughout. Looks like we have a problem there too, And there are other things that we can do to get rid of that crop line, but in the context of what we're currently learning I think we've got it.
We've applied a luma key, and we now have our rocket ship moving through space. SO AS YOU CAN SEE, SOMETIMES ISOLATING AN IMAGE'S LUMINANCE VALUE FOR KEYING IS A DESIRABLE WAY TO COMPOSITE YOUR SCENE. AND WHEN THAT'S THE CASE, 3D LUMA KEYS ARE A GREAT OPTION.
02 USING ANIMATTE EFFECT
THE ANIMATTE EFFECT ALLOWS YOU TO DRAW SHAPES AND MAKE MATTES FROM THOSE SHAPES. NOW, THIS ALLOWS YOU TO CUT OUT VARIOUS PARTS OF DIFFERENT PIECES OF VIDEO AND LAYER, OR COMPOSITE THESE LAYERS, ON TOP OF ONE ANOTHER TO CREATE A COHESIVE SCENE. Now this may sound a little confusing so let's take a look at exactly how this works. All right, so we have our actor in front of the background here (in the timeline/Record Monitor) and we know from our master sequence that he actually needs to have a window in front of him. So I have the window right here (another clip to add to the Source Monitor).
And we're going to need to move him to make sure that he fits right in this space. But for now I just want to cut this into the sequence. I'm going to go ahead and mark my track on V3, and overwrite this in by pressing B. And okay, so there's my window. We can't see through it yet, but if we go to the Effect palette, and in the Key category, we're just going to apply the AniMatte effect. Again, nothing happens automatically. We have to open up the Effect Editor. And this is where we start to draw our shapes.
Along the right-hand side are our shape drawing tools. We have the Rectangle tool, the Oval tool, the Polygon tool, the Curve tool, and the Brush tool. Now we're going to be working right now with the Polygon tool. And I'm just going to select it. And what we want to do is we want to cut out this shape right here, and we'll eventually cut this one out as well. But for this movie we're going to focus on cutting out this shape so that we can see our guy behind it. NOW THERE ARE TWO WAYS THAT THE POLYGON TOOL WORKS.
First of all, you can just click and release and then click and release and you'll get straight edges. OR YOU CAN CLICK AND DRAG, AND CLICK AND DRAG AND YOU GET CURVED EDGES. AND THIS RESULTS IN GETTING BEZIER HANDLES. AS YOU CAN SEE WHEN I DRAG I GET MY BEZIER HANDLES, AND THIS WILL ALLOW ME TO LATER MANIPULATE THESE CURVES, in any way that I wish. So I'm just following this around. If I don't get it perfect, that's okay because, we can come back later and manipulate it.
So we're almost around, and we just want to join the shape. And we don't have it quite yet. Right now what it's doing is it's showing the shape that I did not draw. WHAT WE WANT TO DO IS SEE WHAT'S INSIDE OF THE SHAPE. SO WE COME OVER TO THE MODE MENU AND YOU CAN SEE HERE THAT WE HAVE TWO OPTIONS, KEY IN OR KEY OUT. I WANT TO KEY OUT IN THIS CASE. And now we have exactly what we want, except he's not in the frame yet, but we'll fix that.
USUALLY WHEN YOU DRAW AN ANIMATTE SHAPE, YOU'RE ALSO GOING TO WANT TO INTRODUCE A CERTAIN AMOUNT OF FEATHERING. FEATHERING IS GOING TO MAKE THESE EDGES NOT SO SEVERE, SO IT'S GOING TO BLEND A LITTLE BIT INTO THE BACKGROUND. And you do that by just clicking on your horizontal and vertical-- and I'll just do something pretty drastic here so you can see what's happening. But it's basically making that very soft so I don't want to go too much. And if I have my Bias towards 100, it's going to go from the outside of the edges in.
If I have my Bias towards 0, it's going to do the opposite. So I want to kind of have something a little bit like this. Now if I'd like to manipulate this shape, I just double-click, and I get my handles. And if I did make a Bezier curve, like about right here, you can see that I have the ability to manipulate my curve so I want to come in and perfect it a little bit. It's not bad. It's going to work just fine. But just so you see, if you need to tweak it a little bit, you can come in, and then if you double-click again, you can move it.
So you can see what happens. There he is! But we want to make sure to move him over right in front of the window. So, just a little bit more manipulation, and I definitely challenge you to tweak it until it's exactly perfect, but I think it's good for now. WE NOW NEED TO MOVE HIM IN FRONT OF THE WINDOW, WHICH MEANS WE JUST HAVE TO COME BACK DOWN TO OUR SPECTRAMATTE EFFECT AND I'M GOING TO PROMOTE THIS TO 3D. AND WE'LL GO AHEAD AND JUST ADD A KEYFRAME AT THE BEGINNING AND END, BECAUSE AGAIN, THAT'S GOOD HOUSEKEEPING.
I'm going to press Command+A to select them both. And now I'm just going to drag him over. And it's not really to scale yet, so let's come into my Scaling parameters, FIXED ASPECT SO THEY BOTH GO AT THE SAME RATE. And it's looking better. Okay, so I think that's looking pretty good and let's go ahead and just scrub through it.
All right, I like it very much. I think that what I'd like to do is actually put a tint on the spaceship. It's a little white. So you can do that to AniMatte effects very easily. I'm going to just select V3 again. WHEN YOU WANT TO APPLY A DIFFERENT EFFECT TO YOUR ANIMATTE EFFECT, LIKE COLOR, YOU WANT TO STEP IN. AND YOU CAN DO THAT BY JUST DOUBLE-CLICKING, AND WE CAN APPLY THE COLOR EFFECT RIGHT HERE, WHICH I'LL DO THAT RIGHT NOW. I'LL JUST CLICK ON IMAGE AND THEN COLOR EFFECT AND DRAG IT ON OVER.
And I'm going to open up the Effect Editor and make sure that's selected. I'm going to go ahead and just go find maybe a nice, bluish-purple. Okay, and just manipulating some of these parameters here to give it a hue that's not so starkly white, like so, maybe it's a little too saturated.
So you can see what we're doing here. WE'RE JUST BASICALLY CUTTING OUT PARTS OF THE VIDEO AND LAYERING THEM. YOU CAN NEST DIFFERENT EFFECTS INSIDE OF ANIMATTE EFFECTS. YOU CAN LAYER ANIMATTE EFFECTS ON TOP OF ONE ANOTHER. So we're looking pretty good here. I challenge you to go ahead and cut out the other window, and finish making this look exactly like a cohesive scene. But we're well on our way to creating our Nova spaceship promo.
NOW THAT YOU KNOW HOW TO APPLY STATIC ANIMATTES, LET'S TAKE A LOOK AT HOW TO GIVE MOVEMENTS TO THESE LAYERS. IN THIS MOVIE, WE'LL TAKE A LOOK AT HOW TO ANIMATE LAYERS USING KEYFRAMES IN THE ANIMATTE EFFECT. Okay, so I have a little animation here and this is basically the view out of the back window of the space craft as you've already left Earth, and now you're leaving the Moon. The images are moving and appear to be getting smaller. It's really not to scale, but that's okay. So, I've got another sequence here.
And here are the two images. You can see here now that I'm monitoring the Moon layer. And we've got like a black background behind it. And then if you look at the Earth layer, we have this green background behind it. But I've already applied the movement with 3D Warps, and now we're just going to AniMatte it so that we don't have these ugly backgrounds. Okay, so we're just going to Option+Drag, or Alt+Drag on a PC, our AniMatte effects on top of our 3D Warps, like so it doesn’t replace the effect and allows me to add another one to the clip.
And I'm going to attack the bottom layer first, so I'm going to first do the Earth. And let's go ahead and open up Effect mode. And we've got two keyframes (because they is already a move on it). AND WHEN I'M DRAWING THE SHAPE, I WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT THEY'RE BOTH SELECTED AND THAT I’M ON THE FIRST KEYFRAME. SO I'M JUST GOING TO GO INTO MY OVAL TOOL, AND WE'RE GOING TO DRAW AN INITIAL SHAPE TO KEY OUT THAT GREEN BACKGROUND. And you know, ideally we would have some stars behind it on V1, and you can certainly search through some of the source material to find that, but I've just got a basic black background now.
