WORMHOLES! WORMHOLES! WORMHOLESSSS!!!
That's what I was thinking all of a sudden at 2:48 AM, when I was checking some good old Boku No Hero Akademia.
I opened up my pc and started some very 'noobish' editing.
recap: The owner of the music audio preferred the theme of space and spacetravel. In the last post I decided to work with a video where you can see an astronaut losing a toolbox.
I wanted to take the toolbox and sepertate it from the video clip.
Zooming in on it.
Let it have a B-rated movie effect of flying through a wormhole!
(have to be honest, my expectations were low)
Ok my goal was clear. I had no idea how, but I had the toolkit and my toolkit ( lolz ;) )
Here is what I made on first try.
It is still suuuper basic of course, but it translates a certain feel already. Let me explain you how I did this: Technique zero is simple cut, copy, paste of different video clips into one sequence of clips.DO you know how to do it with Microsoft Word? Well, then you get it! WYSIWYG! in my case some snippets of the loss of the material.
1. ZOOM IN OVER TIME
First technique is a simple zoom in :
How to do this is quite simple: I clicked on the clip in my timeline. Then it opened up on the left (and right). Above the video image on you can find the effect panel. there you can do some crazy stuff with your video image or your videos over time. How do we play with time in Adobe Premiere Pro?
An important part of creating changes over time in a videoclip or between videoclips is done in the effects panel Here you can see before each effect such as motion and opacity (standard), and add many others through the general interface (drag and drop). In the green circle you see a 'clock' icon. Actually you see many of them. For almost every parameter of an effect you can find one.
I will get more into this topic later as it forms one of the main functionalities of Adobe Premiere Pro. It revolves around something many call 'Keyframes'. if you look on to the internet for tutorials you will almost always find talks about keyframes or adjustment cues. KEYFRAMES. KEYFRAMES? KEYFRAMES! Simply said: keyframes are frames you adjust the information on. Here you can place cues for things to change or be different from the original video. If that still sound a bit abstract, don't worry! I will give more examples later and go more into depth about this topic! What important here? What I did for the zoom in was put the timestamp in my timeline on the beginning of the clip and click onto the clip (maybe twice) to open it left and right.
On the right I can select the effect panel of the clip.
There you see the position and scale of the video and the image on the right side of the screen. If you click on the clock icons you set a keyframe on the beginning of your clip (because we put the timestamp at the beginning of the clip, don't forget this, I do too often!). If put the timestamp in the general timeline to the end of your videoclip and click the videoclip again, open the effect panel again and there increase the scale to your likings. It forms the endpoint of the zoom in (and only you clicked the clock earlier), the zoom in should be implemented. If you play your clip you will see that over time the duration of your clip the size slowly increased and your video gets enlarged over time. To adjust any strange decentralization of your video you can also adjust your position of your image in the same way. In that case, set a normal position and scale at the beginning of your clip. Click the two clock icons. After that scroll to the end of the clip and select the preferred max size and final position/center of the video . The adjustments will create new keyframes for the two effect parameters. Your clip is done! BOOYA As you can already feel, you can do some pretty interesting things with these mechanics. :D
2. CROSS-FADE / BLEND Second technique is a cross-fade. What I wanted to do was blend this box thingy with a background of a wormhole. I looked on google for royalty free stuff and found these cool warps for free: https://www.videezy.com/free-video/wormhole https://depositphotos.com/stock-footage/wormhole.html
https://pixabay.com/videos/search/wormhole/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CzY87ZBmhpY Amazing isn't it? During my video I will use several of these. I decided to not upload all the seperate files I use as that would become crazy in the scope of this project. Feel free to reproduce, but use some creativy in connecting the dots! First step I took was putting the two videos on top of each other. recap: to do this i first started with clicking my imported file at bottom left panel, to upper left video panel to specify with part I want to use for my sequence, then I drag the clip from the bottom left panel into the timeline on the central bottom half of the screen, next to the panel with imported clips. I put the two videos on two separate track above eachother. (In the example you see even more!. The green circle indicates a triple stack.
Then I had to adjust the opacity so one could look through one image to see the other. I changed the opacity of the wormhole layer to 50% and this was going into the direction I wanted. Then I understood that the top layer needs to be the wormhole so I can keep the block at 100% opacity (complety visible). This seemed good at first, but was a very louzy try maybe.
I then added a sparkly third layer on top of the wormhole video by also applying around 30-40% opacity.
I also added some masking which I will explain below briefly. (later more)
Do you see it coming?
Anyhow Next I got it. I should've gone for masking more than real opacity. (no wonder the masking mod is integrated into the effect of opacity!!!) Time to go back to the 'drawing tables' (Photoshop? jk) here is one technique I did not explain yet and makes a big difference. It is really a gamechanger! 3. MASKING
Third technique I want to explain in this post is a simple masking. There are many forms of masking and you can go CRAZZYY! But here let's start with one of the most simple ones. It is my first maskbaby! It's special, let's keep it at that ;)!
OK. Here's how it worked. I resetted my opacity settings cause it was a bit messy and only half of a solution. The procedure that follows also works with timestamps and keyframes. It is similar to the zoom in I explained above!
You put your cursus of your timeline on the beginning of the clip you want to mask and click on the clip. Next up you open the effect panel and click on the pen symbol.
With this pen you can draw the contours of for example the object you want to mask. In our case the toolbox of the astronaut video.
Draw around the edges until you have a closed shape and you will cut it out.
(you can bend lines and stuff but that I also have to figure out more!)
One you've done this you can check the effect panel box again. There should be a mask(1) one effect. <ith several parameters
In case you failed you can always delete this mask and start again clean.
You can adjust the feather (blending and thickness of the edges), expansion, etcetera, but that is not so important here. Do experiment with it to your likings! I put it on 10 here. I keep it simple here. I did not use keyframes or the clocker. Later I will try to do this and show you how, but here it works very well to keep it the same. If you add it all up, you come to this video: Before masking:
After masking:
What's cool is that you can adjust shape and parameters for every frame. It even tries to assist you in the process. Again try out all the buttons and try to figure out what they do!
In the next post I will try to get deeper into this masking technique and use keyframes. I will also work on the clip for a while now, so I can show some progress!!
See ya
XOXOXO