Special Video Effects

Let's do something a bit on the lighter side, after last's week's heavy techie topic of quality settings in custom quality-based VBR profiles... how about a broad look at special video effects?

Just a few years ago, in the days of Movie Maker 1, there was one special transition... a fade or dissolve from one clip to another... and no special video effects unless you used other software to make and clip and then import clip. Before that were special effects that your camera or camcorder could apply as you took the shot or footage.

Today there's a proliferation of fantastic special effects, and the choices are growing daily. Some you can apply to your pictures and clips with other software before importing. Photo Story and Movie Maker 2 have many built-in effects, and many others are available in add-on packages. And then there are the infinite possibilities from custom XML files.

Let's look at:

• Effects embedded in the picture or video, added by the camera or camcorder. I'll illustrate it with a pastel effect in my Sony Hi8 camcorder, which gives the video a cartoonish appearance.
• Effects added in your computer, before importing for a story or movie.
• Effects in Photo Story 3 and Movie Maker 2... those that came with the apps, and the additional packages available from Microsoft and others. Photo Story limits you to one effect per picture, but Movie Maker lets you mix and match any of them up to a total of 6 on each clip.
• Custom XML which can take you wherever you want. I'll illustrate with a 'privacy overlay' to cover or hide a person's face.

... before getting into it, here are a few notes...

Notes...

From programmer Bruce Shankle comes a new Utility for users of Movie Maker. Select a project file (.MSWMM) and it'll show you a list of the source files, including custom XML files and the source files used by them. It's a great tool to help you stay organized.

If you like reading XML files, use the Show XML button to see the internals of the project file. And if your source files are spread all over, you can round up a set of selected ones into one folder... by clicking the Copy Files button.

Bruce is still enhancing it and adding features being requested. Get a copy from his website. I'll be adding a link on mine.

the Vista Corner... you've no doubt heard the release will now be after the end of the year instead of in time for year-end holidays.

I received my first formal positive feedback this week from Microsoft about them incorporating a suggestion... I noted you could copy and paste from the Photo Gallery to the DVD Maker, but you couldn't drag and drop. Now you can do both.

.... on to the main topic...

Effects Applied by a Camera or Camcorder

These of course vary by the brand and model. The party line is to not use them on the original, and add effects during computer editing. Yes, but maybe there's something the camera can do that your software tools can't, or it can to it easier or better.

My Sony Hi8 camcorder has a pastel effect which gives the video a cartoonish appearance. Here's a clip that used the feature during recording:

Hi8 camcorder - pastel effect

The other effects on the camcorder are: negative, sepia, black and white, solarize (makes it look like an illustration), mosaic, slim, stretch.

Our digital camera is a 5 megapixel Olympus C-5050... the options for effects are B&W, Sepia, Black board, and White board... had to dig out the manual to find the settings and take a set of pix... here's what the 4 shots look like.

They might see some use in transparent overlays when the black or white needs to be transparent... or as still images by themselves.

Are these better

Editing Images and Video Clips Before Importing

Your image editing apps have features to edit pictures however you want. Beyond that there are great add-in filters. I'll use some filters that work with most things from Photo Shop to IrfanView.

We'll use two filters from Richard Rosenman ... the Pinocchio one for this part of the newsletter, and the Pixelate an Image one a little later.

As long as you're there, download the rest too, as each of them is great.

Install them to IrfanView... by copying the .8bf files to the Plug-in folder.

open an image

drill down to the 8BF filters

double-click on the Pinocchio one

... play around

I made a slight adjustment to the Golden Gate in the middle of the main span.

Effects in Photo Story 3 and Movie Maker 2

There are many that come with the apps, and additional packages available from Microsoft and others.

Photo Story 3 has 3 'auto fix' options... for contrast, color levels and red eye. You can apply one or more to a picture. Beyond that it has 10 visual effects that you can select from, using one effect per picture.

Movie Maker 2 has lots more choices, with 60 or so built-in special effects.

Additional 3rd Partly Effects (Movie Maker) - Microsoft released some additional packages... and Adorage and Pixelan sell very professionally made ones. The Setup Movie Maker > Other Software page of my website has links to them.

Movie Maker lets you mix and match any of them, up to a total of 6 on each clip.