SO, GET THAT EXACTLY RIGHT, AND THEN ALSO WITH BOTH KEYFRAMES SELECTED YOU WANT TO PUT IN SOME FEATHERING, JUST GOING TO UP THE FEATHERING JUST A BIT. AND WHEN YOU WANT TO CHOKE THE MATTE, WHICH MEANS YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU'RE NOT BLEEDING TOWARDS THE OUTSIDE, BUT IT'S BASICALLY GOING TOWARD THE INSIDE. YOU WANT TO BRING YOUR BIAS CLOSER TO 0. SO, WE START OUT FINE, BUT THEN THAT DOESN'T WORK AT THE END. SO ALL YOU HAVE TO DO TO ANIMATE YOUR ANIMATTE IS TO WORK WITH KEYFRAMES.
And this is a very simple movement. I'M JUST GOING TO RESHAPE MY ANIMATTE SHAPE ON THE SECOND KEYFRAME. BUT EVEN WITH MORE COMPLICATED EXAMPLES, WHEN SOMETHING IS MOVING IN SEVERAL DIRECTIONS OVER THE DURATION OF THE EFFECT, YOU'RE JUST GOING TO ADD KEYFRAMES THROUGHOUT THE EFFECT AND THEN RESIZE AS NECESSARY. If you have a more complicated shape that's not a circle, for example, if you drew a polygon, you would just double-click on your shape and then you would receive the direction handles that you could then begin manipulating and changing the shape.
But all we've got is an oval here so we're fine. We are now animating as the Earth is disappearing into the background. That looks good. Now let's go ahead and do the same thing for V3, our Moon. OPEN UP THE EFFECT EDITOR, AND I'M GOING TO CLICK ON THE FIRST KEYFRAME, BUT THEN PRESS COMMAND+A AND SELECT THEM BOTH. WHENEVER YOU'RE DRAWING A SHAPE YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE THEY ARE BOTH SELECTED AND THEN WHEN YOU PUT FEATHERING ON YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE THEY'RE BOTH SELECTED. So again we've got a very simple shape here, and again, we're going to choke the matte, so let's go ahead and introduce some Feathering.
And then move our Bias close to 0. And as I go through the effect, you can see that we're going to need to animate down (over time the image is now smaller). So I'm just going to click on the last keyframe, making sure the first keyframe is deselected. And just bring this down a bit. And we'll call that done. So, now we've got our back view out of our spaceship, passing the Moon up.
The Moon is diminishing in a faster rate than the Earth. Which makes sense, right? And they are layering. Everything looks good. And as you can see animating mattes is a fairly straight forward process. And it allows you to introduce a world of motion into your composite scenes.
In the last movie, we learned how to keyframe AniMatte shapes to animate them over time. Well, sometimes the movement isn't too easy to keyframe, which is why motion tracking is such a great tool. Let's take a look. Okay, so we have our rocket here and we have our stars. And what I'd like to do is just make it seem like the rocket is traveling through the stars. We did this in an earlier movie with Chroma Key techniques and now we're going to do it with AniMatte. Okay so we need to probably darken this up to make it look like it can be in the night sky.
We also want to rotate it around so that it's going in the same direction as the stars. So I'm going to go to my Effect pallet, and under Image I'm going to choose the Color Effect. And let's go ahead and open up the Effect Editor, and let's darken it up and increase the contrast. And let's give that tail an orangeish tint, bump up the red, and bump down the blue.
Looks good as far as color is concerned. NOW LET'S GO AHEAD AND ROTATE IT. I'M GOING TO DO SO WITH A 3D WARP. OPTION+DRAG THIS ON TOP, AND OPEN THE EFFECT EDITOR. OKAY, SO WE WANT TO ROTATE IT AROUND THE Z AXIS. I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND DO THAT. AND I'M GOING TO PUT A KEYFRAME AT THE VERY BEGINNING AND VERY END. AND THEN I'M GOING TO PRESS COMMAND+A OR CONTROL+A TO SELECT BOTH OF THEM, AND REPOSITION IT.
And I'm going to just go through the whole thing and make sure that it looks okay. Actually, I probably need to reposition it just a bit more. Okay, I think that's going to be just fine. I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND NOW APPLY MY ANIMATTE EFFECT. I'LL COME IN TO KEY, AND ANIMATTE, I'M GOING TO OPTION+DRAG, OR ALT+DRAG FOR A PC, AND I'M GOING TO GO INTO MY EFFECT EDITOR AND DRAW MY SHAPE. I'M GOING TO USE THE POLYGON TOOL.
I'm going to use a combination of curves and edges to draw this shape. As we go through you can see that the shape stays where it is but the rocket moves. And that's not what we want. Now the first thing I want to do is just apply some Feathering to the shape so that it blends into the background just a little bit better. So I'm going to come into my Feathering parameter. And bump up my horizontal and vertical Feathering parameters.
Bring down my Bias just a little bit. And I'm going to just click outside in the gray area so that I can see how it looks in its first state. And again, it's going to look bad as I go on because my matte doesn't move. SO WHAT WE WANT TO DO IS PERFORM A TRACK. WE DO THAT WITH THE TRACKING TOOL. THE TRACKING TOOL IS RIGHT HERE. IT'S IN THE ANIMATTE EFFECT AND IT'S IN A LOT OF EFFECTS. THE TRACKING TOOL IS A VERY COOL WAY FOR YOU TO TRACK YOUR VIDEO AND MOVE AN EFFECT ALONG WITH IT. I'm going to click on the Tracking tool, and as you see here we see the stars, which is the background, and we have our tracker.
So we want to instead track our foreground, and WE WANT TO PUT OUR TRACKER, SPECIFICALLY THE YELLOW X ON AN AREA OF HIGH CONTRAST. THAT'S HOW IT'S GOING TO GRAB ON TO THE VIDEO. So I'm just going to put it about right there. And it's going to find inside this smaller square, that area of high contrast. And the larger square is basically the outer limits. And I'm just going to drag that in just a little bit, because we want it to be very, very close.
So if we have a good track, that means that the X will not leave this location. It's going to latch on to it. I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND START THE TRACK. THE START TRACKING BUTTON IS RIGHT HERE. I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND PRESS IT, AND JUST KEEP YOUR EYE ON THAT TRACKER AND MAKE SURE THAT IT DOESN'T LEAVE THAT SPOT. Okay, we're done. The track is finished, and we have this squiggly yellow line. This is actually tracking data. So it tracked every movement of this video.
And we're going to use this to our advantage by attaching this tracking data to our AniMatte shape. That's pretty amazing. So, I'm going to go ahead and close that and head back to the beginning here. I'm going to choose my shape, and right now it's still not moving, but I'm going to go ahead and TWIRL DOWN MY TRACKING CATEGORY AND YOU CAN SEE I HAVE UP TO FOUR TRACKERS I CAN APPLY. RIGHT NOW WE ONLY HAVE ONE TRACKER BECAUSE THIS IS A FAIRLY SIMPLE MOVEMENT, GOING FROM LEFT TO RIGHT. There is a little bit of arching but if you have a lot of rotation, if something is going back and to the left or the right, you might want to attach more than one tracker. But we only have one so all I have to do is just click on this button and I've enabled my tracker. And now when I go through, you can see that my shape goes with it. Now it doesn't keep it in frame in the very end because I have just changed the trajectory. I'm going to have to actually reform the shape. But take a look at the intricate movement that the shape is making along with the video.
Okay. So when something changes, you usually can just click on the last keyframe. You might have to add a couple more in between, but I'm going to see how much we can get away with just clicking on the last one. I'm going to redraw the shape so that it surrounds the rocket ship at the end as well. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and make sure that just this keyframe is selected and change the shape just a bit. I'M GOING TO HAVE TO DOUBLE-CLICK ON THE SHAPE AND THEN JUST START TO MANIPULATE THE SHAPE AROUND THE ROCKET SHIP LIKE SO.
Okay I think we are getting close. We've reformed this shape, but the tracking data is still applied. And let's go ahead and just scrub through it and see if it follows it. It looks like it does. I'M GOING TO JUST CLICK OUTSIDE IN THE GRAY AREA HERE, AND IF YOU DON'T HAVE A GRAY AREA YOU CAN GET ONE BY JUST REDUCING YOUR SIZE JUST A LITTLE BIT. And I'm to go ahead and play and let's see how it does. (video playing) All right, not bad at all! Might just need a little bit more tweaking, but I think this looks really good.
