• Welcome to The Spark
    The Spark is a blog curated by the staff of the Multimedia Project Studio (MPS) at Duke University. We are a small group of highly talented students and staff well-versed in the language of multimedia. We hope this will become a regular resource for helpful tips, tutorials, specific concerns of the lab, and general inspiration.

Creating 3D Video in Motion

By Billy Baumgartner | Published: January 8, 2013

The way we access media is once again changing. It was only a few years ago that everyone suddenly experienced High Definition screens, and suddenly no one would go back. Now, the cutting edge technology is 3D. This more immersive viewing experience might become the new standard in another few years. So, video geeks and novices alike are going to have to start learning how to produce 3D video.

 

First, a general outline. 3D is produced by having each of your eyes see a different image at the same time. These images are taken at different perspectives (right and left), thus allowing your brain to comprehend depth perception as you would viewing the real world. Most 3D monitors and projectors use polarized light to do this. two signals are shown on a screen: one is polarized horizontally, one is polarized vertically. Your naked eye can see both, but the glasses cut off the light waves (with the equivalent of microscopic vertical or horizontal lines) such that each eye only sees one of the two images. And voila – 3D!

 

But how do we produce 3D footage? Fortunately, 3D TV’s give us a variety of input methods so that we don’t have to do any of the polarizing. If you give the TV a feed of the two images simply side-by-side, the TV will combine them and polarize them for a 3D effect. All we have to do is produce video from two different 3D perspectives. Now, to do live video this way would require either two cameras directly next to each other or a 3D camera (Sony makes a consumer version). But today we’re going to learn how to make digital 3D images, which can range from as simple as text that comes out of a screen to complicated 3D models (water, smoke, explosions). If you know the basics of Apple Motion, then this blog post will be a way to translate these skills into a 3D capacity using camera angles. If not, I recommend going to the Apple Motion tutorials on Lynda.com (through the OIT website) first.

Begin by opening apple motion, and choosing the format that you prefer. I always use HDV, 1080p24 (high-def, film frame rate). We’re going to create 3-dimensional moving text. Using the text button (The big “T” in the upper left corner), type your favorite word in the middle of the black screen. Then, click on “New Camera” in the upper right hand corner. Immediately, Motion will ask whether you want to  “switch to 3D” or keep as 2D. Choose to switch to 3D. You will now see controls in the upper right hand corner of the screen. These controls mimic moving a camera – pan, orbit, and dolly. Click and hold the mouse down while moving around to move around your text in 3 dimensions.

The record button (big red circle in the bottom center) enables easy key-framing of elements, such as your text. Click it to turn on. Then click on your text. In the top left corner, click on the “Inspector” tab. You will see controls for your text. Now click on the “Properties” tab. Click the arrow next to “Position” to bring down the 3D position controls for the item.  On the right of the Z-axis, click the small dash and select “Add Keyframe.” Then, in the small timeline at the bottom of the screen (gray bar with blue arrows on either side), move forward in time. Now, make the Z-axis number larger. This will automatically add another keyframe if the record button is on. Now, if you move around in the timeline, you will see that the text moves towards you over time.

Now, turn off the record button.

 

To output this video to 3D, we need to create two separate angles of this, and output each individually to quicktime files. Click “New Camera” again. Drag your timeline upwards (from the bottom of the screen) and name one camera right, the other left. Click on the right camera, and in the Inspector>Properties tab, under rotation, move it 3 degrees to the right on the Y-axis. Move the left camera 3 degrees to the left. To output 3D video, deselect one of the cameras in the timeline (so it’s layer doesn’t exist), then File>Export a quicktime video with either left or right in the file name (whichever camera is active). Do the same for the other camera. Now, open Final Cut Pro. Import the two quicktime files, and put them in the sequence one on top of the other.

 

 

Under the motion tab for each clip, change to distort>aspect ratio to 100. Change the x-axis of the center of the left clip to -360, and the right clip to 360.

 

Export this to video to quicktime, and your 3D TV will play the clip!

