How to make the effect of the perspective of a camera recording?

musman wrote on 2/21/2004, 1:18 AM

I'm looking to do make it look like the perspective through a camera- with the lines demarking the safe zones and also a blinking red record light. That kind of thing. I figure I could make the blinking light pretty easily, but the rest I have no idea. I wouldn't even begin to know how to do a search for something like this.
The problem is I'm doing one of those make a movie in 48 hours type of things, so I was hoping there was a nice script somewhere or something like that.
Can anyone help me out? Thanks ahead of time and wish me luck!

Comments

stormstereo wrote on 2/21/2004, 3:00 AM

How about drawing that stuff in Photoshop, make sure the alpha channel is there and save to TGA or PNG? Then put it on the uppermost video track and drag the edge to desired lenght? Oh, and by the way, my red dot does only blink when the tape or battery is near the end. BUT for a viewer in front of the TV it might be perceptively better with a blinking one. Sometimes I've seen the word REC beside the red dot.
Best/Tommy

mark30 wrote on 2/21/2004, 3:26 AM

You can make an easy blinking red dot with the media generators..
Just create the red circle you want, and keyframe it on and off..

gr
Mark

Chienworks wrote on 2/21/2004, 6:01 AM

I've got some safe area overlays stored as transparent .gif files here: http://www.chienworks.com/media/. Place one of these on a track above the main video and you'll get the dashed lines superimposed. Drag out the duration as long as you need it to be.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/21/2004, 5:53 PM

OK Kelly, I gotta ask: What’s with the vegasmixer.gif and vocalremove.gif? (the vocal remove menu is quite funny) I assume the vegas mixer is a spoof too. There’s gotta be a good story behind these. ;-)

~jr

Chienworks wrote on 2/21/2004, 8:47 PM

JR, yeah, they're from way way back. The vocalremove picture is obviously a spoof on all the "how do i remove the vocals" threads. The mixer was in response to a bunch of requests for a "vertical slider" window. Apparently there is a rather large & vocal minority of users who don't feel comfortable mixing with Vegas' horizontal layout and wanted a more traditional set of controls. That was my suggestion for a compact vertical layout. SonicFoundry's official response was "No promises". I'm sure if you do some diligent searching you can find the relevant threads.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/21/2004, 9:53 PM

That’s funny, I was looking at Ableton Live 3.0 recording software and it has an option to switch from horizontal to vertical mode with the sliders. I’d imagine if you spent a good number of years sitting at a recording console you kind of make a mental picture of the vertical faders in your mind and its hard to transpose that image. I guess you could add an audio bus for each channel in Vegas 4 and get vertical sliders that way. ;-)

I know Sonar and other audio apps all have vertical faders so I can see their point. I’m trying to find the right MIDI composing software myself and if Vegas had MIDI and VST instrument support I wouldn’t be looking at apps like Sonar. Acid just isn’t good for MIDI composition either. I guess we all have our own wish list for future Vegas versions.

~jr

musman wrote on 2/22/2004, 1:13 AM

DOn't have much time, but wanted to say thanks. No sleep till 7pm when movie is due.
Wish luck, please!

JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/22/2004, 6:35 PM

Ashley,

I made you an animated gif file that may do what you want. You can get it here. Just place it on the track above where you want the effect. It already has a transparency and the red record light blinks. Stretch it out as far as you need it. Let me know if you need it modified in any way and I’ll see what I can do. I can be reached at john_rofrano at hotmail dot com.

~jr

TorS wrote on 2/23/2004, 1:42 AM

How do you like the generosity of this forum?

If you still would like to create a viewfinder screen yourself, here's a tip: Your system ought to have a font called "symbol". In it, you'll find the characters alt+0233, alt+0249, alt+0235 and alt+0251. When put together clockwise from top left they will form the corners of a rectangle, like you would expect to see in a viewfinder. To add text like f-stops etc is just a matter of adding a text event on a track above. Same with the red light.
Tor

PeterWright wrote on 2/23/2004, 2:05 AM

Tors - time to call on some of your generosity.

I tried opening the Text Generator, called up Symbol, held down alt and hit the +0233 keys - nothing happened.

So I went to Character Map and found a "top left corner" shape in Symbol - referred to as 0xE9. I then tried to put alternate horizontal lines, like a "safe zone", across the top , but I couldn't find a dash which lined up with the top of the "inverted mirrored L"

Please help a flounderer ......

TorS wrote on 2/23/2004, 3:31 AM

You can always put the dash in a separate event on another track.

There ought to be a place where you can choose between hex and regular numbers in your character map. But these things may well be different in different Windows versions. I'm on 89SE.

By the way, you must hav numlock ON when you add those characters.
Tor

JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/23/2004, 7:00 AM

It’s important to note that these number combinations only work on the Numeric Keypad! This is why TorS said that numlock has to be on. So the procedure is: make sure NumLock is ON, hold down the Alt key and type 0 2 3 3 on the Numeric keypad, then lift you finger off the Alt key and the character will appear. You can do this in any text editor too. This is an old DOS trick for those of us who remember DOS. ;-)

~jr

PeterWright wrote on 2/23/2004, 5:13 PM

Thanks for explaining that Johnny - it works!

Presumably there are Reference books telling which number produces which symbol.

Chienworks wrote on 2/23/2004, 5:19 PM

http://www.chienworks.com/webinfo/charcode.html

This is only for the standard roman type fonts, but it's a good starting point.

JohnnyRoy wrote on 2/23/2004, 6:56 PM

The characters change with each font. Try the Character Map utility, which will show you the characters, the numeric codes (in the lower left corner), and it allows you to copy characters to the clipboard to paste into an application. This is much easier than remembering the numbers. The Character Map can be found under: Start -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Character Map.

~jr