SO IF YOU HAVE A SIMPLE MOVEMENT, KEYFRAMES ARE PROBABLY GOOD ENOUGH. BUT IF YOU HAVE A MORE COMPLEX MOVEMENT, USE THE TRACKING TOOL. BECAUSE THE TRACKING TOOL WILL MAKE INTRICATE MOVEMENTS REALLY EASY TO WORK WITH.
In this movie, we're going to put all the AniMatte tools together to composite our spaceship scene, and we're also going to take a look at a very useful tool called THE SUBMASTER EFFECT, WHICH WILL ALLOW US TO ANIMATE AN ENTIRE GROUP OF LAYERS AND EFFECTS AT ONCE. Let's take a look. Okay, so we have our subject and we have our spaceship and we have our background, but he's facing the wrong way and we need this to move. I'm just going to show you what the master sequence should look like here.
And, here we have him turned around the other way. And he's moving because the spaceship is moving. Okay, so we need to make that happen. But if you take a look--IF WE WANTED TO CAUSE MOVEMENT, WE HAVE THREE THINGS TO MOVE. WE HAVE THE SUBJECT. WE HAVE THE SHIP. AND WE HAVE THE ANIMATTE SHAPE. SO WE WOULD HAVE TO GO THROUGH EACH LAYER INDEPENDENTLY AND MOVE THEM EACH SEPARATELY. OR WE CAN ACTUALLY COMBINE THEM TOGETHER, WHICH IS WHAT WE'RE GOING TO DO.
SO WHAT WE WANT TO DO IS NEST ALL OF THESE INTO ONE NESTED SEQUENCE, AND WE'RE GOING TO DO THAT VIA A COLLAPSE. I'm going to go ahead and just mark an in and an out point on either side of this sequence, and this button right here is your COLLAPSE BUTTON. I'm going to go ahead and press it. AND NOW YOU HAVE EVERYTHING CONTAINED IN ONE LAYER. If you wanted to see inside of the collapse, you could always step in. And there it all is. I'm going to go ahead and step out.
But NOW THAT THIS IS COLLAPSED AND WE ONLY HAVE ONE TRACK THAT WE'RE DEALING WITH, WE CAN ACTUALLY MANIPULATE ALL THE LAYERS AT THE SAME TIME .IF I OPEN UP THE EFFECT EDITOR, YOU CAN SEE THAT THE COLLAPSE IS NOW NESTED UNDERNEATH SOMETHING CALLED A SUBMASTER. And, if you ever needed to just do this within the Effect palette, the Submaster is located within the Image category. All right, so you NOTICE THERE'S NO PARAMETERS TO ADJUST IN THE SUBMASTER, SO WE'RE GOING TO NEED TO AUTO NEST A 3D WARP ON TOP OF IT.
SO WE'LL GO TO BLEND, AND I'M GOING TO OPTION+DRAG, OR ALT+DRAG ON A PC, MY 3D WARP ON TOP OF MY SUBMASTER EFFECT, AND HERE'S ALL OF OUR 3D WARP PARAMETERS. So we need to do a couple things. We need to first, put a keyframe at the very beginning and very end. And then I'm going to go ahead and select both keyframes, Command+A or Control+A on a PC, and we want to just rotate it around the Y axis so he's looking the other way.
So go ahead and do that, and oops, too far, going to just PRESS SHIFT TO MAKE IT A FINE MOTION like so. And then we actually need to scale it up because we can't introduce any movement because this is perfectly sized. So if we introduce movement, we would have the background showing behind and we don't want that. So let's also scale it up, again with both keyframes selected, and now I'm going to select the first keyframe and start him off over here. And select the last keyframe and move him to the left. So now he's moving all at once.
I think in my final movie, I actually ended up placing him in this window. And you certainly could. We could go inside the Submaster and move him over. You certainly can feel free to do that. But right now, I just wanted to get the concept across that IF YOU HAVE LOTS OF LAYERS, GO AHEAD AND NEST THEM ALL TOGETHER. AND THEN YOU CAN GO AHEAD AND APPLY EFFECTS ON TOP OF THAT TO PRODUCE AN ANIMATION ACROSS MANY LAYERS AND MANY EFFECTS.
Most of the time, the AniMatte effect is applied to a segment, as we've seen in the previous movies. However, I should mention YOU CAN ALSO USE ANIMATTE EFFECTS AS TRANSITION EFFECTS. IN THIS WAY, YOU CAN DESIGN A SHAPE TO WIPE OFF ONE LAYER AND WIPE ON ANOTHER LAYER. Let's take a look. Okay, so I have just two shots here, very simple. And I want to apply a customized AniMatte transition right in between. So I'm going to go to my Effect pallet and my Key category AniMatte, and this time just drag it right onto the transition.
And we'll Open Up The Effect Editor. And If You Aren't Zoomed Out, I Would Recommend That You Do So. Again, Just Press The Reduce Button Here, You Can Zoom Out, Because We Want Some Off Stage Area For This. Okay, so I'm going to go ahead and just draw a shape. You can draw any shape that you want. I'm going to come over with Polygon tool. And let's go ahead and just draw very simple saw tooth shape, like so.
And what we want to do is have it off screen on the first keyframe. And right now this is only lasting one second. You can of course change this; if I want it to last two seconds. I can just type in 200, and now this will last 2 seconds. And now I'll go to the last keyframe and I can do a couple of things. I mean, I can just drag it over here so that you see the shape go across, but that's not as interesting, for example, if I wanted to just have it overcome the frame.
And so I'M GOING TO ACTUALLY COPY THE KEYFRAME CHARACTERISTICS FROM HERE, COMMAND+C OR CTRL+C ON A PC. AND I'VE ALREADY MOVED THIS BUT I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND JUST MOVE IT BACK BY PRESSING COMMAND+V OR CTRL+V ON A PC. SO IF YOU EVER WANT TO COPY THE KEYFRAME CHARACTERISTICS FROM ONE TO ANOTHER, THAT'S HOW YOU DO IT. So this time I'm just going to select the last keyframe and I'm going to reshape, so I'm just going to double-click here, and then just drag these across.
So you can kind of just see these jagged movements just coming across the frame, and here as well. So, this is what it's doing. And let's go ahead and just watch it happen. (video playing) All right, pretty cheesy, but you get the point; you can draw any shape that you want. If you wanted to draw a rocket ship going across, and you were good at drawing, that would work as well.
AND YOU WOULD LITERALLY JUST BE WIPING ON ONE IMAGE AND WIPING OFF ANOTHER. I'm going to go ahead and remove this. I'm going to go ahead and apply the AniMatte effect just one more time to my transition, because there is one parameter category that we haven't gone over yet that can be useful to wipe on and wipe off an image. I'm going to make sure that both keyframes are selected. And I'm going to come down here to the Brush tool. THE BRUSH TOOL IS INTERESTING BECAUSE IT'S GOING TO ALLOW ME TO JUST GRADUALLY WRITE ON A TRANSITION.
AND SO I'M GOING TO JUST OPEN UP THE BRUSH CATEGORY, AND I'M GOING TO MAKE THIS FAIRLY LARGE SO I DON'T HAVE TO JUST GO BACK AND FORTH A MILLION TIMES. And let's go ahead and just press it. Okay, so I think this is going to to work. Again I'm going to go back and forth, and you can write your name. You can write anything that you want. Right now I'm just going to go back and forth. So I cover the whole image, and now we're going to come in, and I'm going to just get my Selection tool here and select it.
NOW, WHAT WE WANT IS FOR IT TO BE FULLY WRITTEN ON AT THE LAST KEYFRAME, WHICH IT IS. AND WE WANT NONE OF IT TO BE WRITTEN ON, ON THE FIRST KEYFRAME. SO I'M GOING TO SELECT THE FIRST KEYFRAME, MAKING SURE THE LAST KEYFRAME IS DESELECTED. AND THEN, I'M GOING TO COME TO MY PATH PARAMETER. AND RIGHT NOW IT'S 100%, I'M JUST GOING TO GO BACK ALL THE WAY TO 0. OKAY, SO LET'S GO AHEAD AND PLAY THIS AND YOU'LL SEE EXACTLY HOW IT WORKS. (VIDEO PLAYING) SO IT DEFINITELY STRUGGLED.
We see down here in the timecode track that we were dropping frames. The red line indicates that we were dropping frames right here and this indicates that we are just about to drop frames. So the buffer kind of got overloaded there. We are working in high definition, so WE MIGHT WANT TO JUST DROP OUR VIDEO QUALITY TO BEST PERFORMANCE AND SEE HOW WE DO AGAIN, just one more time. (video playing) And you can see that it blew right past that no problem, and no dropped frames.