Here’s the final video in 3D: (you can choose to cross your eyes or use red/blue glasses to watch it)

 

 

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Using Aftereffects to make twins

By amk58@duke.edu | Published: January 6, 2013

This blog will give you the basics to duplicate a figure on screen. The most important thing in creating a duplicate is your footage. It is essential that you have a steady camera that can capture two identical camera frames. If the camera moves even a little then your footage won’t work to make a mirrored shot. Start with two clips. One with the figure on either side of the frame. Make an imaginary line in the frame that neither figure will cross at any time.

Import the files into Aftereffects and drag them into a new comp time line. The order of the clips doesn’t matter. Click on whatever clip sits on top. Go to the rectangle tool.

Create a rectangle over the half of the frame that does not have a figure in it. Note: As soon as you click to start creating a rectangle, you’re figure will switch sides. That is totally normal.

Cover your figure entirely.

You have created a mask. In order to make both images appear, go to the drop down menu next to, “Mask 1.” Switch it from add to subtract. 

Both figures should now appear. But there will be a distinct line that separates the two figures. The light has shifted ever so slightly and results in this punishing line in your footage. You can see it below on the middle cabinet.

To get rid of this, expand the, “Mask 1″ menu. Next to feather, drag your mouse to the right.

If you drag it too far, you will lose some of your figure. 

But if you find a nice balance, you will get rid of the line and maintain your image. 

From here, you can certainly expand your horizons. You can make all sorts of things disappear and appear. If there is one thing to remember it is that you need to have good footage. You need to think ahead and make sure that you have a good tripod.

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Illustrator Texture Masks

By Conrad Haynes | Published: January 4, 2013

Hello everyone, today I am going to show you how to make a simple concept art image in Adobe Illustrator. For this tutorial, I chose to do an image from Disney Pixar’s Up. – Conrad Haynes

1.)

To start, we first need to download all the texture references that we will need for the scene. There are several free texture websites online that you can refer to but for today, we ill be using Texture King.  So head to http://www.textureking.com/ and download the following texture http://www.textureking.com/content/img/stock/big/DSC_6227.JPG To be honest, you can really download any texture you like but I believe this one works very well for our project. Also, although many concept artist work from sketches, for this project, we will be working from scratch. =]

 

2.)

Lets start with the background. Start by creating a rectangle object. Remove the rectangles border and set the inside color to an off yellow.

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Using the Healing Tools in Photoshop CS6

By Chris Dieguez | Published: November 9, 2012

Every photographer has a couple of photos that are almost perfect—all except for a few dust spots, or a smudge on the lens, or perhaps a single object that’s in the wrong place. In Photoshop, there are couple of ways to correct those errors. The easiest way is using the healing tools. These tools use complicated algorithms to calculate what should be an area of your picture based on the surrounding pixels. In short, it saves you the trouble of having to manually correct faults and flaws using the brush tool or the clone stamp tool.

Let’s take this picture as an example:

Sky with dust spots

Here, we have a lovely sky—and Cereal Guy—except there are some dust spots on my lens that really stand out against the clouds, and I’m not totally happy with where Cereal Guy is in the composition. Let’s see what we can do. If you click on the bandaid symbol on the left vertical toolbar and hold, you’ll see the following menu:

CS6 healing toolbarThese tools are (from top to bottom): the spot healing tool, the healing brush, the patch tool, the content aware move tool, and the red eye tool. In this tutorial, we’ll discuss how to use these to fix our image.

Spot Healing Tool

This tool is super easy to use. Once you’ve selected the tool, click and drag to paint over the area you want to heal, in this case the dust spots. Give yourself a little margin around the area for best results.

 

 

Applying the spot healing tool

Once you release the mouse, Photoshop will calculate what ought to be under the painted area given the pixels that surround it. And voila! No more dust spot.

