How do you do this?

Hi Mac,

This is a very easy shot to do. But its not entirely done in Vegas. First during production you will have to shoot 2 shots. Have the camera locked off, Which means no movement whatsoever. First shoot the spot empty without the jeep (a few seconds of footage will do). Actually even a frame will just do since there are no moving elements such as trees etc. Now you have one clean frame. This is known as the clean plate in the industry. Next park the jeep on the road so its approx on the left half of the video frame as in your example. Then have the guy run down etc. He should only be in the right side of the video frame. Ill tell you why later. Now take your main footage and load it onto the vegas timeline. Create a video track above the main video and load your clean plate frame onto that. You can stretch the image out to play as long as you like. Now cut a hole into the upper track (the clean plate video/still frame). This hole will show the main video and no one will know that they are 2 different videos. Your actor should pay no attention to the jeep. Then he should suddenly act as if its appeared. At that moment just finish the clean plate making sure it ends on the upper track. So at that instant your left side clean plate will seamlessly vanish revealing the car in that location. I hope you understood. For the smoke you just create it using some fx generator and lay that on the top of both of these tracks. Just to overlap the area where the car appears. It can be done with pan and crop. If you have any further doubts let us know.
 
thanks plainman. i'm actually just looking for the smoke effect. what fx generator should i use? do i need to buy other software? what do you recommend? thanks.

-adam
 
There's no particle generator in Vegas which will produce smoke like that. You can keyframe, say, the cloud templates in the Media Generator, but you probably won't get results like that.

In the past, I've drawn frames in Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro and animated them to produce smoky explosions.
 
The one FX generator which can give you exactly that effect is Particle Illusion. Go to their website i think its wondertouch.com. You can download the free version, there is no time limit on the free version only that it can do very large frame sizes. But for SD work you can get away with the free version because mostly you will render out and then use the video clip in a much smaller size within your orginal video frame. In a situation like this it will hold enough clarity to be used even for pro work. I know because ive used it. You can even customise the smoke to any color, size of fragments etc. Basically you get a rendered video file out of it of the smoke puffing away. The you import this clip into vegas and over lay it onto the video and resize the smoke clip to fit the are you want it to cover. Particle illusion can render as tga or even uncompressed avi with transparency built in. Or anyway the rest of the frame will black so you can directly overlay using add within vegas compositing modes. I think you know the rest of the route. As David says you can create this smoke element within vegas. Vegas is only an NLE and has by far the best compositing (mixing abilities,,but not creating the actual effect as explained above) tools you might ever need for this kind of SFX work.
 
This brings up something I've been wondering about for a while. I want to have an actor in a scene walk out of the frame, and have some text revealed that his body was blocking. That clip does this when the truck pulls out of the shot. How could I accomplish that?
 
You'd have to use a bezier mask. You'd keyframe the mask to stay with the truck on one track. Below that track, you'd have your text. Below that, you'd have another copy of the same clip with the truck.
 
Well I think I figured my part out. I wish I didn't have to keyframe every little bit. I wonder if there's a way to get all of the black parts to be transparent. Anyway, here's what I ended up with.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujxGKTiBQ_M

Would this have been any easier if I'd shot my subject in front of greenscreen first?
 
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DammitJanet > Yeah thats possible with some luma/ matte masks and stuff. But thats too complex. In fact, for your text reveal question i wouldnt even suggest 2 layers of video. Too complex for this requirement. That method is used for more complex FX like that of the orginal posters question. For this text thing i would suggest having the video on track 2 and the text on video track 1. Then animate a positive bezier mask on this text layer to reveal the text in line with the moving trucks etc. You can avoid the complexity of having 2 video layers having the same video which may be a lil intensive on your system (hinders your realtime preview ability). Ive done this before so i can assure you it will work satisfactorily. The other technique of pulling a matte using black values etc is something i know only in theory. Havent tried it yet !
 
I'm all about an easier way to do that. Can you elaborate a bit on the process? When I made that clip I had to search Help for Bezier Mask and teach myself from there, so any sort of walkthrough would be fantastic.
 
plainman007 said:
Hi Mac,

This is a very easy shot to do. But its not entirely done in Vegas. First during production you will have to shoot 2 shots. Have the camera locked off, Which means no movement whatsoever. First shoot the spot empty without the jeep (a few seconds of footage will do). Actually even a frame will just do since there are no moving elements such as trees etc. Now you have one clean frame. This is known as the clean plate in the industry. Next park the jeep on the road so its approx on the left half of the video frame as in your example. Then have the guy run down etc. He should only be in the right side of the video frame. Ill tell you why later. Now take your main footage and load it onto the vegas timeline. Create a video track above the main video and load your clean plate frame onto that. You can stretch the image out to play as long as you like. Now cut a hole into the upper track (the clean plate video/still frame). This hole will show the main video and no one will know that they are 2 different videos. Your actor should pay no attention to the jeep. Then he should suddenly act as if its appeared. At that moment just finish the clean plate making sure it ends on the upper track. So at that instant your left side clean plate will seamlessly vanish revealing the car in that location. I hope you understood. For the smoke you just create it using some fx generator and lay that on the top of both of these tracks. Just to overlap the area where the car appears. It can be done with pan and crop. If you have any further doubts let us know.
Click to expand...

I'm not so vegas savvy, how do you cut a hole in the upper track to reveal the track below? secondly how do you create positive beizer masking?
Thanks!!
 
DammitJanet & Jinks > You cut a hole in the text (upper video track) by making a mask. The way to do this is to open the pan and crop tool for that clip. You will see 2 small icons on the corner of each of your clips. Click the upper icon. This will open the pan and crop tool for that clip. In that you can see a small timeline like panel on the bottom end. There you will find a panel named MASK on the left. Just activate the mask by ticking the box. Then click on that MASK word. This will show a new bunch of tools on the left of your video. They look just like some photoshop pen tools. Select the topmost pen tool and draw around our text. Then you will see options as you start drawing which will allow you to set the mask to be positive or negative. Positive shows what is inside your marked area. Negative hows only whats outside thereby eliminating whats in your selected area. You can also select feathering options etc etc. Fiddle around and youll get the hang of it. Make sure your titles/text is in png or tga or psd format with transparency all around the text. ie text on a transparent layer.
 
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