Okay, so THERE'S A LOT OF INTERESTING THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH ANIMATTE, INCLUDING MAKING CUSTOM TRANSITIONS. AND IF YOU'RE AN ARTIST, THERE'S SOME REALLY INTERESTING THINGS YOU CAN DO BETWEEN TRANSITIONING FROM ONE IMAGE TO ANOTHER.
04 USING ALPHA CHANNELS AND MATTE KEYS
SO FAR, WE'VE SEEN THAT TO CREATE COMPOSITES WE NEED TO WORK WITH MULTIPLE VIDEO LAYERS, AND CREATE MATTES SO THAT CERTAIN AREAS OF EACH LAYER ARE TRANSPARENT, AND CERTAIN AREAS ARE OPAQUE. In the last few chapters, WE DEFINE THESE MATTES USING SPECTRAMATTE, BY USING COLOR, and ANIMATTE EFFECTS BY USING SHAPES. In this chapter, we'll take a look at ANOTHER WAY OF CREATING MATTES, BY WORKING WITH IMPORTED GRAPHICS WITH ALPHA CHANNELS, CALLED MATTE KEYS, to define our mattes. Let's take a look at what I mean here. Now, to explain matte keys, let's take a look at a graphic outside of Media Composer.
I've got one right here. And I want the logo and the text to appear over the stars. And I want everything else to be transparent. Now, this has already been created with an alpha channel, which we'll go over in the next movie. But, right now we have a transparent layer, and we're going to be able to bring it in, and put it over our background with no problem, as long as we follow a few important steps. I'm going to go back into Media Composer here. This is just to show you that you have quite a few options when you import something.
And you're going to want to make sure that you choose the right ones. So you can sit back and watch, you don't have to do this with me because we're going to go through this in a lot more detail in a future movie. I'm just going to right-click in my bin and choose Import. And we have our file for import right here. And I just want to show you in Options I'm going to choose to ignore the alpha channel. If we ignore the alpha channel and bring this logo in, we're going to go ahead and just bring it in as a flattened image. I will edit this into the timeline, and you'll see that there obviously is no transparency to it.
Let's go ahead and do the same Import, but this time under Options I'm going to CHOOSE INVERT ON IMPORT. IF ANYTHING WAS CREATED OUTSIDE OF AVID; IN PHOTOSHOP OR AFTER EFFECTS, OR ANOTHER PROGRAM, YOU'RE GOING TO WANT TO INVERT IT. IF IT WAS CREATED USING AN AVID PROGRAM, YOU WON'T INVERT IT.
So pretty much 99 percent of the time you're going to invert. I'm going to say OK, and choose my logo, and Open, and this time we'll still do a flattened image (BY CHOOSING FLATTENED IMAGE IT’S BASICALLY GOING TO NEST ALL OF THE PHOTOSHOP OF AE LAYERS TO BE ONE FLATTENED LAYER). And notice that we have an entirely different icon. Just because we chose that we wanted the alpha channel to come in-- looks like we have a transparent background. We won't know for sure until we edit it in, but there we go. It looks great. Now I just want to show you one more option.
I'm going to right-click and Import, and do the same thing. I'M GOING TO KEEP THE ALPHA CHANNEL ON INVERT FROM IMPORT, BECAUSE IT IS FROM PHOTOSHOP. AND THIS TIME I'M GOING TO CHOOSE THAT I WOULD LIKE THIS SEQUENCE OF LAYERS, AND THIS IS A REALLY, REALLY TERRIFIC FEATURE BECAUSE AS YOU'LL SEE WHEN IT COMES IN, WE HAVE EVERY LAYER OF THE PHOTOSHOP FILE. So I can literally just edit one layer on top of another. Go ahead and mark my in and my out points, and get each element of it arranged just so.
And I'm sure you can see why this is going to be so powerful, because EACH ONE OF THESE IS TOTALLY ABLE TO BE ANIMATED SEPARATELY. So if I go ahead into Effect mode on this matte key, you'll notice that I have some DVE controls, as far as just my two-dimensional controls. I can also just promote it to 3D. We have a whole host of other options. We are very familiar with the 3D Warp.
When it's in a matte key, it changes to 3D Mattekey, but of course, everything moves the same. But this is just so special because WHEN WE BRING IT IN, IN A SEQUENCE OF LAYERS, WE CAN LITERALLY PROMOTE EACH LAYER TO 3D AND HAVE ALL SORTS OF CONTROL FOR EACH ONE OF THESE LAYERS. And we're going to be doing this a little bit later in a future movie. So you get the idea. You have some options. If you're not careful you are not going to get any alpha channel at all. You can import a graphic with an alpha channel and have it all come in together.
Or if it was created in a program like Photoshop that uses layers, you can bring in everything separately and we can animate this so that everything can move separately. Okay so that's just a little lesson on alpha channels, we're going to get a lot deeper in the future chapters. And of course we've been working with graphics in this movie but of course you can work with alpha channels in video and animation as well. So if you've created an alpha channel in say, After Effects, you can certainly bring that in and composite it with your scene in Avid as well.
But just be aware that WE HAVE THE OPTION OF MAKING CERTAIN LAYERS TRANSPARENT BEFORE EVEN BRINGING THEM INTO AVID. ALPHA CHANNELS CAN BE VERY POWERFUL FOR US WHEN WE CREATE COMPOSITES.
Okay so we've identified what alpha channels are; the layer that contains the transparency information within graphics and movies that allow us to composite different video layers together. In this movie, we'll explore how to create alpha channels outside of Avid using some of the most common graphics creation programs: Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects. So I'm in Photoshop right now, and I have a graphic. And it's comprised of three layers, and we have a transparent background. So it's ready to go, right? Well, not exactly.
A lot of people do think that transparent background in Photoshop translates to a transparent background outside of Photoshop. But that's not true. If I come up to File > Save As, you can see that Alpha Channels is one of the options, but right now it's grayed out and I can't check it. So we need to add an alpha channel. To do that I'm going to come over to Channels (in the floating tab next to Layers), then I'm going to come down to Create New Channel, and I will press that button, and by default it is an alpha channel. I'm go ahead and just select all of them to be viewable and I still have my three layers but right now I have an alpha channel.
Now it is tinted pink to let me know that an alpha channel exists. And if I come up to File now, and Save As, Alpha Channel is not grayed out anymore and I can check it. So I'm just going to save this as, with alpha, so I can save it in the same folder. And we want to keep it as a Photoshop document so that we can retain the layers when we bring it into Media Composer. And I'll just Save that, and let's go ahead and hide Photoshop.
And I'm just going to take a look at that graphic, with alpha. Let's take a look at it in preview. So this light gray background indicates that we do have an alpha channel. So when I bring this into Media Composer, I'm just going to right-click and choose Import. And we just want to make sure that we are bringing in the alpha channel (click Options). We'll go through these rules in much more detail in the next movie, but we're good to go and let's go ahead and grab that graphic, with alpha, and Open.
We want to bring it in as a Sequence of Layers. And here are the various layers of the alpha channel. And here is the entire sequence edited together. And we can't see the whole thing, because we're not monitoring on V3. But just to prove to you that we can see it over the stars, I'm just going to load this into the source monitor, and we want to edit this over our stars. So just add a couple more video tracks. And I'm going to patch V1 to V2, V2 to V3, and V3 to V4.
And let's just quickly edit in, out. And I'm going to press B to overwrite, and here we go. So we have an alpha channel, everything looks great.
That's Photoshop, now I'm going to head into After Effects. And I have here just a short little title sequence here where we have these kind of blue clouds floating in and out, and I want that to go over the star background as well. Now, we do have our transparent background here as indicated by the checker boards, but just like in Photoshop, we don't have an alpha channel yet.
What we have to do, is go to Composition, and we need to Add this to our Render Queue. And I'm going to close this one because this is the one we're working with. And you need to check all of your settings of course, but the place where we check the alpha channel is under Output Module. And I'm going to click right here where it says Lossless, and we want to come to Channels and right now we just have RGB and that's the default. We want to change this to RGB + Alpha.
I'm going to go ahead and choose this, and this little plus that appears here is the alpha channel. So we're good to go here and I need to actually set my output destination. So I'm going to go ahead and just send this to my Desktop, and Nova Spacelines Title, Save, and let's go ahead and render it. That's going to take just a little bit, but I'll catch you on the flip side when we open up Media Composer.
