Adobe Morph Cut

I don't know how many of you have seen or heard about this new feature in Adobe Premiere called Morph Cut, but it is really cool (and scary). Basically, the premise of Morph Cut goes like this: it fixes jump cut interviews. Awesome, right? Yeah, it is, but it's also intimidating for the editor because it represents a shift in film editing that moves toward the computer controlling everything, rather than the editor. Will this be the start of robots being editors?? Nobody knows! Okay, enough of my dystopian view of this effect and now for the nitty gritty.

Morph Cut works like this. You have an interview with someone that goes as such: "So the...uh...car was driving..uh..um...down...uh..the road and uh, uhm, we saw a deer in the street but it uh...uhm...was too late for us to uhh move so...uh...we hit the uh...deer." Wow, that is like pulling teeth. What would be an 8-second sentence turned into a 25-second sentence. If this was essential to the story, and there was no way to schedule a reshoot, the clip would have to be cut to exclude the uh's and the uhm's and the lapses in talking altogether. What would result is a jump cut edit that would pretty much suck. The character would be jerking around in the frame everytime a cut had to be made and it would essentially be unwatchable. Enter Morph Cut. Morph Cut is an effect that will be implemented in Premiere Pro down the line that analyzes the footage and presents a seamless edit that is free of the jump cuts. Below is a presentation by Adobe about this. Really worth the watch.

The Best After Effects Tutorials

 

Have you ever seen an amateur film with some great special effects, and asked yourself how they did it? Or how you can add the same kind of effects to your own pieces without hiring expensive professionals? It can be done with some patients and determination. My interest in After Effects first sparked when I was a junior in high school, I wanted to learn and become efficient with it. Learning special effects could bring a lot of new opportunities into my productions, so I decided to scour the internet for tutorials and any other help I could find. One of the greatest resources I discovered was videocopilot.net, and I encourage anyone interested in learning VFX to take a look at the tutorials on the site. Andrew Kramer, the tutorial master at videocopilot, makes After Effects easy to follow, and you will learn a lot. I am looking forward to taking Motion Graphics here at IC, and I hope to learn more about visual effects, and the power computers can bring to productions. Below is a tutorial showing you how you can extend a field location to match your originally desired location which just might not have been practical for you to actually get to. There are other great tutorials on videocopilot.net that are worth checking out if you have any interest in After Effects. 

Motion Graphics and Animation!

So this post isn't really entirely Fiction Field Production related, and I'm sorry. I hope you can forgive me. BUT it is about Motion Graphics and Animation, so it'll be super cool, I promise.
I ended up enrolling in not one, but two of Arturo's classes this semester and I decided to post today about the other one, Motion Graphics, because we're all thinking about registration about this time of the semester.
SO. The class, which meets twice a week, deals with learning animation and effects in Adobe After Effects. We've also spent some time discussing other programs, including Photoshop and Maya, but we spend most of our time learning After Effects.

After Effects Launch Menu

So far this semester we've learned various elements of After Effects, including how to use rotoscope, motion tracking, green screen, color correction, and we've played with many of the effects that come with After Effects. 

Our first assignment that we completed on our own was a music project. We had to pick a song that we liked and make a graphic video to accompany it. Some people made lyric videos, which are becoming very popular on YouTube. Others made more interpretive videos, but all of them were really cool, and it was interesting to see how everyone interpreted the assignment. 

For my project, I did the song "Radioactive" by a band called Imagine Dragons. I really liked the feel and the beat of the song, and I used it to create my general theme of "red" and "sparks." 

My Lyric Video Project

I really liked this project because it gave me a chance to figure out After Effects for myself, and use the information I learned in class. I used many of the effects I learned in the class, but I also utilized one of our class resources. This great website, Videocopilot.net specializes in 3D effects in After Effects and other various motion graphics software.

If you're interested in motion graphics and animation, feel free to ask me about the class! Good luck with registration :)