Hey Jim. Good job- I bet the boys really liked it... and the coach for that matter. Did you use Alan's picture wall II for the background image?

j razz

Thanks. I used Andrea's Mosaic for the coache's photo...over 2000 photos I think... It made one huge jpg and when I migrated to V7 it would not even load -kept crashing... so if I want to go back and edit it I need to use V6.

The morphs were done with WinMorph and the smoke was done with Bluff Titler.

Here's another bit of the presentation with a little live video. Note I handed my video camera to a parent to get the race scenes because I was taking stills... but it's not too shabby.

I hesitate uploading real video footage to you guys. Excuse the render, it's a bit compressed... also I don't spend much time worrying about color correction or that sort of thing... I'm a point and shoot guy that tries to make up for technical issues in post.... heh heh.

Bees Sting Manhattan

Though I must point out, Vegas seems to wash out my HD footage. If I play the raw M2T files through the camera or with Nero, they look much more saturated. It's really noticable in other sections of the video when I use video next to stills. The video looks pale.

The showing is a week from Monday.. ... so I have another week to tweak.

Definitely check out www.MyPublisher.com

You can put 80 pictures in a $10 book (last time I looked) -
you/they will LOVE it -

v

Jim, the winmorph was the best I've ever seen. What things do you do to get that good of an effect other than make sure the face sizes are all the same? What shapes do you do for the comparison? I usually place things like some circles on the eyes, mouth, nose, etc, but it never comes out that good. Very nice!

Jim,

Excellent work with your usual attention to detail. The morphing was very effective.
Can I ask the significance of Dwayne's caption at 2:08 (or should I not ask)

Alan

Cheroxy, Though I did have some problems with hair, neck and jersey, I was happy with the face morphs. I can post a screenshot when I get back to my workstation, but generally I trace the eyelids, cornea, brow, nose, nostrils, lips, frownlines, face, hair, ears. For a free program, Winmorph really offers a lot of control... it even does video (which I have not tried yet).

Alan, "Dwayne" is some ficticous kid who was made up at the spur of the moment to deflect blame for some school bus antics. When the coach asked who was in the back of the bus fooling around, one of the kids shouted "Dwayne." The coach seemed happy with the answer even though there is no Dwayne on the team... the kids thought that was pretty funny, so Dwayne lives on.

The point in the vid where Dwayne shows up is the midpoint between a particularly painful morph. The long hair was really killing me so I had to create an interim image "Dwayne" with the eyes and hair only. The resultant morph looks bizarre and is twice as long as the others so it seemed a good spot to give Dwayne a shout out... conveniently, the long haired kid before Dwayne is the guy who made him up.

Ah, I understand now. Thanks for the explanation.

Looks like you created a bit of a monster there :~)

Your video took me back 43 years. I would have *treasured* such a video of my team. Fully half the members are no longer living, yet we were the So Cal champs in my high school senior year.

As an athlete, I would have also liked my name, class, team position (I was number 5 and my claim to fame was "always second-to-last in the race, always beat my man"), and best time morphed along with my image. 43 years later I can see most of the faces, yet all but one of the names elude me, even our own invisible "Dwayne".

You have no idea of the emotion your vid has brought to me, but I am not ashamed to say there are tears of joyful memory flowing as I type this.

Thank you for sharing. I had completely forgotten that even those bus rides are events in themselves.

"Though I must point out, Vegas seems to wash out my HD footage. If I play the raw M2T files through the camera or with Nero, they look much more saturated. It's really noticable in other sections of the video when I use video next to stills. The video looks pale."

We shoot Z1U's, and immediately noticed that wash-out effect ourselves. Nero seems to do a "bass boost" thing to the saturation, and the camera viewer gives a rich saturation. So we set Zebra to 80 and shoot with very little zebra, if any. That keeps us matched to Vegas for production work, and we don't use Nero anymore.

Jim, I read that WinMorph can be used as a plug-in for Vegas. Did you use it this way, or did you use it as a standalone and bring the results into Vegas?

Dave, thanks for the comments... At one point I had plans to put all the kids names across the bottom...now that I have time I may just do that... or scroll them at the end if it's too distracting.

I used Winmorph stand alone seeing that it was stills that I was morphing.... I think that if you're working with video, using it as a vegas plug in may be the way to go...

Ok, endulge me while I post one more clip for fun. The kids made up this "magic" spike they call the Omega Thruster. They insert it into their shoes for a boost... makes your realize that even though they act grown up sometimes..they're still kids playing games:

Omega

Oh, maaaaan! Even more memories! We each had "The Golden Spike" (team colors were blue and gold). Cool commercial. Thanks.

Our "home course" was about 1 mile away from the track field, so instead of taking a bus we'd all pile into Coach's '53 Chevy and off we'd go. Varsity and JV, so that made 10 guys + coach and his gear bag. We could get 3 runners plus Coach and his bag in the front seat, 6 in the back seat (yep, sitting in two rows, two high) and, uh, oh yeah, Richard Wheeler riding in the trunk! Geeze, see, bringing back these memories even brought back a name.

Jim what you are doing for these guys will pay off for decades. Funny, memorable stuff *their* kids will ROTFLTAO.

SUPER cool, Jim - I loved it very much

Thanks for sharing - sure gave me some ideas to try out some day.

/Ulf

Very nice. You've given me some ideas for my yearly x-mas presents...