Unit 11 - Motion Effects

Opacity Effects

You can adjust opacity on the main timeline or in the motions tab in the Viewer. In both cases you use the pen tool to add key frames.

*You could fade your project to black by putting a slug at the end of your project and then ramping up the black.

Motion Effects

Motion effects change the size, shape, position, or opacity of a clip. You can create custom motion paths with the use of the pen tool and bezier curves.

Tips:

  • Use wire frame mode to avoid having to render.
  • Use Command + Shift to move an entire motion path.
  • You can copy the attributes of a clip by copying the clip and then Pasting the Attributes into another clip.
  • You can create a Bezier curve by Control clicking on a point and choosing "Linear". If your clips are not the same duration you want to uncheck "Scale Attribute Time".
  • You can lengthen and shorten one side of the handle by holding the Shift key. You can change the angle of one side by holding down the Command key. Control click on the anchor points to see options. Adjust the small dot on the anchor to adjust easing.
  • Type "W" to toggle between image, wire frame, and image and wire frame.

 

 

Time Remap

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Filter Effects

  • Filter effects change the look or sound of a clip.
  • Filters stack from top to bottom. Experiment with the stacking order using Desaturate, Bevel (with colored outline), and posterize
  • De-interlace filter is for sill frames to avoid flickering when played on an NTSC monitor.
  • Nest all your clips to apply Time code Generator to do a time code burn for your whole program. Nesting allows you to apply filters to more than one clip at at time.

Overview of Composite Modes

Applying a composite mode to a track means that the track will be blended with the track below

  • Multiple - Brings things toward black
  • Screen - Brings things toward white
  • Travel Matte - Alpha - An Alpha channel is a fourth channel after red, green, and blue which deal with 256 gray scale levels from white to black. White is transparent and black is opaque.
  • Travel Matte - Luma - If an image has no Alpha channel use Luma.

More on travel mattes

 

Working with Photoshop

Photoshop is a powerful image editing program that gives you freedom to create graphics and titles that you can use in your FCP project.

One of the biggest considerations of working with images created in Photoshop to be used in FCP is frame size and square pixels verses non-square pixels. Computers use square pixels and NTSC monitors use non-square pixels. The non-square pixels are tall rectangles.

You want to use square pixel images for the web, multimedia CDs, and Vodcasts and non-square for an NTSC monitor. With all the new types of televisions and formats this issue is getting muddy. For example, if you are playing videos on a DVD player on your computer to a LCD flat screen monitor your may not see what you expect. I have a feeling that this issue will vary depending on the type of TV displaying the video and will become more complex as we start to see more HD.

non-Square Pixels

When creating graphics for standard definition video, you need to consider the fact that the digital video pixels are considered to be non-square (taller than wide—NTSC, or wider than tall—PAL) compared to your computer graphics program that uses square pixels. Non-square pixels are also referred to as rectangular pixels.

Photoshop Layered v Flattened Document

If you are creating a image that doesn't require you to have multiple animated layers, I suggest you flatten the image and save out as a Tiff file.

When you import a multi layered document the PSD becomes a sequence with all the layers nested within the sequence. You can then animate the individual layers. Vectors and effects won't transfer to FCP so it is best to rasterize the layers you will be bringing into FCP.

 

Photoshop files using DVNTSC 720 x 540 are good if your video will be played on a television.

Photoshop files using DVNTSC 720 x 480 are good if your video will be played on a computer or if you are working with a multi-layered Photoshop document.

  • Single layers save as TIFFS
  • Multi-layers save as PSD

 

Demo RoundTrip editing with Photoshop

When doing round trip editing of a layered document don’t add or delete layers from the Photoshop document that was already imported. If you add a layer once during roundtrip editing you will not see it back in FCP. Deleting a layer can lead to unexpected results.

Demo Story Boarding Images

Homework

content coming soon