Let's look at effects in Movie Maker... by splitting some video footage of a parade at MGM Studios in Disney World, taken in 1999 on my Hi8 camcorder. I split the clip into a batch of 10 second clips. 

Here's the start of the storyboard... notice that I have the first clip in twice.... to illustrate the use of different effects on the same clip.

The Fade-in and Fade-out options, so easily accessed by right-clicking on any clip in the timeline or storyboard are in fact video effects, and counted as 2 of the 6 effect limit....

If you're like me, adding the fade in or out, or both, are done anytime the mood strikes, and usually at a different time then adding other effects from the full collection... by doing it that way, I'm sure you don't stop to consider the difference in overall playback that happens based solely on when you decided to add what effect.

Let's use the first clip of the project to illustrate what can happen, by chance or design.

I took frame snapshots with Movie Maker as I stepped slowly through the frames.... when watching the video, you might blink and miss something important.

Five selected frames of the first clip in the project are at the left....

... and the same five frames of the second clip are at the right. Remember that the second clip is a copy of the first.

What's happening?

The first clip starts by seeing fully the Adorage: Egypt motif frame effect, with blackness in it...

.... the blackness changes to show a couple other Adorage frame effects working inside the Egyptian frame.

Outside the window of the frame in the frame is the Chinese parade going on...

At the end of this 10 second clip, the view inside the Egyptian frame turns to blackness, until totally black.... followed by the clip ending in a straight cut with no transitioning. 

The Fade-In, From Black, and Fade Out, To Black never effect the overall view... just the view inside the frame.

The second copy of the same clip uses the same 6 effects, but sequenced differently.

It's the whole frame that fades in from black, not the view inside the Egyptian frame... and at the end of the clip, it's the whole frame that fades back to black.

The sequences of the effects used on each clip are shown... the positions of the Egyptian frame and the Fade In and Fade Out effects are the only ones that are different.

I'm spending a bit of time on this, as it's more important than you might have known or thought. The overall viewing experiences you create can be dramatically different. Which of these two panning spotlight effects do you want? The difference isn't in the effects used, but in their sequencing.

I prefer the one on the left with the bright white frame. There are many lighting and border/frame effects... check what you get with a different sequence when you use them together. 

The next clip in the project is a normal situation at a parade or other spectator event.... when you're not in the front row, you can end up with heads to the left and right of your view.

Applying a zoom-in effect will get you closer and remove the people in front of you, but at the cost of reduced quality... here's the Pixelan Pan/Zoom Center effect applied 4 times to get closer and closer, just enough to crop the heads out.... 

Here's a link to a sample that shows these clips, with an extra clip thrown in for the multiple frame effects...

Multiple Effects

The Wide-World of Custom XML Effects

"....when is a title overlay really an effect? when it's used to add a custom image overlay...."
 

For those who can't get enough effects, or when the thrill of developing a new different effect is more satisfying than making a movie, custom XML can satisfy you.

Let's go through a sample... a 'privacy overlay' to hide a face. We'll bounce around a few apps as we go... leave them open in separate windows, and with copy/paste there's never a need to save a file until you're finished. With a few windows open, it really doesn't make a difference if you're using a few windows in a single app or a few windows with different apps... the process is quick and easy.

Here's the link to the sample clip this part of the newsletter ends up with... about a minute long.

Hiding a Face

The steps start and end with Movie Maker...

1 - Movie Maker

take frame snapshots from the video at various places along the path of the face you want to hide... I took 8 of them for the face in the Chinese parade float, starting with where the face first comes into view and ending with when it leaves the scene.

the snapshots, taken from the clip in the collection, are JPG files of 640x480.

put each of the snapshots on a different layer

select the area of the face, and delete the rest... I used the Ellipse selection tool to copy round sections from the original layers to new ones

save each layer individually (by making the other 7 layers not visible) to a new BMP file... 8 files - 640x480 BMPs 

3 - IrfanView

here's a new fun part of the process... open one of the new BMP pictures and use Richard Rosenman's Pixilate an Image filter to hide the face.

using the menu of IrfanView... Image > Effects > Adobe 8bf Filters (or Control-k keys from the keyboard)

double-click on the Pixelate... filter to open it...

here's the 7th one before changing from the default settings. If you still recognize the face, increase the Horizontal/Vertical settings (use the Horizontal slider and the Vertical moves with it to keep the pixilation as squares)....

