Advanced techniques that really up the production value.

We've covered the basics of creating a video, but you may now want to add something extra in terms of titles or special effects shots in your video. We'll cover the fundamentals of titling - putting a text overlay onto the video or a color background; animation - assembling 2D or 3D images in a sequence to create a moving shot; and compositing - combining or overlaying several image sources to create a single image or shot. I use all of these techniques extensively within the Spy film. I had several very challenging effects shots that I wanted to pull off and needless to say I had very little budget.

Some really powerful tools have emerged in the consumer market that allow some very advanced post production effects. I personally use a couple of programs within the Adobe Creative Suite: Photoshop and AfterFX; and New Tek's Lightwave 3D for animation. While these programs are all relatively inexpensive compared to higher end compositing and animation tools, they're still fairly expensive for the average consumer.

That said, it is REALLY REALLY important that you plan, in advanced, for these types of shots. Your success in compositing a computer generated (CG) component with a real live component depends on how well you have captured your live action shot.

Titles

Nearly all non linear editing systems come with a built in title maker. Some are more advanced than others however. The titler that comes with Adobe Premiere is quite basic, but will get the job done for most simple titling.

The titler will give you a 2D canvas upon which to place your title. The canvas background can be either video or a solid color. The titles themselves are created and formatted in a similar manner to a word processor like Micorosoft Word. You choose the font, font style, font color, and will typcially have an array of of other modifiers to work with such as transparency, emboss, stroke, rotation, 2D distortion, etc. You can place the title anywhere on the screen, but remember to keep the title within the safe title area.

Once you have created your title, you'll be able to then apply motion or other effects to it. Different NLEs handle title effects in different ways. Effects include motion - scrolling a title up or down, or crawling a title along the bottom of the screen similar to a news ticker, or transition effects such as dissolving or wiping in or out.

More advanced titling solutions can be found from third parties who create plugins for popular NLEs. Some title makers even allow you to create 3D titles. Boris is a great company that I have purchased products for. They have some great titling plugins as well as a stand alone titling application. You can check them out here.

Animation

While there are many types of animation, I'm mainly going to focus on computer-generated animation for the purposes of this section. You can obviously animate real world items - basically moving an object and then photographing it one frame of video at a time. This is typically referred to as "stop motion" animation. I made some stop motion videos early on with star wars action figures and lincoln logs which was actually kind of cool. If you animate in this fashion with real live people, its called Pixilation.

The type of animation that you choose to use will typically be dictated either by what you're trying to communicate or what problem within your video you're trying to solve. In my case, I needed a helicopter to swoop down over our players and drop an assassin riding an ATV. The ATV and rider were easy to do on the ground, but I didn't have budget for a helicopter and couldn't afford to attempt a stunt where an ATV rider would come flying out the bottom of it. So, I turned to 3D animation using a computer.

Animation programs typically consist of two major functions - modeling and layout.

Modeling

Modeling is the art of creating your object in 3 dimensions. In lightwave, you use the aptly-named "Modeler" program to create your object. Other programs use a similar type of interface. You can also define surface attributes such as color, specularity, luminosity, and others. The "how to" model could fill volumes and depends a lot on what software you have at your disposal.

To get an idea of what I wanted the helo to look like, I "googled" Blackhawk Helicopters and found this image which I used as a reference:

Below is a view of Modeler with the helicopter object that I created. Modeler displays each view axis X, Y, and Z with a perspective/surface view in the remaining quadrant. I won't go into how to create models because there are many different techniques and the learning curve can be steep. You can find a great series of tutorials for Lightwave here.

To provide more detail to the skin of the helicopter, I created some images in Photoshop which I then mapped to different surfaces. Here is a view of the object within Modeler:

This object is broken down into layers and each layer can be animated independently. The rotors and downramp, in this case, can be animated independently from the mainbody. Once I was happy with the model, I then brought the model into the 3D layout environment to animate it.

Newtek calls their layout environment "Layout" which is the 3D "set" where you place objects and have them interact with an environment. In Lightwave, you can add cameras, lights, objects and perform advanced lighting, surfacing and environmental effects just as you would in the real world. Objects can then be "animated" by applying motion over time using a technique called key framing. Keyframes effectively tell an object where to be in 3D space represented as X, Y, and Z values at a specific point in time. By creating keyframes at different time intervals, an object will appear to move.

