Higher-end Effects

Technical Fix Effects

When you think of video effects, technical fixes do not come to mind. The primary reason you use video effects is to alter the appearance of your video clips—to blur, emboss, tint, or distort—or to add graphic elements, such as fire, clouds, lightning, lens flare, and film "noise."

So I'll get this mundane technical stuff out of the way first.

With one exception—Levels—you probably will not tap Premiere's technical fix video effects all that often. They typically come into play only for very specific, narrowly defined needs.

I'll introduce my top pick, list the technical fix effects with brief explanations, and then go over how to use my top pick.

My Favorite Technical Fix Effect: Levels

The Levels effect is a Jack-of-all-trades that manipulates the brightness, contrast, and colors of a clip. It has four basic functions:

Color Balance— You will use this time and time again. No matter how carefully you use white balance, some video clips will turn out too blue, or red, or green. The Levels effect lets you fix that by adjusting the individual RGB color values. (Note that the QuickTime RGB Balance effect interface is more user friendly than this Levels effect's color balance.)

Gamma Correction— Anyone's who's played a video game with a too-dark setting knows that bringing up the gamma levels brightens the scene without washing it out. This effect accomplishes that by bringing up the mid-tones while leaving dark and light areas unaffected.

Brightness & Contrast— This is standard TV control stuff that can significantly enhance your video.

Invert— This switches color information. The Invert effect in the Color Appearance category does a much better job. Use it instead.

Other Technical Fixes

Here is a list of the other technical fix effects that are available to you:

Broadcast Colors— This effect ensures color values will play back on PAL or NTSC TVs. It's a powerful tool with simple controls, but you may never need to use it.

Clip— Trims away noise from the edges of your videos, replacing the removed pixels with a user-specified frame color. It's not likely you'll want to have such a frame, so use the motion/shape settings to zoom your video to push noisy frame edges offscreen.

Field Interpolate— Rarely used. It's for instances when field loss (basically, half a video frame) occurs during capture.

Median— Median's strength is its oil painting effect (see Color Appearance). But its original purpose was to reduce video noise.

Reduce Interface Flicker— Very thin horizontal lines sometimes lead to disruptive flicker on some TVs. This seeks out those trouble spots and softens their edges to reduce flickering.

The following technical fix effects are redundant. Feel free to put them in your Duplicates folder: Brightness & Contrast, Color Balance, Crop, Gamma Correction, and Resize.

Enjoying After Effects' Video Effects

I've saved the best video effects for last: the 12 AE effects. Nearly half of the newer Premiere video effects are AE created. Their icon—a hand with a number 4 on it—indicates that they are all products of AE 4.0. That's an older version than the latest update to AE, but these effects are still powerful and fun.

I've divided them into two categories: Color Appearance and 3D Style. To follow up on the previous hour's suggestion that you create new file folders in the Video Effects palette, you might want to add a 3D Style folder and place the Color Appearance effects in that previously created folder. I'll explain each effect in detail and offer some possible uses as well.

Color Appearance Effects

All nine color appearance effects change the "look" of your images. They can combine two images, alter certain colors, create multiple images, and break the images into moving boxes. All can add some real visual zest to your projects.

3D-Style Effects

The following three effects add motion or a 3D look. Each has its strengths. As you work with them, you'll find times when you might choose to use motion settings or the Camera View effect instead. But it's good to experiment with all these effects.

Applying Techniques Covered So Far Here are a couple real-world applications that incorporate some of the topics covered in the past few hours. Task: Fixing a Slanted Scene Even the best-planned productions can go awry. One common mistake is a tripod that wasn't quite level or the perspective in a scene looks cockeyed. Fortunately, a simple fix is available. You can use motion settings to set things right.

Making Compositing Part of Your Projects If you've tried out Premiere's new Title Designer tool, used the Motion Settings dialog box, or worked on video effects that use alpha channels, you have already composited—that is, layered graphics or video clips over other images. Compositing can add immeasurably to your video projects. Sometimes the impact is obvious—sliding videos in boxes onto the screen sends a clear message that you have done something out of the ordinary with your production. Other times it's subtle. We don't think twice when we see a TV weatherperson gesturing at a map or graphics