Okay, so here's our movie. Let's go ahead and open up Media Composer. And we want to just right-click in our bin here, and choose Import. And we want to choose Options, and we want to make sure the alpha channel is coming in correctly. It's inverted on import which is correct. And we did size it correctly, so we're good to go, let's click OK. And our movie is on the Desktop, so let's go ahead and choose that, and click Open. And as you can see here, it's creating QuickTime media.
It will take just a little bit. And here it is creating the alpha data. Okay, here it is in our bin. You can see that it's a Matte Key. And if we load it you can see that we have our clouds and text, you can't really tell much right now because it's not positioned over something. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's go ahead and patch V1 to V2, and just press B to overwrite. And here you can see that everything is positioned with the stars in the background. So you can see the alpha channel is working great! So, as you can see, transparency information in the form of alpha channels within imported graphics and movies is absolutely essential when compositing in Avid.
And knowing how to create these correctly is also a must. So use these tools to your advantage whenever you're layering video in Avid.
So once you're at the point where you're ready to import your graphic or movie, it's as simple as one, two, three, right? Well, not exactly. THERE ARE SOME IMPORTANT IMPORTING RULES YOU'LL NEED TO FOLLOW TO MAKE SURE THE FILE IS BROUGHT IN AT THE RIGHT SIZE, THE RIGHT ASPECT RATIO, AND THAT IT RESPECTS THE CORRECT GUIDELINES FOR HANDLING ALPHA CHANNELS. It might sound confusing at first but I'll do my best to break it down as simply as possible.
So have you ever been working in an editing or graphics program and seen an image that looks like this, way too stretched and squeezed. Or like this, something that should be the size of a logo but stretched the size of the frame. Or like this, where you're expecting an alpha channel and you just can't see the background layer. Well this happens a lot because the rules for importing are not as simple as you might think, but let's go over them and try to break it down.
I'M GOING TO RIGHT-CLICK IN MY BIN AND CHOOSE IMPORT. AND HERE'S WHERE WE CHOOSE THE LOCATION FOR WHERE WE'RE IMPORTING FILES FROM. BUT THE MOST IMPORTANT BUTTON ON THIS ENTIRE SCREEN, IN MY OPINION, IS OPTIONS.
And this is where we choose how the file is brought in. So let's first touch on IMAGE SIZE ADJUSTMENT. THIS IS WHERE YOU CONTROL THE SIZE AND ASPECT RATIO OF THE IMAGE THAT YOU'RE IMPORTING. If we look at option number one, this is indicating that the image is sized correctly. So you've done your homework, you've sized the image in another program, and it's ready to come in. If it's not sized correctly, then you end up with something very stretched and squeezed because Media Composer sort of makes it fit.
So if everything is good to go, choose this, otherwise MOST OF THE TIME WHAT YOU WANT TO CHOOSE IS RESIZE IMAGE TO FIT FORMAT RASTER. THIS IS GOING TO KEEP IT ITS SAME SHAPE, BUT IT GOING TO EITHER SCALE IT VERTICALLY IF IT'S A TALLER IMAGE, OR HORIZONTALLY IF IT'S A WIDER IMAGE. So, I'm going to choose this option here. And we're going to ignore the rest of the options for right now. I'm going to say OK. I'm going to bring in my Earth graphic with that option instead.
So I'm going to click Open, and let's go ahead and load this one. You can see that this looks just fine. Again, this one ended up stretched and squeezed because we accidentally chose that first option, image size correctly for import. It obviously wasn't, because it's more of a square. So what we wanted to do was choose option number four, Resize image to fit format raster. And it looks great.
Let's go ahead and look at another scenario. And go Import, and Options. Now, number three, Do not resize smaller images, if you have a smaller image, for example, a logo, or a bug (and I want it to stay small and not be full frame), and you want to put it in, for example, and you want to put it in the lower right-hand corner of your video frame, you want to make sure that you choose, Do not resize smaller images, because otherwise, for number one or number four, it's going to scale it up, and either stretch and squeeze it to fit the frame, or it's going to keep it the same shape, but it's still going to fill the frame. So when we do not resize smaller images, we're going to get the small image we desire.
I'm going to click on number three then, and choose OK. And I'm going to go into spaceship logo, and there's my logo. It's just that little logo of the spaceship there. And I'm going to click Open, and let's see how this looks. Okay, so there's our little logo. We can apply a 3D Warp on it and put it in the lower right-hand corner. It's not resized to dramatic proportions. All right, I'm going to go back into my Import dialog box, and Options, and I want to go over just one more thing here.
So, we already know what number one is, this is if you've done your homework and it's good to go, choose this, if not, you want to choose this so that it resizes. Otherwise, if you want to bring in smaller images, you want to choose number three. And number two is seldom used. Basically there's a six line difference between standard definition footage and DV footage. It's either 720x486 for standard def, or 720x480 for DV footage. And it either crops or pads the missing lines. So again, not very often used, but it is there if you should need it.
The other really important set of options in this window, in my opinion, is the Alpha Channel box. Now we already kind of talked about this, but IF YOU DON'T HAVE AN ALPHA CHANNEL YOU DON'T HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT IT. YOU JUST SELECT IGNORE.
IF YOU HAVE AN ALPHA CHANNEL, AND IT WAS CREATED IN A PROGRAM OUTSIDE OF AVID; SO AFTER EFFECTS OR PHOTOSHOP, OR BASICALLY ANYTHING ELSE, YOU'RE GOING TO INVERT ON IMPORT.
NOW AVID HAS DIFFERENT RULES, SO IF IT WAS CREATED IN AVID YOU DO NOT INVERT. SO 99 PERCENT OF THE TIME YOU'RE GOING TO CHOOSE INVERT ON IMPORT IF YOU HAVE AN ALPHA CHANNEL.
So let's go ahead and choose Invert on import, and try bringing in our graphic of Saturn again. I'm going to go ahead into Mattes and Composites, planets with alphas and my Saturn graphic, Open, and it's creating my alpha media right now. Okay, and just to make sure. And you can see that it composites nicely in the background.
Okay, I'm just going to head into my Import dialog box just one more time, and Import and Options. And I just want to briefly hit on these other options. So again, size and aspect ratio and alpha channels are very, very important. So just to hit on this very briefly. MOST IMAGES YOU'LL BRING IN WITH COMPUTER RGB, BUT IF YOU'RE BRINGING IN SOME TEST PATTERNS LIKE COLOR BARS, YOU WANT TO MAKE SURE TO CHOOSE 601 SD OR 709 HD. NOW IF YOU BRING IN A GRAPHIC OR MOVIE FILE WITH COMPUTER RGB, AND YOU NOTICE SOME UNATTRACTIVE BANDING ACROSS GRADIENTS, YOU KNOW, COLORS KIND OF CLUMP TOGETHER, THEN YOU CAN CHOOSE THIS ONE, DITHER IMAGE COLORS. That's the only time you should really choose the second option. Otherwise, you're going to choose number one. Here we have the Frame Import Duration, so it's set at 30. You can change that. Here if you create an animation in a program like After Effects, and you have sequentially numbered files, this allows you to just select the first file, and then when you check this box, it's going to autodetect all subsequent files. And then finally up here, if you're working in non-interlaced footage, you're going to choose Ordered for current format. If you're working with standard definition interlaced footage, you want to choose Odd. And if you're working with HD interlaced footage, you want to choose Even.
All right, so those are the basic rules. A lot to keep track of, but really you have just some generally basic ways that you're going to import. You either have something that was sized correctly or not. Or you have something that you'd like to keep small and not resize. And you have to pay attention to the alpha channel. Otherwise, the rest of this stuff is a little less important, but for example, if you bring in some interlaced footage and it looks jittery, just go ahead and select the other one that you didn't choose. So yeah, a lot to digest, but all of these options are here for you as you import your files.
So now that we, A, know what alpha channels are, B, know how to create alpha channels in graphic creation programs, and C, know all the rules for importing graphics into Avid, we're finally ready to import. I know there's a lot of buildup here, but you'll be glad to have all this preliminary knowledge so that you're spared many of the problems that can exist when amateurs try to work with graphics that contain alpha channels. What we want to do is build the part of the scene where the spaceship is approaching Saturn. So I've already edited the stars in as our background.
And we just want to import those other two images which are matte keys. So I'm going to right-click, and Import. And the first one is inside the planets with alphas folder, and it's Saturn. So Saturn already has an alpha channel. It's also sized correctly, so I want to make sure that I have Image sized for current format selected. And I want to make sure that my alpha channel is inverted on import. I'm going to select OK, and choose Open, and there we go.