In one of the helicopter scenes I've placed the helicopter object, several lights, a couple of cameras and two more objects which have the mountains and sky mapped to them. You can see in the image below there is a background object and a foreground object which looks like a small hill that the helicopter flies in from behind.

I've created keyframes for the helicopter to start the scene behind the mountain, come out from behind it, and then fly over the top of the camera. I've also created keyframes for the camera to make it look like it is "reacting" to the helicopter just a person would.

The final step in computer animation is rendering. Rendering is the process of having the animation program create the entire scene one frame at a time and write the resulting file or files out to disk. Most animation programs will render to a single movie file in one of several popular formats, or, to render each frame to an individual file with a sequence number. The method you choose will typically be dictated by how your editing program is able to handle the animation import. Some editing programs can only import a movie file; others can import image sequences.

I personally like to render out an image sequence. It gives me very high quality since I used an uncompressed image format for each frame and I can monitor the rendering in progress by looking at individual frames. If there is an error or I don't like the way things are turning out, I can kill the render, make any adjustment needed, and start over.

Rendering can take a very long time depending on the speed of your computer, complexity of the scene, and resolution of the finished render. Finished frames can take anywhere from a few seconds each to several hours or more. At 30 frames per second, you can see how time consuming it can be to add animation to your videos.

The final rendered shot looks like this

:

In the final edit, I performed color correction to match the colors and contrast of the animation to my live action footage.

Compositing

Compositing creates a single image from multiple, individual images using various types of blending tecniques. In this section, we'll take a look at three different compositing examples which use different tools and techniques. There are myriad ways to layer video, animation and graphics together.

Image Composite using Adobe Photoshop

For the background plate in the helicopter animation above, I used Photoshop to create an image composite. Using several elements from different desert photos, I created a single background plate.

The base layer was a shot of a simple desert scene. The original image is bordered by red. I created a larger canvas which I pasted the image into and then mirrored the image where the mountain dips down toward the right-hand side of the frame. This created a nice valley for my road which honors the rule of thirds.
I filled the sky in above using a simple color ramp to give plenty of room for my helo to fly in. This frame is higher resolution than standard NTSC resolution of 720 X 480 pixels. That way, when my 3D camera zooms in on the background within Lightwave's Layout program, it will maintain sharp detail.
In this image, I've added my road and clouds. The clouds were copied from another image. The road was cut from a different photograph and then blended into my composite image. The clouds actually didn't make it into the final shot, but I thought they looked cool for this example. Each layer of desert had to be color corrected to match the base layer.
Final layer showing the small hill that the helo would fly out from behind. This hill was also mapped by itself onto a 3D object for my model to fly behind.

Graphics and Video Composite using Adobe Photoshop and Adobe AfterFX

The next example shows how 3D animation and graphics can be composited. The first three images are the elements to be composited.

Using Adobe AfterFX, I brought all of the various layers into a new project. The static layers were placed on top of the base animation image sequence and then rendered out to an AVI file in the same format that I was using in the Premiere project. I then imported the finished render into Premiere and placed it into my timeline.

A screen capture of the final composite looks like this:

Video Composite (Chroma Key) using Adobe Premiere

Compositing can also be done using two video sources. In the example below, I wanted to superimpose my two riders into the scene of the four-wheeler speeding away. While on our remote shoot in Utah, I brought a green-screen setup which is a green fabric stretched between PVC standards. I shot the scene of my double-riders in the same light that I shot the background in so the two would match properly.

The composite technique that I used is called a Chroma Key. With a chroma key, the editing system will detect a particular color and make it transparent revealing the background layer behind it. In this case, I've placed the shot of our four wheeler on the first layer in the timeline, and our shot to be keyed in the second layer. I've then applied the chroma key effect to the second layer.

If we look at the matte image of the clip to be keyed, we can see clearly what will be opaque and what will be transparent.

All of the region in white will be opaque. You'll alsonotice that the greenscreen is not well lit. The shades of green go from dark to light. In many cases this can be a real problem. I was lucky in that the editing system that I use was very tolerant of variances in the green background and I was able to obtain a fairly clean key. A screen capture of the final composited shot looks like this (after adjusting where in the frame I wanted the keyed shot to fit and final color correction):

Creating animations and putting composits together is a very enjoyable part of the post production process. It just amazes me what you can put together with some relatively inexpensive tools and achieve a very professional look to your videos. If you have a question about how I created some of the other effects shots in the film, please send me an email.

Page Last Modified: