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)

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.

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.

3.)

Next, on a new layer, create your hill. Start with the pen tool. Select the bottom left hand corner, then near the top of the slope, the lower right side for the bottom of the slope, and finally the bottom left hand corner to complete the shape. (Be sure to drag a little after selecting the vector points to extend the anchors.) Adjust the shape as necessary and then fill with a green color.

3.)

After this, construct your tree and treetop in a similar manner. Place each object on a separate layer and use the pen tool to adjust as needed.

4.)

Finally create two sets of building skylines for the background with the pen tool – one layered above the other. Use the pen tool and have some fun. For these shape colors, I selected two different adjustments to the background color. Remember to place these two layers behind the hill layer; overlapping is ok.

5.)

Now for the fun part, remember that texture that we downloaded from the Internet? We are going to use that to bring some dimensionality to our image. Start by creating a new layer in your illustrator file. Then select your texture in your computer’s finder window and drag it into your illustrator file. It should be placed on the new layer you just created.

6.)

Scale the image down to size of your yellow background and place it directly over the background.

7.)

With the image selected, select embed. It’s an option on the top of the Illustrator Program.

8.)

Now, select the image again and locate the Appearance Tab on the right hand toolbar. Under the appearance tab you will see an image option as well as the word “Opacity” in bright blue. Select Opacity. After selecting Opacity, you should see a drop down bar with the word Normal selected. Scroll through the drop down bar until you reach Overlay. Select Overlay.

9.)

With this filter on, your image should look pretty cool, but chances are, it is over emphasized / stressed. So we will adjust the opacity layer and use mask to apply the filter only to certain parts on the image.

10.)

So first, reduce the opacity to somewhere between 60% and 70% on the Appearance Tab under Opacity.

11.)

Then return to the Layers Tab and duplicate the Texture layer 3 times.  Place one layer above your background, one above your hill, one above your tree, and one above your treetop.

12.)

Now we will create mask for each respective layer. Let’s start with the background layer and filter. First, turn off all other layers so that you do not get distracted and duplicate the background layer. Place the original background layer above your texture and the duplicate below it.

13.)

Then (locking the duplicate layer beneath the original and texture) group select your original background layer and the texture layer beneath it. With them both selected, create a clipping mask (Object –> Clipping Mask –> Make) or click Command + 7.

14.) You can now remove the old texture layer, unlock the duplicated background layer, and turn on all other layers turned off. You have just masked the texture to a background image.

15.)

Repeat this process for the hill, tree, and treetops adjusting the opacity of each texture layer as necessary. (Remember to turn off all layers you are not currently using.)

16.)

Congratulations, you just created your first concept art illustrator piece.

Let’s take this picture as an example:

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:

These 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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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).

Click on the area and drag it wherever you want.

…and voila!

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:

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

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

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!

Slow Motion

We will start off by having the footage that you want to edit on the time line. Premiere’s Slow Motion can be worked in several ways, but the most conventional way is simply adjusting the speed of the video.

First, within your footage, choose the points where you want to start and end the effect. You can simply go to the Tool Box and select Razor Tool (usually located on lower right corner of the interface. *If you cannot find it, go to Window –> Tools to make it appear on the interface).

After clicking on to the Razor Tool, click on the points you want to start and end. You will be able to see that footage has been cut and separated so you can add the effect to the chosen portion of the footage.

Second, you want to switch your cursor back to selection tool by going back to the Tool Box. Then, Right Click on the portion of the footage –> select “Speed/Duration.”

A new Window will pop-up saying “Clip Speed/Duration.” On the “Speed:” option, Notice it says 100%. You can select and type in the percentage that you want to slow it down or fast-forward. (i.e. 50% will be slowing down, 200% will be speeding up)

[*One thing to be careful is when you want to have a continuous Regular-->Slow Motion-->Regular Shot, you want to move the last portion of the further to the right of the timeline, because by making your middle portion into slow motion, it will elongate the footage and you want to create space for that.]

If you feel like your footage becomes choppy when you added Slow Motion, it is probably because your footage is filmed 24 frames per second. If you want to have a very smooth Slow Motion effect, you would have had to film the footage with greater number of frames per second. (ex. High speed camera)  Alternatively, check out Austin’s tutorial on TimeWarping in AfterEffects for more precision control.

Motion Tracking

Motion Tracking is a technique where you can add an object (image, text, etc.) to move around in your footage. (For example, this can be used in Documentaries when you want to censor part of the footage by covering it with a black box with “censored” on it)

First, you should add an image or text on top of the footage on your time line. In this case, we used a text box.

Second, Select the text on your timeline. On your preview box (usually upper middle section), you should see “Effect Controls” on one of the tabs. (If you cannot find it, Go to “Window”–>Select “Effect Controls”).

Third, You will couple options like “Motion”, “Opacity”, and “Time Remapping”. If you click on the Arrow on the left, you will see couple of adjustment options. Click on the ‘Stop Watch Icon’ next to “Position.” This allows you to toggle animation (freely move around your image).

Now, this could be a tedious work, but you would have to move the image and record frame by frame where you want that image to be located. Here is one trick you can use.

1)    On your Final Playback window (usually on the upper right corner), after you have done the previous step, you will click and drag the entire frame (switch position of the frame). This allows you to choose the position of the image for that frame of the footage. [*If you can’t move the image, try pressing on the option, “Motion” under “Video Effects”]

2)    You can press the Right Arrow Key to go to the next frame and switch the position of the frame again. Notice, if you keep dragging your image while you are pressing the Arrow Key, you can move the position of your image to where you want it to be.

3)    Check the edited image by playing back on your time line.

Here is the edited version to check out!

MotionTracking(GangnamStyle)

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.

Starting Capture

When you start ScreenFlow for the first time, you’ll be presented with a window like the one above–where you’ll be asked to select your input sources before recording. Once recording begins, all sources will be recorded  simultaneously and independent of one another, and will show up in separately editable tracks later.

Hit the red record button, and you’re ready to go! You can stop the recording by pressing Shift+Command+2 at anytime after you start recording.

Editing

After you’re done recording, it’s time to edit. Fortunately, ScreenFlow offers surprisingly robust editing and post-processing capabilities to create awesome video.

After you’re done recording, this is what you’ll see. If you’re familiar with iMovie or other video editing programs, you’ll see a similar timeline for editing video/audio sources at the bottom half of the window. The main window in the middle is a live preview of your movie, and the right hand side bar offers several tools to edit, augment, and process your video and audio. We’ll step through some basic editing tools in ScreenFlow, and then talk about included features that can smartly augment your video on the fly.

Basic Video/Audio Editing Tools

Just like one might expect, you can split clips (right click, “split clip at playhead”) , click and drag clips to change order around, and generally do most things one can do with clips in the iMovie timeline.

You can also import external media (video, images, audio) into the project by clicking and dragging media into the media tab (and from there into your timeline).

To edit video clip properties, click on your desired clip and head over to the Video Properties tab. There, you can adjust several parameters of your video, most notably the scale, size, or opacity of your video, which is particularly useful if you have two (or more) video layers on top of one another (as is common in tutorial videos). After clicking on a particular video clip, you can also head over to the preview window to resize or change the position of layered video by clicking/dragging the preview and using the free transform tools that appear around the clip’s preview. Opacities, shadows, saturation/brightness/contrast and more are all easily adjusted by way of the sliders on the window.

If you click “Add Video Action” before modifying video properties for a clip, it will allow you to apply property changes for a designated section of video. Clicking on “Add Video Action” after selecting a target clip creates a yellow overlay clip over the currently selected target video clip (that designated the duration over which the Video properties are applied). Just select the overlay clip, and make the changes you wish to in the video properties bar. Adding such action clips can also add/change properties of a given clip or track for any of the features described below as well.

Double clicking on clips in the timeline brings up a window where duration and speed of the clip can be adjusted (this works for all types of clips).

You can also add text and text-to-speech segments to your video by going to Insert–> Text Box or Speech Clip. These show up as separate clips on your timeline, and you can adjust their duration (by double clicking on the clip) and their position (by dragging the clip around).

If you’re looking to edit audio recorded alongside webcam video, you can right-click on the webcam video clip, and select “Detach Audio” to have to audio split out into another layered clip. There are several useful audio editing features on the “Audio Properties” tab.

A useful feature is the “Remove Background Noise” option–where you can use ScreenFlow’s algorithms to remove background noise to a selected magnitude (via the slider). You’ll also see options to add “Effects” presets to audio–that change the feel of your audio clip by changing properties like echo and reverb.  Of course, you can also change the volume of the clip and introduce ducking on clips (if you’ve got more than one audio track). Setting the ducking to 10% on a given audio clip lowers the volume of all other audio in the project by 10% when there is audio on the selected track.

ScreenFlow Extras

As it turns out, ScreenFlow captures more than just audio and video while you’re recording. It smartly captures what you type and where your pointer is, among other things. This means that you can display what you’re typing in an overlay or highlight the position of your pointer at various points throughout your video (which can be particularly useful in video tutorials).

First, we’ll take a look at the displaying typed text and augmenting your pointer. Head over to the “Screen Recording Properties” tab.

Click on your target clip (add a “Screen Recording Action” if you want to specify the duration over which effects act) and then go change the properties that interest you. You can change the size of your pointer, add a click effect (that draws attention to your pointer whenever you click), or even change your type of pointer (you can even specify an image). Checking the box “show keys pressed” brings up a large overlay readout of all keys pressed during the segment, which is also really useful for tutorials where type might not be so clear.

If you want to further highlight and augment mouse properties for some duration (or the whole clip), check out the “Callout Properties” tab.

That’s it folks! That was a general introduction to what ScreenFlow offers and how it works, but do please explore and experiment with ScreenFlow and it’s numerous features.

-Suyash

The first thing to know about After Effects (in my opinion) is that animating can be achieved primarily with the position adjustment. By “activating” the position for a particular object or layer, its location can be placed at certain determined times on your timeline, and then After Effects will make the transition as smoothly as possible between the different position markers.

In this example, I have an object with the word “The,” an object with the word “Inquisition,” and a solid layer that is simply colored gray (Layer => New => Solid). I also have a camera layer (though we’ll get to that later).

 Position
In the timeline, expand the word objects, expand the Transform characteristic, and one of the first characteristics to adjust is Position. Next to each of these different characteristics are stopwatches, that when clicked, will create a keyframe wherever the timeline cursor is at.

 Place the position wherever you wish for the initial start frame. As for me, I am simply going to start with the word off screen to the left, so that it will come in and then settle at it’s current location. I will then move to two seconds on the timeline with my cursor, and move it to the current position of (131, 260). When you move the cursor and then change the position, a new keyframe will automatically be created.

Then, I will select the “Inquisition” object, go to the position characteristic, hit the stopwatch, and have it move at the same time from the bottom of the screen to where it currently is. In the viewer, you can see the paths of both words. Also, what I will do to make the movement not completely abrupt, I will right-click on the keyframe in the timeline, go to keyframe assistant, and choose Ease In. That way, it will “ease in” to its end location and not look so sudden.

When viewed, you can see that a nice simple animation is created for the text!

Furthermore, if I wished to animate the text in relation to an object or a path, I could animate along a path. To achieve this, I would just have to have the position of the text match that of a path.

Animation Presets
The easiest way to animate text is just using the Effects of Animation Presets. On the right hand side, there is an Effects & Presets tab (however, you can also access these by going to Animation => Presets). From there, expand Animation Presets, and then expand Text. There are several different options for animation that you can choose from, and then adjustments you can make for the effect. If you wish to see the animations before choosing them, then going to the Presets from the Animation tab up top will open up Adobe Bridge and show short previews there. Otherwise, simply choose the animation and drag it over the object you wish to animate.

 Camera Layers
The biggest importance with creating camera layers, is to make sure that the objects you wish to manipulate with the camera are in 3D mode. You can change the mode of any object or layer at any given time, so you don’t have to make sure you do this at the beginning of each creation you make. Down in the composition panel, make sure you’re toggled to modes and then simply click in the box for 3D mode.

After this, I would also suggest changing your views, so as to understand what the camera is actually doing. This is achieved by going to your preview panel, and at the bottom, changing the views to either 2 or 4. This way, you can see what your presentation will look like, but also where the camera is and where you can position it in a 3D represented space.

After you have selected the 3D mode on the objects, you can see that they have added rotations in the x, y, and z directions. That is just on the objects. Again, manipulating just these positions can create animation for your text, but the camera layer can further this animation. The camera has its own rotations and position as well, which adds further effect. Changing or altering any of these, and making sure to change the timeline cursor to change the positions or rotations so that the animations will be seen, will all create animations!

Hopefully messing around creatively with any of these options will give you great animations for your film!

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.

The pictures below are an example of what drop shadows can do for you. The picture on the left is your bland, everyday flyer with nothing that really stands out, and the text blends into the background a little bit. The picture on the right is a flyer, although not drastically different, will stand out much more when posted on a bulletin board. The only difference between the two is drop shadows.

 Let’s walk through how I did the above example in a few quick steps.

Step One: Design/open a flyer that you’d like to improve. Select the layer of text that you want to work with. My text is split into three different layers, and I’ve selected the “Vietnamese Sandwich Fundraiser” part since it’s the main body of the flyer. Now, we’ll want to apply Drop Shadows. You’ll find the Drop Shadows feature under Layer -> Layer Style.

Important Note: In order to save time on projects, make the Drop Shadows look perfect on one layer of text, and then simply copy the layer style and paste onto the other layers. For this tutorial, I’ll only be working with the “Vietnamese Sandwich Fundraiser” layer and then copying the layer style to the other layers.

Once you’ve clicked on Drop Shadows, Photoshop will automatically apply the default Drop Shadows to your layer. You may decide that the default already makes your flyer look good enough, which is fine, but there are plenty of settings you can adjust to make the shadows look perfect.

Step Two: In this step, I’ll talk about many of the different options you can adjust for your Drop Shadows. There is no “best setting”, the best look for your Drop Shadows will depend on the color of your text, background color, what exactly you want to do with your Drop Shadows, etc. I’ll go in order down the Drop Shadows menu:

1. Blend Mode – The default option for Blend Mode is Multiply, and this is usually the setting that I stick with. Many of the effects that are created with the other Blend Modes can be created through adjusting the other options while in the Multiply Blend Mode, which gives you some more flexibility.

2. Drop Shadow Color – Clicking on the box next to Blend Mode will bring up the color palette that you’ll see everywhere else in Photoshop. Since black is the color most people associate with shadows, it’s the most natural looking color you can pick for your shadows. That said, using different colors can add some spice to your flyer, such as using a bright green shadow to give your text a glowing, neon type feel.

 3. Opacity – The default Opacity is 75%, and in my opinion, 75% is usually a little too much. If your drop shadows are relatively small, the difference between 75% and 100% isn’t very much, but I tend to use Opacity in the 50-60% range to make the shadows a little more gentle. 0% Opacity means you won’t be able to see the shadow at all.

4. Angle – This is when Drop Shadow options really become fun. Angle is the direction from which light is shining on your text, so an angle of -90 means the light is coming from directly below the text, and the shadows are above the text. While -90 degree light is a nice effect for certain situations, the best angles to use are between 0 and 180 degrees since that where our minds think shadows should naturally be. The default 120 is a good choice.

 5. Distance – The distance between your actual text and the shadow. Usually, you’ll want to keep the shadow pretty close to the text, 6- 10 range, but if you’d like, you could create an extended drop shadow. Looks sort of like this:

For flyering purposes, I wouldn’t recommend doing this since a flyer can only be so artistic before it becomes obnoxious. If you’re using drop shadows on something else though, just drag the distance slider to the right.

6. Spread – The spread slider in essence adjusts the thickness of each letter’s shadow. Try to keep Spread below 20%, anything above that and you’re shadows will start overlapping. Anything above 0% will let you actually see the shadow; 0% means the text stands out, but you won’t see the shadows as much, if at all.

Size – I prefer to not edit size because Photoshop’s default setting is usually ideal. The slider is quite sensitive, as anything beyond 10 means you have less of a shadow and more have a haze around your text.

Contour – If you click on the graph like thumbnail next to contour, you’ll receive a menu that looks like this:

In my opinion, playing with the mapping can be a bit finicky and usually unnecessary unless you’re going for perfection. Since we’re working on flyers, however, the Photoshop presets are sufficient. Clicking on the dropdown arrow will show you the preset contours Photoshop has ready for you.

The default contour is the one in the top left corner (y=x line); contours that monotonically increase from left to right are similar, as all are various adjustments of the default black (or whatever color you choose) shadow. The other contours with more interesting shapes, on the other hand, make your shadows become outlines. This becomes a stylistic choice: outlines obviously appear different from shadows, but they aren’t necessarily better; depends on your taste for which one you prefer.

Noise – Adjusts the grainy-ness of your shadows. Sometimes useful for the effect it create, but sort of defeats the purpose of using a Drop Shadow in our case.