Results

If we use this on all the spots, here are our results:

 

no more spots

Healing Brush Tool

The healing brush tool is essentially a content-aware version of the clone stamp tool. If you control click on the a given area of the image to define the source and the click and drag anywhere else on the map, the tool will copy all the pixels at the defined location and paste them under your brush. The only difference between the clone stamp tool and the healing brush tool is that the latter blends the pixels into the new area instead of flatly pasting them over. It’s a step up from the clone stamp tool, but I’ve still found the spot healing tool to be more useful 90% of the time.

Patch Tool

The patch tool works a lot like the spot healing tool, except you can define the area that Photoshop will draw on to replace the selected pixels. After selecting the tool, click and drag to draw around the area you want to replace.

patch tool

Next, drag the selected area over to the area you want Photoshop to use to replace it. Here, I’m using an adjacent area of the same cloud. When you release the mouse, Photoshop will blend the new pixels into the old ones. I’ve found this tool to be useful in areas where there is a high contrast, like at the border between two different color values (for example, where the clouds and the sky meet in this picture).

patch tool

Content Aware Move Tool

This is my favorite new tool, included for the first time in the CS6 package. Let’s say we like Cereal Guy, but we wish he had posed just a little farther to the right.  Using this tool, getting him to move is as easy as selecting him and dragging him over. Photoshop will determine what should be underneath him and it will automatically blend him into his new setting. Once you’ve selected the tool, click and drag to draw around him. Try to keep the selection as neat as possible, and give yourself a little room around the area for best results (tip: If you need to clean up your selection, use the quick selection tool, fourth tool from the top of the vertical tool bar).

selecting the area to move

Click on the area and drag it wherever you want.

moving the selection

…and voila!

image moved

Now, you’ll notice it isn’t perfect. The background isn’t perfectly blended, and there’s a little bit of distortion on Cereal Guy’s head because I wasn’t thorough enough in getting a circular selection area around him. A small amount of distortion is not uncommon to the content aware move tool.  That said, this tool works best when you’re moving an object  where a little distortion won’t be noticed and when you’re moving it to an area with a similar background. You can also use the spot healing tool to clean up the area. However, even with its faults, content aware move is still vastly superior to options we had before CS6, which would have involved a lot of cutting, pasting, cloning, blending, and fussing to get it just right.

Redeye Tool

This tool is specifically used for removing redeye in portraits. Cereal Guy’s eyes are immune to red eye, so let’s use a different photo.  Here’s a prime example, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons:

red eye

All you do is select the tool, drag a box over the affected area, and Photoshop will do the rest.

selecting the area

And there you have it, a redeye-free, though no less intense, portrait.

red eye resolved

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Making Mobile Phone Shots More Professional Using Photoshop

By teh13@duke.edu | Published: November 6, 2012

That Random Moment

We’ve all had those random moments in life where we see a great moment at a party or walking down the street and we pull out our phone to a take a quick shot before the chance escapes us. We don’t have time to set up lighting, fix hair or position our camera just right to get the proper framing. We’re just happy we got the shot. We’re happy about it until we realize all the things wrong with it when we want to use it in a photo album or hang it on the wall. Sure it might be a good picture but it just has too many things wrong with it that Instagram and other apps on your phone just can’t fix. This tutorial for Photoshop is an easy way where anyone can make simple changes to a photo and get some near professional results.  So let’s get started!

 

So I was cleaning out my phone of pictures last week when I ran across this photo I took last year of my daughter as I was dropping her off at school. It was a random moment where she was too cute for me not to take a picture but it was completely unplanned. I would love to bring this to a shop and get it printed on photo paper but there are just too many things wrong with the picture that need to be corrected for me to want to show it off to the world (ignore the fact I’m using it for this blog).  Her scarf tag is hanging out, lose hairs that catch the sun light, the background glass in the car is catching the sun reflection and the book bag has an iphone purple hue to it that I don’t like. The focus of the picture is my daughter but there are too many things going on that draw the eye away. So let’s start with layers.

 

Once we have our photo loaded in Photoshop, we want to take and duplicate our layer. Go to the Layer menu and go to duplicate. You can name the layer anything you like. For larger projects you want to label what the layer does but for this tutorial copy is fine.