I stopped when the settings were notched up to '21'... OK and it's applied to the original picture. Now you can't tell who it is.

Do this for each of the 8 pictures, and you'll have roundish highly pixilated things on white backgrounds... all positioned right if placed over the frames we started with... but BMP files are not transparent, so we have to take them into Paint.NET to make them into PNG files for our overlay images.

4 - Paint.NET

it's here that we not only make the white background fully transparent... we also make the big blocky pixels translucent to the degree we want, somewhere between fully opaque and fully transparent....

open each in turn and

• use the magic wand tool to select the white background, followed by the delete key to remove the white pixels (with a selection tolerance of zero if some of the blocks are initially included in the selection)
• double click on the layer in the Layers toolbox to open its properties
• in the drop down list of blending modes, change the blending mode to Multiply, Difference, or Darken... these 3 modes will work in Movie Maker and the others won't
• set the opacity to 200... that's the degree to which you'll be able to see thru the pixilated area (actually the degree to not see through it)
• Save it as a .PNG file for use as the overlay image in Movie Maker...

do each of the 8 to end up with a full set of PNG files... still at our 'standard' size for the movie, 640x480

the image at the right shows the 7th image being worked on

5 - Notepad

to avoid doing all the math and getting it wrong anyway, I did the position settings visually... by trial and error...

Conclusions and Closing

The custom overlay sample was a fun and rewarding learning experience. There are often requests for help on covering a license plate, a body part.... maybe an ex-spouse in a wedding video. Lot's of applications.

I learned what the zoom figures did to the size of the overlay image, how to apply the translucency settings in Paint.NET and which blending modes work, and the exercise of swapping out the Sample1.jpg file with the face pictures was invaluable in avoiding any heavy-duty... or light-duty... math.

I look forward to comments and discussion about this and other newsletters on the forums at:

Windows Movie Makers.net

PapaJohn

Movie Maker 2 and Photo Story 3 - www.papajohn .org
Photo Story 2 - www.photostory. papajohn.org

Products and Services

Software

I've beta tested some of the Pixelan packages and think very highly of their people and products.

ProDAD's Adorage package for Movie Maker 2 provides an additional source of professionally developed transitions and effects.

Personal Database

Managing your personal information is more of a challenge as hard drives get bigger and the internet more robust. 

My personal database has been an ongoing project over many years, and is now available to others. A tutorial about using it is on the Managing > Personal Database page of my site, and more info is in the database package itself.

It's free for the asking to regular newsletter subscribers... send an email request and I'll return it with the zipped file, which is less than 1 MB.

To others it's $10. To order, use the button on the top of the Managing > Personal Database page.

Online Gallery

If you can't save a movie because your project has become too complex, e-mail a copy and I'll divide it into manageable sub-projects, and provide detailed instructions about how to render the parts and assemble them into your final movie. $49.95 (no cost if it's not the right solution or doesn't work) - for details, see the sidebar on the Problem Solving > Can't Save a Movie page of www.papajohn.org

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About John 'PapaJohn' Buechler from Microsoft.com John "PapaJohn" Buechler, of Kalamazoo, Mich., goes by PapaJohn online. An avid user of Movie Maker since its first release, and a regular supporter of the community of Movie Maker users, John received a 2003 MVP award from Microsoft for that support. In March 2003, he started a comprehensive website about Movie Maker 2 at www.PapaJohn.org. He maintains the website, writes books and articles, teaches, and provides support services - all for the community of Movie Maker 2 users. An engineer by formal education, John is a computer database and multimedia expert by business and personal experience. He co-authored the first book about Movie Maker 2 and is actively working on a second one. You can find his advice in the Windows XP Movie Maker newsgroup and in the Windows Movie Makers Forums. This newsletter is republished with permission of John "PapaJohn" Buechler. Please note that this is an archive of newsletters and some information may become outdated. PapaJohn, and the webmaster of this site, provides this information "AS IS" with no warranties. Visit - PapaJohn's Movie Maker 2 and Photo Story 2 Newsletter Index