special effects help needed

astral_supreme wrote on 9/27/2002, 8:03 AM
Hello...I have some questions about possible digital special effects creation.

I take a short 60sec video and want to add a special effect. I take this short film from the media pool and put it far in the back of my projects time line. I then "stretch" this out over the time line. I pull it so far it can not be pulled no more. This is when I see hundreds of frames from this short 60 sec video. I then keep cutting and streching to make the video in its purest form. (strecth to "frame by frame" size.) I then get a .jpg of one of my frames. I send this into another program like microsoft paint and color the eyes of the actor red. I save this jpeg and replace it into my media pool. I then take it from my media pool and overlay it in the timeline in the exact place it was copy from. The end resulting effect is during playback for a brief moment the charactors eyes flash red...pretty cool but very limited and hard to line up. Vegas doesnt let me stretch out the movie far enough to do frame by frame editing such as this. Many cool special effects can be realistically drawn in ...or with effects from adobe photshop7.0 the jpegs can seriously be manipulated and replaced in vegas for some wicked effects. I would like to no if any one can help me with these questions:
1. Is there any way to stretch my clip all the way out?
2. Is sonic foundry considering the future of special "digital" effects?
3. Does any one else have any cool ideas for digitial visual effects?
4. Can you design a program that makes what I am tring to do easier?...sample program theory below....

The bluescreen easy manipulator plugin:
Sometimes during the streching up to 30 pictures can look the same and that is alot of jpegs to create and color. So you stretch the "film" and select your 30 frames at once. There is an apply effect to all frames button for time saving; each frame is shown in full screne in a 30 page flipbook (check out how coreldraw art dabber flibook animations works) microsoft paint already has "fill with paint" brush and other usefool tools. You are now given a toolbox like in coreldraw artdabber and microsoft paint and can edit your frames.. frame by frame!!! just like they were jpegs. Add photo layers..spray paint fog...shade in areas to be darker...perform bluescreen editing with cut copy paste and layer...posibilities are endless...then render project(30frames) back to timeline. You can see the need for this software...it is the next level...the hollywood level...and your customers are ready. Thanks for your time...astral

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 9/27/2002, 1:02 PM
When you say "stretch", what exactly are you doing to stretch? What keys are you pressing or where are you clicking with the mouse? I would associate "stretch" with lengthening the clip to make it play in slow motion, which i don't think is what you want to do. But since this stretching is limited to 4x and you mention that you can't stretch all the way out to frame by frame, i get the feeling that this is what you're doing.

I think what you want to do is "zoom", which is accomplished by using the up arrow key to zoom in or down arrow key to zoom out. You can also click on the + and - buttons next to the horizontal scroll bar underneath the timeline. With zooming you can show individual frames very easily. Press the up arrow until the very last digit of the time display above the timeline increments by 1, for example: 00:00:34.02   00:00:34.03   00:00:34.04   00:00:34.05 each of these indicates an individual frame.
astral_supreme wrote on 9/27/2002, 2:45 PM
the left and right zoom did stretch out the project, but is hard to see because the frames are small. when I zoom up and down the frames look bigger but get compressed again. Thanks for the tip tho.