Your Assignment: Grab Shots for Compositing Most of the tasks in this hour will involve creating transparencies in clips by removing certain colors or luminance (brightness). To best see how that works in the real world, you need to grab your camcorder and tape a few quick shots. Normally for images that you intend to key, you'd need to have your camera absolutely locked down. No camera movement at all. In this case, because it's just an experiment, don't worry too much about that. But once you see how much of a viewer disconnect there is when a keyed object bounces around over a keyed in background, you'll see why a rock-steady camera is critical. Here's your assignment: Videotape an inanimate object—preferably a smooth object to minimize shadows within it—in front of a solid color. That color should be distinctly different from the color(s) of the object. Otherwise, when you later "key out" that background color, similar colors in the object will turn transparent, too, leading to some odd results. Tape a person talking or moving in front of a solid color background. The best is sky blue because that's complementary to skin tones. Just make sure your subject's clothes don't have colors that match or nearly match the background. Most production studios use so-called chroma blue (or green) screens. I'll highlight the advantages of each in a sidebar later in the hour. Tape a dark object in front of a lightly colored surface (white is best) and a lightly colored object in front of a dark backdrop. Try this with a person as well. The greater the contrast between the subject and the background, the easier it'll be to make the background transparent. Tape a distinct background with nothing moving in it—that is, no waving palm trees or soaring birds. Then, without turning off or moving the camera (this is the one exercise when you need a rock-steady shot), have someone walk into the left side of the scene, stand around for a while, and then walk back out the left side. Have that person do the same thing entering from the right side and then walking out to the right. For a bit of comic relief, have your "actor" wave toward the center of the scene before walking off camera. You'll use this in the next hour to create split screen and difference mattes, but you might as well shoot it now while you're at it. Finally, grab a few shots of background locations in which you'd like to place the objects/people you've videotaped. You will later key your subjects onto those locations. Working with the Opacity Rubberband Before keying out colors or working with luminance, I want to cover opacity. Premiere and other nonlinear editors like it have a general operating practice. Video tracks above track 1 trump tracks below them on the timeline. In other words, whatever appears on the highest track covers up whatever is below it. However, the object isn't to use tracks above Video 1 to obliterate what's beneath them. It's to enhance what's down there. Premiere offers up to 98 of those so-called "superimposing" tracks. Their purpose is for layering (compositing). One easy way to see compositing at work is to place a video or graphic on a superimposing track. Then turn down its opacity to make it translucent, and let video(s) on lower track(s) show through. A tool to accomplish this is the Opacity rubberband. Task: Use the Opacity Rubberband Here's one way to see the opacity rubberband in action. For this exercise, I'll have you place a "super" (text) in a superimposing track above a clip. Then you'll use the opacity rubberband to fade that text in, display it over your clip for a while, and then fade the text out. Here are the steps to follow for this task: Place a video clip on Video 1. Any clip will do, but trim it to about 15 seconds to simplify things. Open the Title Designer (File, New, Title) and create some simple text. Add color if you like. Save your text (File, Save). It'll show up automatically in the Project window. Drag the text to Video 2, drag the right edge to make it as long as the Video 1 clip, and expand the Video 2 track by clicking the triangle next to the words "Video 2." By default, the red opacity rubberband track should display (as opposed to the keyframe track). Even though you have not added a video effect to this clip, the expanded track reads "Alpha Key." By default, all titles have an alpha channel that is enabled when you add them to Video 2 or higher on your timeline. That means the non-text portion of the title screen automatically will be transparent, letting the lower clip show through. Use the red opacity rubberband just like the red volume rubberband for audio tracks. To fade in the title, drag the start handle down to the bottom of the track. A couple seconds into the clip, click the rubberband to create a handle and drag it as far up as it can go—to 100% opacity. A couple seconds before the end of the clip, make a new handle. This anchors the opacity at 100% at that point. Drag the end point handle down as far as it can go, fading the clip to zero. Preview your clip. The title should fade up, hold for a while, and then fade down. That's compositing in its simplest form. Moving on to Keying The opacity rubberband works great with text, but when using two full-screen clips or graphics it can be an inexact science. You can get more precise compositing results using keys. Using the RGB Difference Key First up is the simplest key—the RGB Difference Key. Use this key when you have a brightly lit scene with no shadows, a solid-color background, and a subject with a color that's distinctly different from the background. Not many scenes will qualify. Almost all have some shadows, especially when the subject has texture. But it's a good way to see how keying works—or frequently does not work. Task: Use the RGB Difference Key To use the RGB Difference key, follow these steps: Place the clip from the first item in the assignment list—the inanimate object shot in front of a solid color—on Video 2. Drag the location clip, the fifth item in the assignment list, to Video 1. Open the Transparency Settings dialog box for the clip on Video 2. As a reminder, to open the Transparency Settings dialog box, either right/Option-click the clip and select Video Options, Transparency or open the Effect Controls palette and click Setup next to Transparency. In the drop-down menu, select RGB Difference. Place your cursor over the clip image in the Color window (the middle screen). It turns into an eyedropper. Use it to select the background color that you will "key out." Click the Page Peel icon below the Sample window on the right. In a moment this will display how the keyed clip and the one below it will look when composited together. Drag the Similarity slider to the right and watch the Sample window as your background disappears—becomes transparent—to reveal the clip on Video 1. Similarity expands or reduces the range of background color keyed out. However, the more you increase Similarity, the more likely you are to key out other colors and create transparencies in both the background and the subject itself. Your subject will probably have "aliasing" or "jaggies," those stair-step edges common to diagonal lines in computer monitors and TV sets. Just as you did with Transitions, you can turn on anti-aliasing to fix that. It blends the pixels around the edges of your object. Use the Smoothing drop-down menu, choose Low or High, and check your results in the Sample screen. Before moving on, check out the other controls in the Transparency Settings dialog box. from left to right, they are as follows: The Black/White icon. Clicking this replaces the keyed-out background with white. Clicking it again displays a black background. The Checkerboard icon. This uses a black and white pattern to replace the keyed-out background. Click it again to reverse the checkerboard pattern. The Page Peel icon. You've seen already that this tool reveals the clip below the keyed image. The magnifying glass icon is on by default. Move the cursor over the Sample screen and it turns into a plus sign. Click to zoom in on the image. Alt/Option-click to zoom out. While zoomed in you can use the hand icon to drag the image to check other portions of the clip.