What I want to do is take the photo’s strengths which are the band color on her head and that backpack and highlight those areas of color. At the same time I need to tone down the things that are overpowering the image such as the sun light and reflections. I could go area by area and edit them but that would take forever and I like quick and easy.

Select and convert the new layer (the one on top) to black & white by using the desaturate option; Image> Adjustments>Desaturate (shortcut Ctrl+Shift+U) This will make the image on screen look black & white, but notice that bottom layer is still in color. If you deselect the eye on the layer you can flip what you can see back and forth. Remember this for later.

 

We want to create a layer mask. Layers>Add layer mask and choose reveal all. This creates a small white box next to the duplicated layer thumbnail.

Think of the mask as a sheet of glass that has been painted. Using the eraser tool will reveal more and more what the glass is covering beneath. In this photo I used the eraser tool to take away the areas around the bandana. I use a softer edge like the airbrush on the outside of the bandana and a hard edge when I go to erase the inside area of the bandana. Any areas you remove will appear black on the small thumbnail. If you make a mistake you can use the undo tool or step backwards options under the edit menu. You can also paint over the area with the brush tool.

A trick you can use that gives you some great control is the brush strength option. When I go to erase the area around the back pack I only use 25% so it will bring only a portion of the color through to the black and white image. I just want to give a hint of color in the pack. Too much and it pulls away from my subject and the color on her head.

 

Now comes my favorite tool – the Clone tool! It looks like a stamp on the icon bar to the left. It takes a bit of getting used to at first so feel free to use the undo button as often as you need to get it to look right. The best way to use the clone tool is to zoom as far in as possible, just above the pixil level. You will know the pixil level because you will see a grid of colors. We want to work in the smallest level possible to keep people from knowing we corrected the photo.

We are going to get rid of the tag. The problem here is we have a seam that needs to contine. Take your mouse and move it to the closest seam point below the tag and press the Alt key. It will bring up a target and click your mouse. It will now duplicate from that point forward wherever you start painting. Keep the size small and manageable to the space you want to remove. Don’t over copy! Just take out exactly what you need and use spaces from the area closest to where you are removing so it matches better. You can come back with the smudge tool on a few area that might not exactly line up and just smudge them together. Remember the undo button is your friend until you get used to the process.

I took out the stray hairs on the left side, some dirt on her face and the stray hairs around the top of the bandana.

 

To finish it off, selected the top layer and go to Image>Adjustments>Hue/Saturation and select: Colorize – Sepia Option in the top dropdown menu. This will put the Sepia color option only on the top layer and continue to let the other colors shine through. We still want some of the color to come through so drop the layer opasity down to about 60% and adjust for how much you think your picture needs. This way you get a hint of Sepia but without the overpowering tint. If you swap back to the origional image you can go back and finish off any area you might have missed that you want color. I realized her bandana was on her right shoulder and had to add color to that area.

The biggest change is the removal of the harsh color imbalances that was in the origional photo. Now the color that pops is around our subject, not the back window and the yellow glare. Now I used the color in the bandana but you can use the same techniques to highlight a person’s face or a logo or anything else that should be the focal point of the picture. Using the mask technique you can add blur effects to the whole picture and erase the parts you want make clear. Layers and Masks can be a simple option to create multiple effects that are all adjustable to fit your style of photography.

Total time for the edits was about 30 minutes with most of the time spent on the clone tool taking out different areas. The seatbelt alone was about 10 minutes to get right but this is a picture I want to hang in my hallway so I put in the extra work.

Hope you enjoy taking great moments and turning them into great pictures. If you any questions please come by and see us in the MPS!

 

 

Posted in Adobe, Photoshop, Tips & Tricks, Tutorial | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Adjusting Video Motion in Premiere (Slow Motion, Motion Tracking)

By Joe Park | Published: November 3, 2012

In this tutorial, you will be covering some of the basic editing techniques to adjust video motion in Premiere. The interface and version covered in this tutorial is from Adobe Creative Suite 6. The techniques covered involve Slow Motion and Motion Tracking.

