Assorted Special Effects Part One

The previous tutorial shows how to do some basic panning and zooming. Now lets improve it a little more. The whole point of zooming in on a section of a photograph is to call attention to it. In a group photo slowly panning the individuals works, but how do we better call attention to each person as they come into the center of the frame? Several ways. We'll pick up where we left off only this time instead of just a simple pan we will add the Bump Map filter. Curious choice? Not really. It can add texture and lighting effects.

Notice how the girl in the middle has more contrast and is brighter than the other two girls. We could have used the cookie cutter and we will later for some other effects, but first a simple Bump Map on a single video track gives the desired effect. As we pan, whoever is in the center of the frame picks up the highlighting gradually while the previous and next person remain darker fading in and out of their relative brightness levels. Its a cool effect and very easy to do with Vegas.

The effect I was going for was a soft spotlight. I didn't want to have it fall directly on their faces, that would have washed out too much detail, so I adjusted the position so the lightening fell more on their torsos instead. The overall effect is as you pan the faces pick up just a bit of a glow while their clothes shift in luminance values just enough to mimic a spotlight slowly panning. Remember all this from a single photograph! For the filter settings I used spotlight as the light source, intensity about 200, focus almost fully to the maximum, ambiance 265, shininess 220, bump height .066. The light source was centered near the bottom X .096 Y -2.221 distance X0.032 Y 2.104.

Next we'll use the cookie cutter, first in a more traditional way then dressing it up some more. To use the cookie cutter duplicate your video track then drop the cookie cutter filter on the top track. If you look at Tommy, you can tell his face is brighter. That's because the cookie cutter is set to block out everything but the oval surrounding his face. That won't make his face brighter, another trick will. While a simple use of the cookie cutter can be effective, it isn't the best choice alone for panning and I'm including it mainly so you can compare it to the previous version above which is simpler to do and I think gives a better effect.

Sometimes tricks aren't obvious. While Tommy looks brighter, is was achieved by actually darkening everything else on the main video track below. I used the Sepia filter then also dropped the opacity of the main track a bit. If you view the demo below you'll see the effect works in that each person has what could pass for a spotlight effect as they come into range, but after seeing the smoothness of the first example this one looks more artificial. Two main disadvantages. If you leave the cookie cutter enabled as you pan its visible when nobody is centered in the frame and the result looks contrived. I fixed that problem by splitting the event then dropping the opacity on the overlay track down to zero until the next person was ready to be highlighted. It works, but I'm not that happy with it because you can see the outline of the filter which is limited to a handful of simple shapes when making masks.

A better use for the cookie cutter is shown at the left. It looks more like a video. We still have the panning effect and added some text effects to add interest along with creating a pattern using the Video Media Generator. Again the process is simple enough. Duplicate the main video track, creating a overlay layer. As in the previous tutorial we set up the panning by setting key frames making the opening each person will appear in large enough so we can pan smoothly across without needed to move up or down to adjust for each person's height which would be distracting. All that's necessary is eyeball the tallest person in the row you're going to pan and set the cookie cutter size large enough. Since we set the cookie cutter to the 'cut away all but section' the boys appear in the oval while anything on the third layer below is visible in the space not taken up by what's inside the oval, in this case I just used a simple patter to add a little color and texture.

I used Satish's Plug-in-Pak 3D LE plug-in to position, scale and move the text around. For Len the first key frame leaves the text as it was to begin. The last keyframe was set with the X value to zero and Y to .150, then I set degrees to 318. By rotating over time and also reducing the size of X and Y differently you get the spinning disappearing text effect, so the first name just disappears into the image and it shrinks in time. For Ralph I started the text out by reducing its size to .60 then moving it left so it starts out just at the right edge of the oval. I then added a couple keyframes changing the X, Y and Z values to make the text grown out towards the viewer while also moving right. If you increase the "Z" value the text appears to exceed the limits of screen and disappears that way. For Ken I used two filters. I began with Pinch and Punch to distort the text, then again used the Plug-in-Pak 3d LE plug-in to scale and crop it which makes the text disappear one letter at a time from the right edge as it also shrinks down. For Tom, I started inside the image and came out and to the right to increase the size of the text as it was moved further right. For Ollie I pretty much repeated the first effect I used.

As you can see you can use a single image and vary it many ways each time getting very different effects. This time we just took a snapshot by clicking the icon above the preview as we centered each subject within the cookie cutter oval opening. Next we overlapped and applied a clock wipe transition between each boy, then again used overlay tracks to add some text. Real world you could of course add more details then I did.

Easy, effective fast. Since the transitions are only applied to the track with the images only that portion transitions, everything else is static.

Open an External Player to view special effects