We have Saturn ready to come in. And let's go ahead and just edit Saturn in on V3, actually, in and an out, and I'll overwrite by pressing B. And let's go ahead and grab our spaceship. You have several spaceships to choose from. I'll show you the one that I'm going to choose. In spaceship images, I like Spaceship03, with the flames coming out. And I'll choose Open, and again, this is sized correctly.
And the alpha channel is inverted on import, OK, and Open that. And let's go ahead and edit this one in as well. On V4, in and an out, and overwrite. All right, so there is everything. It looks terrible, so let's go in and edit this a little bit. I'm going to to start with Saturn. I'm going to go ahead and just monitor V3 so I don't have to worry about V4 for right now.
And I'm going to open up the Effect Editor, and let's go ahead and set a keyframe at the beginning and the end. And I'm going to select both keyframes, Command+A, and I'm just going to size it up, pretty significantly. And then offset it a little bit, like so. And then I want it to slightly move to the left during the duration of the effect to counteract the right word movement of the spaceship.
So this is a fine place for it to start on the first keyframe, and then on the last keyframe we want to just move it ever so slightly to the left. Maybe not even that much. So, there we go. We're getting some movement there. Now let's go ahead and take a look at the spaceship. I'm going to go ahead and enable that and also monitor it. So it's headed in the wrong direction. That's the first thing. But the wonderful thing about matte keys is that we can very easily rotate it as soon as we promote it to 3D.
So it needs to go about the Y axis, so we want to choose Y rotation, and I'm just going to flip this to the other direction and then SHIFT+DRAG TO CONSTRAIN. HERE I SHOULD BE AT 180. I'LL JUST TYPE IT IN 180, THERE WE GO. And it needs to be a lot smaller, obviously, so I'm going to come into Scaling, and Fix Aspect, and just bring the size of it way down.
And we want to start keyframing, so I'm going to do a keyframe at the beginning and a keyframe at the end. And in the beginning, I'm going to start off with it off screen. And I'm going to just play to see how fast this goes. (video playing) Okay, and so, I think that by the end of it, it can be either off screen or almost off screen, because we're going to intersperse some shots of the guy on the spaceship looking at Saturn.
So this can last a little while. It looks like we're at ten seconds, but it's not like we're going to see it all at once. So I will go ahead and play. (video playing) Okay, it's actually a little fast for my taste, so I'm going to just move it over just a little bit, like so, and I think that's more the speed that I was after.
Just to test, but to actually slow it down I'm going to trim this out so that it lasts just a little bit longer. Again we won't view this entire animation at the same time, but we at least get the speed right. So I'm just going to exit Effect mode for just a bit, and I'm going to enter Trim mode on V4, V3, and V1. I'm just going to press U to get into trim, and I'm just going to trim out a couple of seconds. Okay, I'm at twelve right now. And then let's go back into Effect mode and make sure that we get all the way across.
We should be at a good speed now. Okay, so right about here is when we're going to cut to the guy on the spaceship looking at Saturn. There's a couple of shots of that, and then we'll probably catch up with this animation about right there, and then on the way out. So again, this is not realistic, It's not to scale obviously, but it's a fun little animation. And as you can see, it's really easy to create a world from just a couple of still graphics.
We've explored how to work with matte keys to create a cohesive scene. Now we're going to start looking at how we can animate matte keys to create a title sequence. Okay, so I again have my star background, and I'm just going to kind of show you what we're after here. We want to have our title sequence sort of animate in. We're going to have a flip on the spaceship. We're going to have this big swoop on the word Nova and Spacelines just kind of moves in from the foreground.
SO LET'S GO AHEAD AND IMPORT OUR MATTE KEY. NOW I CREATED THE GRAPHIC IN PHOTOSHOP AND IT'S MADE UP OF SEVERAL LAYERS AND WE'RE GOING TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THAT. I'M GOING TO IMPORT, AND UNDER OPTIONS WE WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT WE HAVE SIZED FOR CURRENT FORMAT, AND INVERT THE ALPHA CHANNEL. AND THOSE ARE CORRECT SO I'M GOING TO SAY OK. AND LET'S GO FIND OUR GRAPHIC, WITH THE ALPHA (save the file with _with alph), AND OPEN. WE DO WANT THE SEQUENCE OF LAYERS.
Here it is creating the media and the alpha channel information, and again, we have our three layers that we can work with, and our sequence that it edits together. So I'm going to load my main sequence and I'm going to go ahead and just load this into the source monitor and perform a little patching here. We're a little messed up on the order here. You want to make sure that your monitor is on top. So I'm just going to patch V1 to V2, and V2 to V3, and V3 to V4, and we've got to move the monitor up here.
So, we're good to go. Let's go ahead and just make this edit. I'm going to go ahead and mark this entire segment by pressing T. And then I'm going to overwrite by pressing B, and here we go. We have a static title. Let's go ahead and add some movement to it. You can see it's about ten seconds long in total. And what I'd like to do is have the initial animation last for about the first two to three seconds. So let's go ahead and start on V2. I'm going to go ahead and move my monitor down there. I'm going to start on our little spaceship logo.
And we'll go ahead and just select V2 and open up my Effect Editor. And we want it to flip into view, which is a Rotation perimeter so, we need to promote this to 3D. And let's go ahead and add our keyframes at the beginning and end. And right about here I'll go ahead and add the keyframe, and the animation should be finished by this point. So this keyframe is fine, this keyframe is also fine. Let's go ahead and just select the first keyframe.
And open up my Rotation parameter. And if it needs to flip into view, we need the Y rotation. So I'm going to drag my Y parameter to the left and then AS I GET CLOSE I'M GOING TO SHIFT+DRAG TO ACHIEVE A VERY FINE MOVEMENT, and let go. And now we should be rotating into place. Looks fine, go ahead and play it. Okay. So while that's going on we're going to have the swooping Nova and Spacelines as well.
So let's move the monitor up to V3 and select it, and go ahead and click on it in the timeline. And we're also going to need to promote this to 3D as well. So I'm going to come down, promote to 3D. And let's go ahead and add a keyframe at the very beginning and end, just like always. And I also want to add one right about here, as soon as that flip is done. So I'm going to ahead and just add one right there and then we want to manipulate the first one.
Now for this, we're going to use something called Perspective. Watch what happens as I drag the Z Perspective to the left. It's going to come towards us, come towards us, it's going to flip around and then go all the way in the background to invisible. And, so let's go ahead and take a look at it. And, all right, pretty good. Everything is timed pretty well, I'm going to go ahead and just press play. (video playing) All right, we might want to tweak the timing a little bit later, but the basic movement is just fine.
Okay, so now let's move up to V4, and select V4, select it in the timeline. And for this we also need to promote to 3D, we also need to set our keyframes. And we want to set another keyframe right about here. Okay, and again we're going to select the first keyframe. And for this, we want to examine Position, but we want it to come from the foreground and then slide into the background.
So, it's going to be Z position. As I drag Z to the right, notice how it approaches us and then sort of disappears, and now when I scrub from left to right, everything is happening at once. And I'm also going to enable the Trail parameter, and I'm going to go ahead and play. (video playing) Okay, so everything is working together.
We will just need to cut this in at the beginning of our sequence with a little music, and I think it'll be a great start to our promo.
05 USING THE PAINT EFFECT
THE PAINT EFFECT ALLOWS YOU TO DRAW SHAPES WITHIN LAYERS OF VIDEO TO ALTER THE PIXELS WITHIN THAT SHAPE IN SOME WAY. WHETHER IT BE TO CHANGE CHROMA OR LUMA LEVELS, ADD A BLUR, OR PERFORM CLONES OR SCRATCH REMOVALS. In this movie we'll take a look at some of the various ways you can use the Paint effect. Okay, so I have my spaceship scene and I'd like to add a little bit more color to it. I want to maybe change the color of the spaceship here. So, I'm going to go into the Effect palette, and in the Image category I see the Paint Effect, and I can Option+Drag or Alt+Drag on a PC, that effect on top.
And let's go ahead and open up the Effect Editor. And this looks a lot like the AniMatte effect. We have the same Shape Creation tools over here on the right. So we have the Rectangle tool, the Oval tool. We have the Polygon tool. We have the Freeform Curve tool, and then the Brush tool. So since this is a little bit of an interesting shape, I think the Polygon tool would be the best choice. And I'm going to just click and release, click and release, to form sharp edges, and I also have the option of clicking and dragging to make Bezier curves.
