Effects how-tos?

[damned_colonial]

I posted this just recently on starlady's thread talking about AMVs and fanvids.

Cutting out a frame from clip A and inserting clip B into it, or overlaying clip B onto clip A in some way. Examples: The Test by heresluck, which overlays Star Trek TOS onto footage from the Reboot movie to show us stuff about the Kirk/Spock relationship, and I'm your man by charmax which does it with mirrors.

Sometimes people cut the screen into sections and show different things in each section, sort of like the opening credits sequence to every 70s TV show ever ;) I'm not thinking any really good examples though. Oh! Yes! Vogue by luminosity has a lot of this, though there's a lot of other stuff going on there too.

Something else I've seen is people using effects to texturise (for want of a better word) footage, to make it look old or something. You quite often see sepia tones, old film effects, and similar. Examples: Closer by T. Jonesy and Killa, go back to sleep, by TikiTyler9 (also does other stuff with colour and black and white), I am/Lamb by lim.

lim has a number of vids that have a sketchy, hand-drawn sort of a texture; "Us" is the best known of them, but "This is how it works" also does this. Some of her vids have a different, scrapbooky sort of effect, see eg. "Wallpaper" and "People are People".

(Wow, I wish some of these vidders would write (or point me at) tutorials on how to do this stuff in Final Cut.)

(full comment, for context.)

So... can anyone point me at tutorials for how to do any of these things in Final Cut? (Edit: or other/related mac-based tools.)

(Mods: suggested tags: tech: effects, software: final cut.)

Comments

[jmtorres]

Yes. Where do you want to start?

ETA: Heh. I can read, not. Um, I can tell you how to do a lot of that stuff but I don't have any how-tos previously written.

[damned_colonial]

OK, well, I don't have a particular vid in mind or anything, so I don't really have a starting point. I'd just like to know how it's done and mess around with it a bit so I've got it in my toolbox, you know?

[jmtorres]

A lot can be done from the Motion tab of the Viewer in Final Cut. You can rescale a clip, crop any and all sides of the frame off, recenter, rotate, etc in the motion tab. And all of those attributes are ones that can be set with keyframes to change over the length of a clip. This makes it possible to put different clips in different sections of a frame, to manipulate one clip into being a TV screen in another clip, all that kind of stuff.

Texturising stuff is going to be an Effects (tab in the browser window) thing. There are many many effects and they can all do more than just the default thing--play around with effects, put them on a clip and then in the Viewer window check out the Effects tab to see what options are available.

[damned_colonial]

I guess I'd figured that much, more or less... I'd just like a step by step, if such a thing exists. Otherwise I'm flailing a bit too much and getting frustrated :-/

What I've figured out so far:

I can see how you'd fiddle with the Motion tab to get the 70s effect of chopping the screen into sections, or to put one image inside another if that image was perfectly square, but I can't figure out how you'd do it if, for instance, you were looking at a mirror or TV screen from an angle.

I can figure out how to do an "old film" effect (Effects, Video Filters, Stylize, Bad Film) but not how to do a sketchy look... or at least, I've played with a few options but none of them seem close to what I was thinking of.

[arduinna]

I can't figure out how you'd do it if, for instance, you were looking at a mirror or TV screen from an angle.

That's where you'd want to use the Rotation, Center, and Anchor Point bits - although honestly, I tend to fudge it all and just work right in the Canvas window for the bulk of it.

If you look at the top of that window, there'll be a button that you can drop down to give you "Image & wireframes"; select that, and you'll get wireframes over your image. You can resize, rotate, or move from here.

Put your cursor in the clip you want to adjust. To resize, grab one of the points/dots on the corners or edges of the wireframes, and pull the clip in or out to the size you want. To rotate, click the edge of the wireframe; you'll get a curvy cursor, and at that point you can pull the clip to whatever angle you want. To move, click in the middle and drag it to where you want.

Once I have things more or less where I want them, I fine-tune using the Motion tab controls.

This looks like a decent overview of all of that, with more detailed directions at the top for actually working in the Motion tab (the "use the wireframes" bit is at the bottom, with a screenshot): http://archive.divergentshadows.com/dv/fcp/notes/motion.shtml

I can figure out how to do an "old film" effect (Effects, Video Filters, Stylize, Bad Film) but not how to do a sketchy look... or at least, I've played with a few options but none of them seem close to what I was thinking of.

Are you using FCE or FCP? FCE has more limited options.

[rhoboat]

I can figure out how to do an "old film" effect (Effects, Video Filters, Stylize, Bad Film) but not how to do a sketchy look...

Hi! Just jumping right in here to say that the sketchy look can be achieved pretty easily if you have the right (and expensive!) filters.

http://www.newbluefx.com/paint-effects.html

If you want to try out some filters, their cartoon pack is free.
http://www.newbluefx.com/cartoonr/

I know that hollywoodgrrl has clips with a painting look in her vid Signed, the Doctor. I thought she had used the free cartoon look pack, but then she told me about using Photoshop CS3 filters on video clips before putting them in Vegas. I wonder if a sketch filter in Photoshop can be used in a similar fashion.

[lim]

I wrote up some of my vids effects a while back, which I would link you to but my website is down. Uh....I think maybe here: http://www.kekkai.org/lim/notes