Illustrating a Freeze-Frame

N

nacroswnd

New member
Hello All,

I'm making a short DVD for a local softball coaching clinic. The idea is that full motion video of techniques, drills, etc. will be more useful than diagrams for volunteer coaches to improve their coaching skills.

I have some good footage of kids executing the techniques correctly and with common errors. I want to freeze the footage at certain places and illustrate the freeze frame. For example, I might freeze a hitter at impact to show proper palm up/palm down hand position, and then highlight the proper hand position by drawing an arrow up from one palm and another arrow down from the other palm.

I had hoped to use Motion to do this, but after a little bit of hair-pulling and manual reading, I find that Motion does not respect FCP's clip retiming (thus my clips don't have the freeze frame effect).

Does anyone have any suggestions about how to "illustrate" a freeze frame with arrows, lines, circles etc. ?

Thanks,
Dave
 
first way that comes to mind is layers in PSD format. then you use transitions and key framys and mattes to make the layers say one layer of an arrow another layer is text etc... and just put the layers in your timeline.
 
Nope, I do this almost daily and never leave FCP, it's the easiest thing in the world.

First, I'd recommend considering an alternative technique I use for training videos. Layer your shot on two tracks. First track, matte out the section to highlight. Second track, lower the Opacity. You can key frame so that the frame dims quickly with only yoru selected areas still at full brightness. Very effective.

For doing arrows and circles, I use Stibb's Generators. Very super easy, super fast, you can keyframe everything, and they're free. I don't have a URL, but a search for Stibbs Filters would find them, I'd assume. Nothing's as fast or easy.
 
BenB said:
Nope, I do this almost daily and never leave FCP, it's the easiest thing in the world.

First, I'd recommend considering an alternative technique I use for training videos. Layer your shot on two tracks. First track, matte out the section to highlight. Second track, lower the Opacity. You can key frame so that the frame dims quickly with only yoru selected areas still at full brightness. Very effective.

For doing arrows and circles, I use Stibb's Generators. Very super easy, super fast, you can keyframe everything, and they're free. I don't have a URL, but a search for Stibbs Filters would find them, I'd assume. Nothing's as fast or easy.
Click to expand...

Perfection. Thank you so much. I figured out how to make it work in Motion (with out the Freeze Frame), but this is way, way easier and faster. I'll probably have to do this kind of thing to about 50 shots. This helps tremendously.

By the way, if anyone encountering a similar problem feels absolutely compelled to try this in Motion, the steps go like this. Make a freeze frame, be sure you make it the right length, because it sucks to change it later. Export a still image of the freeze frame. Open Motion and set the clip length to match the freeze frame in FCP. Put the freeze frame still on a layer. Create whatever motion graphics you're looking for. Export the motion clip as an animation (Lossless + Alpha). In FCP, place the motion clip on a track above the freeze frame.
 
I still prefer to do it fast and easy inside FCP and not fool with all the going back and forth. It's not enough graphic work, "to me" to justify the extra time in Motion, when you're doing something FCP will do itself very easily.

I also took Stibb's circle and arrow generators and made them Favorites, since I use them extensively in training videos every day. So I don't have to go searching for them.
 
Nice tip, Ben. I've found the FCP>Motion round trip isn't too bad once you get used to the process, assuming one has the rig for it [nice video card and RAM.] but for little stuff like arrows and circles that's a nice plugin to know about.
 
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