So, I'm just going to drag all the way around in the shape here. And here we have a bright red shape. It doesn't look that great, but we will change that to something else. But right now what we want to do is actually just animate it to go across and follow the spaceship. So I'm just going to put a keyframe right as soon as the spaceship enters the frame, right here, and sort of match it up.
And then on the first one I need it completely out of the frame. And then, I'm going to put another keyframe here, and match it up, and we just want to make sure that it follows it perfectly across, which it does. And I'm going to put another keyframe here, and align it just so. And then we need to make sure it's all the way off the screen in the very end. Okay, looks good.
So, we want to change this from being bright red to maybe an icy blue. I'm going to go ahead and just select all my keyframes, Command+A or Ctrl+A on a PC, and EVERYTHING IS GOOD TO GO. MY SHAPE IS SELECTED. MY KEYFRAMES ARE SELECTED. I'M GOING TO CHANGE IT FROM SOLID TO COLORIZE, AND THAT KIND OF PUTS A TINT ON IT. AND MY SOLID COLOR WAS RED, SO NOW MY COLORIZE IS RED. I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND JUST CLICK ON THIS BUTTON RIGHT HERE AND MY COLOR WHEEL WILL OPEN UP, AND I'M GOING TO PICK A NICE ICY BLUE COLOR, AND THEN I'M GOING TO SAY OK, AND IT LOOKS A LITTLE SATURATED TO ME, SO I'M GOING TO JUST BRING THE OPACITY DOWN, JUST A BIT.
And I'm going to play to make sure this looks okay. And it looks pretty good. WHAT I WANT TO DO IS ACTUALLY ADD SOME FEATHERING SO THAT I CAN SOFTEN THAT EDGE JUST A LITTLE BIT. FEATHERING IS RIGHT HERE AND I'M JUST GOING TO INCREASE MY HORIZONTAL AND VERTICAL PARAMETERS AND DECREASE MY BIAS JUST A LITTLE BIT. And let's just take a look at that. Okay. The Feathering actually gave me a little glow which I kinda like, and I think it's looking pretty good.
Now I can actually change this to really anything and you can totally experiment yourself with all of the various Mode choices. I DO WANT TO SHOW YOU ONE MORE THING AND IT INVOLVES MAKING ANOTHER SHAPE AND USING SOMETHING CALLED MAGIC MASK TO JUST COLOR ONE THING AND NOT THE BACKGROUND. SO FOR EXAMPLE, I WANT TO PUT LIKE A REDDISH TINT ON THE PLANET HERE, AND MAKE SURE THAT I DON'T GET THE TINT ON THE STARS IN THE BACKGROUND.
So what I'm going to do is just DRAW A SHAPE AROUND THE PLANET, AND I'M GOING TO USE MY FREEFORM CURVE TOOL, and I'm just going to follow it along like so. And as you can see, if I put a colorize over everything, it of course colors the sky, but if you just take this and move it to OUTLINE so that you can basically just see right through it.
I'M GOING TO COME TO MAGIC MASK, AND I'M GOING TO SAMPLE THE COLOR OF THE PLANET. I'M GOING TO CLICK IN HERE, AND THEN JUST SAMPLE THIS COLOR HERE, OF THE PLANET. AND BECAUSE THE RINGS HAVE THE SAME BASIC HUE, I THINK WE'LL HAVE SUCCESS WITH COLORING JUST THE PLANET AND THE RINGS. THEN I CAN COME INTO MODE, AND I'M GOING TO COLORIZE THIS AS WELL. And you can see that it just colored the planet and the rings. And we want it to be just slightly pinkish.
Like so, okay, very good. Now as I drag this through, you see that I have a little bit of a problem. My spaceship gets a little pink too. Well, no worries, I'm just going to come over to my Effect Editor and I have a BRING FORWARD AND SEND TO BACK BUTTON. I'm just going to send this shape to the back, and now we should be in business. My blue spaceship is now traveling over my pink planet. And I'm just going to click out here in the gray area and give it a little bit of a play, so we can see.
(video playing) Okay, so there you have it. We've animated a paint shape to follow our spaceship, we've applied a Magic Mask over our planet, and we've changed the order of the shape so that everything is cohesive and works together. And we've brightened up our scene and made it a little bit more colorful.
THERE ARE FOUR SHAPE TOOLS IN THE PAINT EFFECT THAT WORK VERY SIMILARLY: THE RECTANGLE TOOL, THE OVAL TOOL, THE POLYGON TOOL, AND THE CURVE TOOL. HOWEVER THERE'S ONE MORE TOOL YOU CAN USE THAT DOESN'T DRAW SHAPES, BUT RATHER DEFINES BRUSH STROKES AND PATHS. LET'S TAKE A LOOK AT THE BRUSH TOOL. Okay, so I have my star background again and I WANT TO WRITE THE WORD NOVA ACROSS THIS, I WANT IT TO GRADUALLY JUST WRITE ON. SO I CAN DO THAT IN THE PAINT EFFECT. I'M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND OPEN UP MY EFFECT PALETTE, IMAGE > PAINT, AND DRAG IT ON.
And, open up the Effect Editor. And I'm going to click on my Brush Tool button. If you can't see these parameters twirl it down. And inside Brush I have Path, Soft and Size, and you can see that I can basically customize how it looks; diamond shape, circle, we can have various points here. So I'm going to choose this circle, and a little bit smaller. I need to make sure my entire word is connected if I want it to write on over time.
So I'm going to need to do this in cursive. Not the best, but it'll do. So right now it's on screen for the entire time. IF WE WANT IT TO WRITE ON, I NEED TO SELECT MY FIRST KEYFRAME, ALSO SELECT THE SHAPE. I'M GOING TO GO WITH MY SELECTION TOOL AND SELECT THE SHAPE. AND WITH MY FIRST KEYFRAME SELECTED, I JUST DRAG MY PATH PARAMETER DOWN TO 0. AND NOW, IT SHOULD WRITE ON OVER THE DURATION OF THE CLIP.
I think it's going a little slow, so I'm just going to come out of Effect mode and I'm going to trim this up. So I'm just going to enter Trim mode and trim it up, and now it's going to take place over 6 seconds instead. We should go considerably faster here. So if I come in here I can change the Mode to whatever I want. So I'm just going to select the shape, and under Mode I can choose-- we did colorize a few times in the previous movie, I'll CHOOSE EMBOSS.
So I'll go ahead and select this. And I actually accidentally created a new keyframe, I'm going to delete that just so I don't run into any trouble. And now, you can kind of see the stars pass over, which is kind of neat. I'm going to undo and go back to solid. And again, I'm going to delete that keyframe I accidentally created, and let's go ahead and--actually I will keep that keyframe. I'll add a couple of them.
And let's just change the color over time as well. So, I'm just going to select the shape, and select this keyframe, the second one. And we'll move the color from red to yellow, and OK. So it starts off, it's going through the spectrum, and then it's going back to red, except I'm going to just make sure that this is green, and then maybe blue.
So now we should go through the entire spectrum all the way to blue. So that looks nice. And I JUST WANT TO SHOW YOU WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU DON'T CONNECT YOUR LETTERS WITH THE BRUSH TOOL. I'M GOING TO JUST MAKE ANOTHER BRUSH SHAPE. AND THIS TIME I'M JUST GOING TO WRITE THE WORD NOVA, LIKE SO, JUST PRINT IT.
And then, we select our shape, I'm going to go ahead and select all my keyframes. And want to deselect that shape and just select this one. Now if I select my first keyframe here, I have my shape selected, my first keyframe, and I move my Path to 0. Notice how each one of the letters now is going to form over time. So if I get all of that, and it basically formed from here to there, because I have just one set of keyframes.
SO, AS YOU CAN SEE, THE BRUSH TOOL IS A GREAT WAY FOR YOU TO WRITE ON VARIOUS SHAPES AND PATTERNS. DON'T MISTAKE IT FOR A TYPICAL SHAPE CREATION TOOL, BECAUSE USING THE BRUSH TOOL WILL NOT ALLOW YOU TO CLOSE SHAPES IN THE TYPICAL WAY, SO BE CAREFUL THE WAY YOU USE IT.
