Paintbrush stroke effect

Colin Basterfield wrote on 2/24/2013, 1:53 AM

Hi,

I am creating a short video which realises my short story, called Revenge.

I have lots of actual footage of where I pictured what happens happen, but some of it I want to be more abstract, so as not to just show everything that the words conjure.

One of the sentences reads, "The bride in white, stands out against black tuxedos and magnolia dresses."

The black tuxedos are the men at the wedding, and the magnolia dresses are the bridesmaids.

Now rather than film the actual scene with actors and actresses, I want to just have a paint brush sweep go across the screen, first a white one, then a black one, then a magnolia one, perhaps leaving each previous colour on the screen, with the white one in the middle.

My question is, I wondered whether there was an effect that I could use that would give the effect of a colour being swept across the screen, as though a paint brush stroke?

Any ideas anyone?

Many thanks in advance.
Colin

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Colin Basterfield wrote on 2/25/2013, 6:16 PM

Hi Grazie,

Sorry I've not got back sooner.

Your transition is cool, but it wasn't quite what I had in mind.

It's great that so many questions are being asked as it's forcing me to a deeper insight into what's in my head.

OK, the footage I have which will run thro'out this effect, i.e. it will sit behind it and the brush strokes will basically appear over the top. What I thought would be cool however would be if just prior to the brushstrokes, the footage of the sandy inlet transitions to the New Blue ST Coloured pencil for example, or their Cartoonr which will lead the viewer into a more abstract space, which in a sense could also lead them to wonder if the narrator is merely imagining the whole thing.

So now we have the footage in a 'surreal' space, we simply put the three brush strokes over the top., one after the other, white in the middle, then black on one side and then peach on the other. We won't be able to see what's behind the brush stoke, but as the strokes don't cover the screen the image will still be visible on the edges of the footage, i.e. where there's no paint.

Given that I'm going to take a look at the link to the library of brush strokes and see what that can do for me. I am also considering getting some test paint pots from the local paint store and some glass.

Many thanks for your help Grazie.
Colin

Colin Basterfield wrote on 2/25/2013, 6:20 PM

Hi Duncan,

That is exactly it, albeit that I had a much bigger brush in mind. I also had the brush going up, but that's irrelevant.

Could I use GIMP to do that?

Cheers
Colin

Duncan H wrote on 2/25/2013, 6:55 PM

Hi Colin,

Thanks and I'm glad it helped. It really is very easy. I haven't spent much time with Gimp, but it should be ideal for the job. Just set your Gimp page properties to the size of the video (e.g 1920 X 1080 pixels for H.D) and background to transparent. Then use whatever "brushes" are available in Gimp (I guess you'd be looking to set brush width to about 1/3 of the video horizontal pixel resolution,to achieve your graphic and save this as a .png with alpha channel (transparency). Then simply move the brushstroke, change it's colour (e.g to black) and save, then repeat once more, saving the "magnolia / peach colour" resave. You now have 3 different .png images saved, with the same brushstroke in different positions and different colours.

Set up your Vegas timeline with 4 video tracks. The various colours each occupy the top 3 tracks and your beach video on the bottom track.

I then simply included an empty event (insert>empty event) on each of the image tracks, overlapping the empty event with the image. Then simply drag a Sony wipe transition onto the overlap between the empty event and the image on each track and adjust the transition controls as they appear. Simply drag the RH edge of each image on it's track to enable the "white bride" to remain on screen for the duration, similarly with the "black groom" and voila, you're done.

Hope this makes sense and good luck.

Duncan

Colin Basterfield wrote on 2/25/2013, 7:47 PM

That's great Duncan, it certainly reads easy.

The only problem which may reveal me as a pedant, but I wonder if any of the graphics programs have a brush tool that actually looks like a paint brush?

The other thing I stumbled on was that if the output of your suggested exercise was three png files, then if I could find the stroke pattern I want, I could just move it into position and colour it accordingly, e.g.

http://www.everystockphoto.com/photo.php?imageId=4988972&searchId=c1940aeeb9693a02e28c52eb85ce261c&npos=217

Obviously this one in particular would be rather difficult to colour due to the finer of the streaks, but it's a thought, nonetheless.

Cheers
Colin

rs170a wrote on 2/25/2013, 8:19 PM

I wonder if any of the graphics programs have a brush tool that actually looks like a paint brush?

Google photoshop paint brush brush and you'll find a lot of free ones.

Mike

Duncan H wrote on 2/25/2013, 10:12 PM

Hi Colin,

Found a little more time. Here's my latest (& last!) effort. Hope this is getting closer.

[Link=

Regards,

Duncan

Colin Basterfield wrote on 2/25/2013, 11:28 PM

Hi Duncan,

That's far closer. What graphics package did you use out of interest?

Thanks for taking the time to do that for me. Given my knowledge of Sony Vegas, I doubt I'll be able to return the favour, well unless you want a story or poem writing.