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Introduction to ScreenFlow: Tips, Tricks, Uses.

By Suyash Kumar | Published: November 1, 2012

Hi Everyone!

In this post, we’ll be introducing ScreenFlow (newly deployed in all MPS labs) as a tool to capture, edit, and finish beautiful screen captures for use in tutorials or in any other video capacities you may desire.

Let’s start with the basics.

Read More »

Posted in New at the MPS, Screencast, Tips & Tricks, Tutorial | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

How to Animate Text in After Effects

By Jackie Giusti | Published: October 27, 2012

In this entry, I am going to explain how to animate text in After Effects. This can primarily be done one of three ways: using pre-made Animation Presets, focusing on the position control, or using a camera layer. I hope with this tutorial to give a brief explanation of all three and how they can be used.

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How to Effectively Use Drop Shadows in Photoshop

By Richard Cao | Published: October 26, 2012

So you’re making a flyer for an upcoming event held by your student organization. You know the basics of Photoshop, but you feel like the flyers you’re making don’t stand out enough amongst the hundreds of other flyers on any given bulletin board. To make matters even worse, this flyer needs to be ready in the next hour. What do you do? Use drop shadows.

Drop shadow, in a nutshell, is a layer style that automatically detects text and creates a shadow behind it in order to make the text stand out from the background image. Drop shadows are extremely easy to use, especially since Photoshop automatically applies it to your text, but there are also a wealth of options available for you to adjust in order to make your text look just the way you want it to. Read More »

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Time-Stretch with After Effects

By afp8@duke.edu | Published: October 25, 2012

Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere CS 6 both offer modern time remapping tools, but those of you still using Final Cut Pro 7 may find the included speed adjustment tool a bit lacking in quality. Users looking to slow down or speed up a clip in FCP7 will often change the speed of a clip and find the resulting playback jerky, ghosted, or otherwise undesirable. Here’s an example of that, in a clip that I’ve slowed down by 50% using Final Cut’s “Change Speed” tool. Notice the extreme ghosting on the man’s leg:

To fix this, we can send specific clips to After Effects and perform a very basic speed adjustment there. After Effects includes powerful tools for not only changing the speed of an entire clip, but changing the rate and direction of playback within a clip — think of fast forwarding and then rewinding a VHS tape. We will not cover that technique, which is referred to as time remapping, today.

My goal here is to walk you through the process of exporting a single clip from FCP7, opening it in After Effects, applying a basic Time Warp effect to the entire clip in order to slow it down, and muscling the resulting clip back into Final Cut 7. This is somewhat time-intensive; I would only recommend this process if you have already done a significant amount of work in FCP7 and only need to fix a few key clips. If you have a large project or even a single sequence that involves lots of time stretching, you may want to begin the entire editing process in a more recent program such as Premiere Pro CS6 where these tools are easier to access. Read More »

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  • New MPS West Now Open!

    The new MPS in 006 Bostock is officially open! Come see us in our new location near the Link in the lower level of Bostock.

    The Old Chem branch of the Multimedia Project Studio is now permanently closed.

  • What is the MPS?

    The Multimedia Project Studios are a series of high-end computer labs located at Duke University. We feature cutting edge equipment and industry standard software and are staffed by a corps of student Multimedia Consultants who are available to help you out with your project on a one-on-one basis, but are not able to do production work on your behalf.
    MPS Lab Locations & Hours
    MPS East
    115 Lilly Library
    The MPS in Lilly is open whenever the library is open. Check their site for hours, which can change during holidays and academic breaks.

    MPS West
    006 Bostock
    The MPS in Bostock is open whenever the library is open. Check their site for hours, which can change during holidays and academic breaks.



    Staffed Hours for Both Locations

    Winter, summer, and other break hours will vary, according to student consultant availability. To check consultants' availability, view our Live Schedule.

    Sunday - Thursday: noon to midnight
    Friday: noon to six
    Be sure to check our Live Schedule to see who will be on staff and our staff page to meet our talented consultants.