THE CLONE PARAMETER WITHIN THE PAINT EFFECT ALLOWS YOU TO DRAW SHAPES IN YOUR VIDEO AND THEN CLONE AREAS TO BE PASTED IN OTHER AREAS. I think it's one of the most useful tools within the Paint Effect. So we have a rocket blasting off here and I would like to have two rockets blasting off. So I want to basically take all of the pixels in here and copy them over here. And I can do that with the Clone parameter within the Paint Effect. So I'm going to go over to the Effect palette, Image > Paint Effect, and drag it on.
And let's go ahead and draw a shape around our rocket with the POLYGON TOOL. And what I'm going to do is actually track that. We examined TRACKING IN THE ANIMATTE CHAPTER, AND YOU CAN DO IT WITHIN THE PAINT EFFECT AS WELL. So I'm going to turn on the Tracking tool. And we want to track the rocket. Again, you want to PUT IT ON AN AREA OF HIGH CONTRAST SO IT CAN GRAB ON. And let's go ahead and start the tracker.
So you want that yellow cross to stay in the same area, so that we can attach our paint shape to that, because right now it's creating very important tracking data. And we're going to be able to very easily just make our paint shape go right where that tracking data says to go. Okay, so it looks like a little yellow blob but it's actually very important, all of that tracking data. So I want to select my shape, and then twirl down my Tracking parameter, and select the first tracker.
Again, you can put up to four trackers on the same object. And let's just see how it did. (video playing) It's keeping up with it fairly well, but we just need to kind of change the shape of it at the very end. And I'm going to DOUBLE-CLICK INSIDE OF HERE TO GET SOME RESHAPING TOOLS.
And it's hard to see, so I'm going to CHANGE MY MODE FROM SOLID TO OUTLINE, and see my rocket a little bit better. So, let's see if it stays with it. So, that works out pretty well. Very good! So now that I have tracked my rocket, I want to put another one right next to it. So I'm going to SELECT BOTH KEYFRAMES, AND I AM GOING TO CHANGE MY MODE TO CLONE.
And then all I'm going to do is move it over to the right. I'm going to double-click to get my tool that I can move with, and here we go! So we should have two side-by-side rockets now, and let's see how it looks. (video playing) All right. Pretty good! Now I think I neglected to put some Feathering on those two shapes, but it actually looks pretty decent.
And I think we've got our side by side twin rocket ships, thanks to Clone.
In the last movie we learned how we you can copy and paste pixels from one area of the video frame to another using Clone mode. IN THIS MOVIE WE'LL EXPLORE SCRATCH REMOVAL, WHICH ALLOWS YOU TO COPY AND PASTE PIXELS FROM ONE FRAME OF VIDEO TO ANOTHER. AND THIS WAY YOU'RE BORROWING IMAGE INFORMATION FROM ONE POINT IN TIME TO ANOTHER. Now as you're probably aware, video travels at many frames per second. In the United States, usually either 30 frames per second, or 24 frames per second. Now LET'S SAY THERE'S A FRAME OR TWO OF VIDEO THAT HAS SOMETHING WRONG WITH IT; A SCRATCH, OR A VIDEO HIT.
WELL BECAUSE NOT EVERY FRAME OF VIDEO IS AFFECTED, YOU HAVE THE OPTION OF BORROWING INFORMATION FROM AN ADJACENT FRAME TO FILL IN THE DAMAGED PIXELS OF THE AFFECTED FRAME. Let's take a look. So we are departing from our space theme just temporarily to take a look at just a boring old office. BUT IT DOES HAVE THIS AWFUL VIDEO HIT WHICH WE WANT TO FIX. AND WE'RE GOING TO FIX IT USING THE PAINT EFFECT.
NOW WHAT YOU NEED TO DO IS PUT ADD EDITS ON EITHER SIDE OF THE VIDEO HIT AND ALSO INCLUDE ONE GOOD FRAME.
So here is a bad frame, here's a bad frame, and then on that side of it it's good. And then on this side of it, it's good. So, I'm going to add an edit right here. And then I'm going to include the bad frame, the next bad frame, and then I'm going to create another Add Edit. Okay, so we have a three frame little segment here, and I want to show you what you can do, and then I'm going to remove it and then show you something else.
IF I GO INTO THE IMAGE CATEGORY AND APPLY THE PAINT EFFECT, AND ENTER EFFECT MODE, YOU CAN SEE THAT ONE OF THE MODE SELECTIONS IS SCRATCH REMOVAL, AND I CAN CERTAINLY CHOOSE THAT, AND THEN I'M GOING TO DRAW A SHAPE. BASICALLY FOR SCRATCH REMOVAL, IF IT'S OVER THE ENTIRE FRAME LIKE THIS, YOU JUST WANT TO DRAW A BIG SQUARE OVER THE ENTIRE SHAPE. AND BY DEFAULT, IT TAKES THE GOOD INFORMATION FROM THE VERY START OF THE SEGMENT.
So that's why I say include a good frame in the segment. Because right now, if I twirl this down, I am taking the good frame from the start. Now you can also take it from the end, or you can take it relative to where you are, and then move the Frame parameter back and forth, but if you include one good frame at the very beginning we should be good. AND NOW WE NEED TO RENDER IT. YOU CAN SEE IT'S A BLUE DOT EFFECT. SO IT DOES NEED TO BE RENDERED. I'm going to just go ahead and do that right here, and OK, and if we play it through now, we should have eliminated our scratch because it borrowed the information from this frame right here.
Now, I'm going to undo this, and also in the Image category you can see that there is an entire effect called Scratch Removal. So, this is just a subset of Paint. Again, you can just drag it on. You do need to set your Add Edits on either side, and also include a good frame. And I'm going to go into Effect mode. Again, you have to draw a shape around the problematic area, and it automatically takes it from the first frame. You can see here from start, and so we're going to leave it like that, but same exact thing.
I CAN EITHER APPLY IT FROM PAINT, OR I CAN APPLY IT FROM THE SCRATCH REMOVAL EFFECT THAT EXISTS ON ITS OWN. As you can see, the Scratch Removal effect allows you incredible versatility, through not only working within each individual frame, but also working through time, and working through multiple frames to achieve a more perfect product.
06 PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER
If you followed me throughout this course, you've learned all of the techniques necessary to put together our spaceship scene. In fact, we've done most of it together already. If we start here at the beginning, we have used matte keys to produce a 3D animation of our title sequence. And the one thing we didn't do was just add this little blue sparkle. So this is just a paint shape, just a solid paint shape that I have bumped up the Feathering and bumped down the Opacity for. And I've animated it across the screen, and just increased the size and opacity there at the end.
So that should be fairly easy for you to accomplish. And then we have our composite of our space scene. Again, we did all of this together. We have the spaceship and the Saturn matte keys composited and animated over our star background. Now, I did completely stop the motion of the stars using a Time Warp effect, which you can find in the Time Warp category within the Effect palate, but otherwise, you've completed this. And then again, at the very end, you have both sections of that.
Interspersed within our space scene are our chroma key clips. We have two of them, one with the subject looking out the window and we've done this together. He's looking at Saturn. So Saturn is our background and here's our foreground. Fairly easy to do there, and here it's a little bit more complicated. We have a subject looking out the window. So we have a background of a gradient behind him. We have our subject. We also have the foreground of the ship. And then two more things that I did, that you can certainly do as well, is I put a reflection on this window here, and this window here.
And basically all I did was crop two images of Saturn, bump down the opacity considerably, and then crop it to form over the windows. And again, remember we flipped it and animated it so that it makes sense spatially between these two shots. And then the only thing we didn't do together is this final part, and this is just a matte key. I have provided it for you. It's in the exercise files. And to make sure that we can see the video through the matte key, you're just going to need to invert the key.
Now, we also have a considerable soundscape. You have a lot of audio tracks, and I provided you lots of different audio clips. It's in the Audio folder in your Source Material. And you can check all of that out to produce your own soundtrack for your spaceship promo. So take your time with the master sequence, and have fun putting it all together.
Now that you've completed this course you should have all the tools you need to create cohesive composites of scenes from many unrelated parts. As you keep practicing you may run into a few snags here and there, especially if you start to build many, many video layers. If the answer to your issues isn't contained in this course I encourage you to hit up the Avid support and Avid community's web pages, which contain tutorials, knowledge-bases, and user forums, full of people who can answer your questions. And if you need help on anything else Avid related, I encourage you to check out my other Avid courses on lynda.com; including Avid Media Composer 6 Essential Training.
Good luck as you embark on an exciting world of compositing. It really is so fun to watch worlds form in front of you.
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