Although the use of drop shadows in the above example, which mostly using the default Photoshop settings with a few tweaks, is very simple, there are a plethora of options from which you can choose. I hope you get a chance to play around with it and discover what Drop Shadows can do for you. Or if you’re running out of time, just use the defaults and go start flyering!

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.

Open After Effects and create a new composition to match the settings of your Final Cut sequence. Since we are trying to fix image quality issues, it is important that these settings match.

Use File>Import to bring in the clip you exported from Final Cut. It will show up in the Project media browser on the left side of the screen; drag it onto the composition you just created, and it should appear in the composition’s timeline.

Open the “Time” folder in the Effects & Presets pane (Yes, After Effects has a whole folder of time effects) and select the “Timewarp” effect. Drag it onto the clip in the timeline.

The top left pane will immediately change to display all of the settings for the Timewarp effect. We are only interested in a few of these settings, both near the top: Speed, which should be set by default to 50(%), and Method, which should be set by default to “Pixel Motion”. Pixel Motion timewarping uses information from each frame to intelligently create the frames between the frames; it has trouble with some textures, as you will see, but sometimes it is the right effect to use. The Whole Frame setting is closer to Final Cut’s change speed setting, but it does still offer more settings to tweak. Adjust the speed setting to whatever you desire; for this tutorial, we’ll kick it down to 30%. Go ahead and preview the clip in the timeline.

You’ll immediately notice a major problem: the video is playing back slower, but the duration of the clip has not changed. This means we are only seeing the first 30% of our original clip. In order to fix this and be able to export the entire duration of the clip, we’ll have to change what After Effects calls the “Interpretation Settings” of our clip.

Go back to the media browser pane — you might have to click around for a moment or two — and select the clip you imported. Select File>Interpret Footage>Main.

At the bottom of the Interpret Footage window, change the Loop setting. We’ll set the clip to loop 10 times, even though we’ll only use a fraction of that actual looped duration. Don’t worry about this too much. 10 should be enough for whatever you are doing. Click OK and navigate back to the timeline.

You should now be able to drag the right end of the clip out to the right, extending the duration of the clip. Drag it far enough that the entire slowed-down clip plays once, and you will notice that the clip loops as promised. This is okay. Using your mouse, find the exact spot where the clip turns over. That’s where my playhead is in the picture above.

Now, look all the way to the top right of the timeline. You’ll see two yellow handles. Move the lower of the two handles, the “Work Area End” handle, over to the left. This is similar to setting an out point in Final Cut. Position the handle so that it lines up with your playhead at the end of the first loop.

Now it’s time to render our finished clip back out! With the clip in the timeline selected, select File>Export>Add to Render Queue.

The bottom pane will change over to display the Render Queue. Set up your export as needed. I won’t go into detail about which settings to use, because the default “Best Settings” option will work. But one word of warning: the default export option will not include sound. Don’t worry about that, as we can recombine sound in Final Cut. Just keep that in mind. Set your output destination and render.

Now pop back to Final Cut. Import the clip that After Effects rendered, drop it into the timeline on top of our old clip, then slow the old clip’s audio down to 30% speed so that it matches. That’s it — you now have a dramatically slowed down clip. Check out the difference between the two below:

To review:

The Timewarp effect offers an incredible amount of control over the technical details of time manipulation; where Final Cut’s change speed tool merely increases the length of time each frame of video is displayed in order to change the speed of the overall clip, the Timewarp effect actually renders new frames that approximate the motion that would have occurred in between the frames that were actually captured by your camera. While it breaks down on some textures as you can see in the video, it’s better for some purposes than the basic Final Cut speed tool. That’s why we’ve gone through all this effort. Similar tools such as Twixtor are available as plugins for FCP7, but we do not offer them in the MPS labs.

Additional resources:

If you are ready to take your time-bending to the next level, Joshua Mosley has a very straightforward tutorial on time remapping using After Effects’ built-in time tools here. The effect keyframing he describes works with the Timewarp effect as well.

The official Adobe help document that covers time stretching and time remapping using built-in tools can be found here.

Finally, a very thorough Lynda.com video tutorial covering the basics of working with time in After Effects as well as the more technical aspects of time stretching and remapping can be found here. Remember that all Duke community members have unlimited Lynda.com access (They are probably better teachers than I am).