Cheers
Colin

Duncan H wrote on 2/26/2013, 12:07 AM

I used a brilliant and very cost effective program called Xara (www.xara.com), costs about $70. It is the most underrated graphics package, it is a brilliant tool for many things and I find it invaluable for video stills. Its primarily a Vector package and I use it daily. Incredibly easy to use and just so versatile.(Did I mention I like this program?). BTW, I don't have any affiliation with the Co.

I simply painted on some brush strokes (plain big vector strokes), then simply applied some distress to the resultant shape to make it appear as it did, recoloured each and it's done.

Don't worry about returning the favour, this is a really helpful group and no one expects or keeps account of favours. I've learnt pretty much all I know about Vegas here and there are any number of real experts, I'm just an enthusiastic learner!

Regards,

Duncan

Grazie wrote on 2/26/2013, 1:35 AM

Colin, you're very welcome.

I've enjoyed the "journey" and have learnt loads along the way - it also gave me the opportunity to improve my Composting skills - which is always a good thing! I've now got a VEG ready for a client to impress them with.

Cheers

Grazie

farss wrote on 2/26/2013, 2:29 AM

Here's my effort:

Done only with Vegas and Videohive's PaintbrushStrokes ($6.00)

Project file is here.

I have not included the background footage or the Videohives footage to keep the download size manageable and because I cannot giveaway Videohives content.

My interpretation of "magnolia" is probably way off however all three colours are created using Vegas's Generated Media so very simple to change.

Bob.

Colin Basterfield wrote on 3/3/2013, 7:04 PM

many thanks for this!

Colin Basterfield wrote on 3/4/2013, 3:18 PM

Talking of composting, we've got a great worm farm. See www.hungrybin.co.nz - grin

Seriously though, until I read and saw Bob's example, I didn't realise how much I didn't know about compositing. In fact I'm still figuring out how to get my video to appear underneath the paint strokes...

Cheers
Colin

Colin Basterfield wrote on 3/4/2013, 3:30 PM

Was this the program to which you refer?

http://www.xara.com/us/products/designer/

Cheers
Colin

Colin Basterfield wrote on 3/4/2013, 3:47 PM

Hi Bob,

We were away at the weekend, so have only just come back to this.

So I bought the VideoHive paint strokes your link pointed to (NZ$10) and I put them in place of the ones your license prevented you from leaving in the veg project you so kindly sent through to me. The ones I got have a black background and the paint is white, but the different colours you have underneath came through.

In your project I noticed below the three paint strokes and their associated colours, you have a solid colour grey, which seems to allow my video footage that I added to come through. Once that solid colour grey event ends, the preview screen goes black, i.e. my video footage isn't getting through any masks above. This is also true for the events where the three coloured paintstrokes are happening. I just get a black screen and the coloured paint stroke, even though the video footage seems to have all the settings as you had them for that track, as do all the others.

It's clear my compositing knowledge is sub-optimal. Could you point me to a you tube link or white paper that'll help me get up to speed and solve this problem.

The problem with constantly searching for knowledge is that it's really easy to undervalue what one does know...

Many thanks for your time.
Best
Colin

farss wrote on 3/4/2013, 5:32 PM

Colin,
the track of solid grey was just there so I could easily see what I was doing.
What I'd suggest you do is to delete that media from the track and put your footage in its place.

I would really urge you to look through the project and have a look at each and every element to try to get an understanding of what it is doing. Compositing is a dark art that it's taken me the best part of a decade to come to grips with.
Today my goto tool for sompositing is After Effects but I really learned a lot just using Vegas. The only reasons I use AE is it's built from the ground up to be an easy to use (NOT easy to learn) compositing tool.

Some things you can see used in my project which the Vegas manual covers are:

Bezier Mask. Used to isolate each one of the strokes.
The Mask Generator FX, this converts the B&W strokes into an alpha channel i.e. the black is transparent, the white opaque.
Parent / child relationships. This makes the white stoke into the colour but leaves the rest transparent.
A Velocity Envelope. This freezes each stroke by changing the playback speed from 100% to 0%.

Bob.

Colin Basterfield wrote on 3/4/2013, 6:40 PM

Hi Bob,

It's funny, yesterday my brain wasn't on input mode, or perhaps through a tea strainer. Today however, it seems to be grasping stuff so much better.

Thank you so much for taking the time to point out what had been used in the project you sent through. It's much appreciated.

Compositing - ten years? jeepers that's scary...

I've done some playing around with Bezier Mask. the little arms on the end of each placed point confused me for a while, but I'm more comfortable with that now. I assume as the paint stroke stayed more or less in the same place, unlike say a moving cars number plate, you didn't have to move the mask much? The paintstrokes I got are far more free flowing than on yours, but I should be able to mask out a consistent piece of it.

I discovered the Mask Generator FX earlier from a tutorial I found on YouTube. I assume those were placed on the removed videohive events as that seems to be where they need to go?

I found a video tutorial from one of the guys at SCS on the parent child relationships.

The velocity envelope is new to me so I'll have a play around with that.

Once again, thanks for your time. I'm hoping you've cut the ten year learning curve down for me to something far less daunting.

Best
Colin