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For June Brides
Condensing
Titles Created with Video Action Filters
By Paul
M. Grossman
"April showers, Bring May
Flowers, For June Brides"
I remember my grandmother teaching
me that little memory poem when I was young. Being the wedding
season, I thought I would design a nice title sequence in honor
of that special day, as well as my Grandmother, since she now
has an Internet connection. You are probably most familiar with
this effect on car commercials. Lines of condensing text fade
up and down over the video. We will create this effect using
Video Action with a proper font and color for the opening credits
of a wedding video.
To begin with we will need to use
a Character Generator software package to create three 32-bit
TGA titles, each with one line of the text properly positioned.
The best way to do this is to format all the lines on one page
and save it. Next remove all the text below the first line,
and then use ‘Save As…’ to save the page with
an individual line. Reload the original title page and repeat
the process with the remaining lines.
The Set Up
We begin with the background video
on track 1. Drag the titles to tracks 3 and 4 as shown above.
Next click the ‘FX’ button and apply the VSA filter.
We want the title to stay full screen in the center. Under the
Effect menu select Fit To Screen – Full Screen. Next, click
the "No Mot" to keep the title from moving.
This effect resizes the titles
over time. To do this, grab the keyframe slider at the top of
the screen and move it all the way to the end. Next click the
3D Resize button on the hand side of the screen. (The pink cube)
Two more buttons will appear. Make sure only the top Horizontal
resize button is depressed. Next drag your mouse cursor along
the screen and squeeze the title to about one-third of it’s
original size. That’s it for this filter, so click the
OK button.
One of the nice features of Video
Action is that it automatically recognizes 32-bit alpha channel
images. But we do need to fade the text in and out. To do this,
apply a Transparency Assignment filter to create a custom fade.
Slide the Foreground transparency to 100.
Next click the Keyframe button
and add a keyframe at 20%. Slide the Foreground Transparency
to 0. Repeat this step at 80% as well.
The fade is complete so click the
OK button on the filter and on the Apply Effects interface.
The Shortcut.
The last step is to apply the filters
to the remaining video clips. In prior articles I wrote about
saving your effects in a filter macro file. This way you could
simply load the effect macro on another clip. Today I will use
a faster method. Right click on the first title clip and select
‘Copy Attributes’. Next, right click on the other
CG titles and Select ‘Paste Attributes’. The same
effect is now applied to all the titles.
All that is left to do is to render
the effect.
Here is an example of the final
output.
Click above image to see an example
video clip (mpeg)
In addition, here is the completed
filter macro to use on your own projects. Condensing
fade.flt
Lastly, for those of us with kids,
If April Showers Bring May Flowers, What Do May Flowers Bring?
Pilgrims, of course!
Have fun!
The author welcomes comments and
questions. He can be reached at paul.grossman@dps.com
About DPS Video Action
Video Action for Windows NT is
the professional’s choice for broadcast quality digital
video editing. Together with DPS’ award winning hardware
Video Action delivers a full featured editing solution. The
software package comes bundled with all of DPS’ desktop
products – DPS EditBay, DPS SparkPlus, DPS Perception,
and DPS’ real-time editing solutions the DPS Perception
RT and DPS Perception RT3DX. The power of this software is apparent
when it is combined with DPS’ award winning hardware. DPS
Video Action software makes it easy to move from one DPS hardware
platform to another without the need to learn a new editing
program or user interface.
About DPS
About DPS – DPS is a leading
designer and manufacturer of electronic hardware and related
software used for recording, editing and processing broadcast
quality video and audio material. The company has three business
segments: Broadcast, Professional Post-Production, and Security.
DPS products are used throughout the world by television broadcasters,
video production studios, post-production facilities and by
the computer-based desktop video production industry. Visit
our web site at www.dps.com
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