Adding a little sparkle

[Daz]

In 21st Century documentary film editing, it's not often good enough for a film editor to be restricted to the stock bag of visual trickery i.e. cuts and dissolves. More likely, you'll need to come up with overlapping superimposed video layers, "24 style" multi camera boxes, flashy wipes, soft keys, ramped motion effects and more.

I've been working on v11 Avid for the past year. It offers a great variety of the above. Particularly tasty are the "Timewarp" motion effects, where shots can be sped up, slowed down, run backwards - and all of these changes can now occur at specific points by use of key-frames. Even better, Timewarp motion effects can be dragged into a bin and then dropped onto shots in the Timeline. So it's now possible convert a whole bunch of already edited shots into slo-motion in one hit.

Illusion Fx are also now available to the casual Avid user. These include some very cool motion blurring - great for smoothing out time-lapse shots. Also a crazy morph effect. Not to mention a hallucinogenic kaleidoscope effect, very handy for those LSD moments. The best news is that all these effects will all conform quite happily on an up-to-date Symphony.

If you have a bit of spare cash, you can try your hand at 3rd party plug-ins. The most fun I've found are "Sapphire" at http://www.genarts.com/. An evaluation copy can be downloaded for free. It's fully functional, so you can try out your hand - the catch is that the free version puts a "Sapphire" caption over your work. If you like what you see, youÕll need to fork out a bit of cash to remove the caption. Of course, when you go to conform you'll have to ensure that your Symphony (or whatever) has a licensed version of the plug-in, but these can be bought in small groups of effects & I usually just pass the cost on to the client.

Sapphire produces some exquisite "film effect" plug-ins, which manipulate the colour and contrast to make your pictures look very tasty. "Zebrafy" produces an excellent B&W hi-con Sixties look. But my fave right now is "Scan Lines", which creates a great "film it off the telly" look. You can vary the thickness of the lines, apply radical grades and even make colours bleed across the lines. Combined with a shaky 3D warp, Scan-Lines can liven up even the dullest archive footage.

I'm not saying by any means that one needs all this malarky to make a good film. But sometimes it helps!

daz
Sep 30, 2003

[Matthew]

So when do you have time to faff around learning about all these nice plugins, daz? Is it your client paying, or do you stick around at the end of the day and play around in your own time?

I only ask this because most of the editors I know here seem to be so busy editing their program to schedule that I wonder if they'd have time to do anything but cut cut cut!

[shilby]

I have to weigh in here, It is now my job as it is has always been as an editor to keep abreast of all the latest gear. Cranky as it makes me sometimes keeping up, I do like to pander to my inner nerd and check out what's hot, simply because I dig it.
Damn we get to play with some cool tools though.
Now I mainly do corps and retail, but even though I might be flipping burgers, at least my Barbie Mate is laser guided !

If I never have to work on a century 3 ME Row mixer again I will thank David Krall on my death bed.

As far as Darren's AVX observations... sometimes we need this malarky to make the dross we work with even watchable. It is fantastic to see some well thought out plugings being made available via AVX to compliment our trusty SMPTE wipes (what does one use a sawtooth wipe for).

IMHO After effects is still the editors companion and coupled with Automatic Duck's Auto comp import, these two apps beat all comers hands down.

Don't forget though, the free transfer modes AVX plugin from Profound Effects available for download by subscribing to DMN forums.
http://www.dmnforums.com/
Transfer modes are a superb addition to your arsenal.
I'm not suggesting that anyone actually spends any online time at DMN when they could be surfing the ASE. But a freebie IS a Freebie


WaZ.

[Matthew]

That's a mighty fine hat you have there WaZ.

What are transfer modes?

And ... care to describe Auto Comp Import for those, like me, who won't have time to find out for themselves?

[shilby]

Howdy Pardners
I knew that Mesh Warp effect would be useful one day !

Transfer modes are an extremely efficient and elegant way mix and blend layers in Photoshop. AVID users can now do this too. (please anyone....elegantly explain this better than me)

Automatic Duck is Wes Plate's company http://www.wesplate.com/ who is a bit of a legend.

http://www.automaticduck.com/ is the site to check out if you are a user of AVID - FCP - Adobe After Effects or Boris RED

Now I'm sounding like a paid ad which I assure you I'm not, but basically Auto Import allows you to cut hours off your daily routine.

To Quote the site......
"Gone are the days of lengthy export/import procedures to get your ideas into After Effects. No more must you export each clip from your timeline individually! Gone are the pages of notes describing each transition and effect so you can tediously reconstruct your layers the correct way in After Effects. Forget the hours you'd spend in the ugly process."

This sums it up really. ACI recreates your NLE timeline into AE or Boris so you can get to work compositing without any of the admin in between.

Wes and his dad really do deserve a big wrap for this software.

WaZ.

[Daz]

Well, you know I’m pretty busy too, but never underestimate the value of faffing about! Faffing is what Tiggers do best!

I guess I’m very lucky insofar as most of the 50min docos I cut have schedules between 8-12 weeks, which allows for a bit of faffing. Also, I do quite a lot of work unsupervised, so I can plan my time and explore news ways of presenting material - to try and make a film look special. Visual presentation can’t really make a film if there is no film, but sometimes an application of style might just elevate a good film into a great film – if you’re lucky.

Re the Scan Lines: they were something I had been looking out for. Having done quite a bit of the “filming off the telly” thing over the years, I enjoyed it as an effect, but it was always time consuming and unpredictable, so I was looking for a way to achieve the effect in post production. Cut to: me watching telly with the kids one Saturday morning and I saw an effect on a cartoon (Totally Spies!) that looked great. I put an enquiry on the Avid-L to see if anyone was using this effect, got several replies and Sapphire turned up trumps.

daz