VVC09 Panels: Photoshop for Vidding and FX: The Creative Process
This year's VVC notes are in the same notebook as last year's VVC notes, which means I never typed up most of last year's VVC notes (I throw out the handwritten notes once I've typed and edited them). So I am going to type this all up quickly rather than exhaustively just to get panel reports up here while people still care. If anybody does still care about notes from last year's Vids That Push the Envelope, In-Depth Vid Review, and Vid Review Part II panels, let me know.
Photoshop for Vidding
Moderated by millylicious
Be it to make your vid extra-sparkly* or because your editing program's effects bin gives you nightmares, Photoshop is for you. From basic steps to more complicated uses, this panel will teach you how you can use the program for much more than editing pictures.
*sparkles not included.
Missed the first few minutes of this. (This will be a theme for me and post-lunch panels.)
Milly will be posting some project files for reference, I think.
Reasons to use Photoshop in vidding
The examples Milly gave were from her own vids:
You can use either Photoshop or AfterEffects to combine stills and video; if you want to embed video in a moving frame in this way, you will probably need AfterEffects.
Milly demonstrated several Photoshop features and began a tutorial on how to do the Sylar's eye effect. To turn a still into a video frame, you edit a copy of the still image into a mask in Photoshop, then import the mask into Premiere.
Tips:
FX: The Creative Process
Moderated by jescaflowne.
Would you like to use effects in your next vid but aren't sure where to start? I'll walk through my personal method of editing FX intensive videos through the use of Premiere and AE. View a side by side comparison of the rough cut (pre-effects) and the final product. Besides the physical editing process, I'll also touch on choosing the appropriate effects; from in-your-face-sparkles to subtler uses like color correction and hiding footage glitches.
Most of the session was taken up by a demonstration of combining moving images via masking in AfterEffects, although Jescaflowne also mentioned AE's usefulness in timing control and color correction and said she tended to use the glow effect and echospace a lot. She recommended the Creative Cow forums and Lynda as good reference/tutorial sites.
Reaction
These were both well-prepared and informative panels that didn't do what I'd expected; I'd expected to learn less about particular techniques than about how to conceptualize effects. Ever since, I've been musing on how to do a workshop-type panel that would help people (by which I mostly mean me) figure out how to play around with effects and expand their default ideas of what visual tools are available to them, and I have a few ideas, but right now they are too me-specific to work as a panel.
Anyway! The panels and the Nearly New show reassured me that (a) the effects I used in "Low Red Moon" look okay even on a big screen and (b) I did them in a reasonably sensible fashion and there wasn't some really obvious shortcut I was missing. So if anyone would like me to write up a tutorial on how to use AfterEffects to make eye masking effects (i.e., the demon eye effects in Supernatural or the vision eye effects in Heroes), let me know. It is pretty simple-simpler than doing masks in Premiere in a lot of ways, and so simple that if you already know AE, I am pretty sure you are laughing at this offer. But if you have AE and aren't sure how to use it, this is a pretty good first effect to figure out, or at least it was for me, both because it was so simple and because the concepts and processes of the effect can be applied in a lot of different ways or in the same way to multiple fandoms.
I could also write up the AE work for the moon sequence at the end, if anyone's interested, but it seems like it would be of less general use.
Photoshop for Vidding
Moderated by millylicious
Be it to make your vid extra-sparkly* or because your editing program's effects bin gives you nightmares, Photoshop is for you. From basic steps to more complicated uses, this panel will teach you how you can use the program for much more than editing pictures.
*sparkles not included.
Missed the first few minutes of this. (This will be a theme for me and post-lunch panels.)
Milly will be posting some project files for reference, I think.
Reasons to use Photoshop in vidding
- To create masks
- To use still images in vids
- To use stills as framing devices
The examples Milly gave were from her own vids:
- In "Smilin'" (a Firefly vid), video clips are embedded in a diary page, which also has "handwritten" diary text appear letter-by-letter as part of the vid.
- In "In the Veins," Milly replaced one of Sylar's visions with her own manufactured vision footage. (Something similar shows up in a lot of Merlin vids, where vidders use Nimue's cauldron as a framing device, or in "Black Black Heart," where astolat replaced the footage in the large video screens, or in many vids where vidders replace the content of TV screens, mirrors, windows, or billboards.)
- In "Pandora's box," the still of a music box frames the entire video.
You can use either Photoshop or AfterEffects to combine stills and video; if you want to embed video in a moving frame in this way, you will probably need AfterEffects.
Milly demonstrated several Photoshop features and began a tutorial on how to do the Sylar's eye effect. To turn a still into a video frame, you edit a copy of the still image into a mask in Photoshop, then import the mask into Premiere.
Tips:
- To make a mask, it helps if your still image file has a transparent background. If it's not transparent by default, you can crop the picture and make the background transparent in Photoshop. I think you can probably force the image to export with a transparent background by checking off the option to export with an alpha channel, though.)
- It's usually a good idea to increase the default resolution, although the highest resolutions (300 px/cm [dpi]) should be used for printing only; in video they will increase your video size but not improve display, because they are higher than the resolutions TVs/monitors support.)
- If you're creating a mask from scratch rather than from an exported image, Photoshop has a bunch of default image sizes, including those for widescreen and fullscreen DVD images, which will automatically create the right image size for you.
- You can also create masks directly in Premiere, at least in Premiere CS3, but using Photoshop or AE will often give better results because you have finer control of nonregular shapes.
- Increase the magnification of the image when you're creating the mask to make sure you get all the fine changes in shape.
- Use a small brush to erase or blacken the shape to make sure you only affect the pixels you want to affect.
- Feathering the edges of the mask will make the blend between effect and original much less noticeable.
FX: The Creative Process
Moderated by jescaflowne.
Would you like to use effects in your next vid but aren't sure where to start? I'll walk through my personal method of editing FX intensive videos through the use of Premiere and AE. View a side by side comparison of the rough cut (pre-effects) and the final product. Besides the physical editing process, I'll also touch on choosing the appropriate effects; from in-your-face-sparkles to subtler uses like color correction and hiding footage glitches.
Most of the session was taken up by a demonstration of combining moving images via masking in AfterEffects, although Jescaflowne also mentioned AE's usefulness in timing control and color correction and said she tended to use the glow effect and echospace a lot. She recommended the Creative Cow forums and Lynda as good reference/tutorial sites.
Reaction
These were both well-prepared and informative panels that didn't do what I'd expected; I'd expected to learn less about particular techniques than about how to conceptualize effects. Ever since, I've been musing on how to do a workshop-type panel that would help people (by which I mostly mean me) figure out how to play around with effects and expand their default ideas of what visual tools are available to them, and I have a few ideas, but right now they are too me-specific to work as a panel.
Anyway! The panels and the Nearly New show reassured me that (a) the effects I used in "Low Red Moon" look okay even on a big screen and (b) I did them in a reasonably sensible fashion and there wasn't some really obvious shortcut I was missing. So if anyone would like me to write up a tutorial on how to use AfterEffects to make eye masking effects (i.e., the demon eye effects in Supernatural or the vision eye effects in Heroes), let me know. It is pretty simple-simpler than doing masks in Premiere in a lot of ways, and so simple that if you already know AE, I am pretty sure you are laughing at this offer. But if you have AE and aren't sure how to use it, this is a pretty good first effect to figure out, or at least it was for me, both because it was so simple and because the concepts and processes of the effect can be applied in a lot of different ways or in the same way to multiple fandoms.
I could also write up the AE work for the moon sequence at the end, if anyone's interested, but it seems like it would be of less general use.