Follow the bouncing ball!!

Rock_Lee · Post by **Rock_Lee** » Wed May 26, 2004 10:13 am

Does any one know how to make one of those "sing along" bouncing balls that bounce along with the words in a video? Im using Vegas and P

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Wed May 26, 2004 11:21 am

First of all, just make an image of the ball. Now in Premiere, you would just use the motion settings or the transform effect to move the ball around. In Vegas, there is something similar to Premiere's motion settings, but I forget what it's called.

TaranT · Post by **TaranT** » Wed May 26, 2004 12:23 pm

With Vegas, right-click the clip or picture of the ball and select Video Event Pan/Crop. Then start manipulating keyframes and positions. The Vegas Media Generator can also be used to create the colored ball on a transparent background.

It's going to be difficult to create nice curves (cycloids?) whether you use Premiere or Vegas. I believe Vegas will do some Bezier or Bezier-like interpolation, but sometimes that's more of a hassle than a help. It also creates "inertia" on the keyframed motions if you want it (and sometimes if you don't).

Vegas under WinXP supports scripting which might be a way to do this easily. I don't know if Premiere allows this or not. Somewhere on the Web is a page with many Vegas scripts that you can download, but I don't have the address anymore.

Joykiller · Post by **Joykiller** » Wed May 26, 2004 1:32 pm

TaranT wrote:With Vegas, right-click the clip or picture of the ball and select Video Event Pan/Crop. Then start manipulating keyframes and positions. The Vegas Media Generator can also be used to create the colored ball on a transparent background.

It's going to be difficult to create nice curves (cycloids?) whether you use Premiere or Vegas. I believe Vegas will do some Bezier or Bezier-like interpolation, but sometimes that's more of a hassle than a help. It also creates "inertia" on the keyframed motions if you want it (and sometimes if you don't).

Vegas under WinXP supports scripting which might be a way to do this easily. I don't know if Premiere allows this or not. Somewhere on the Web is a page with many Vegas scripts that you can download, but I don't have the address anymore.

Wouldn't it just be easier to render out a movie of the ball bouncing straight up and down against a blue or green background to the timing that you desire, and then reimport that movie, chroma key it and move it from left to right and back as needed? Seems like that would give you all the smooth curves you need, as well as infinate control.... Might take a little time, but really any of the methods mentioned will....

If you had After Effects on the other hand, this would be rediculously easy to do.

bum · Post by **bum** » Wed May 26, 2004 8:30 pm

Joykiller wrote: If you had After Effects on the other hand, this would be rediculously easy to do.

well, besides the fact that after effects is ridiculously hard to use

bum · Post by **bum** » Wed May 26, 2004 8:38 pm

ah, excuse my last post. i just thought of this now.

anyway, ya can do this if your using vegas 5 (which allows swf imports, otehrwise ya'l have to convert the file to another format). download 3d flash animator from www.3dfa.com . its a greate program and realy easy to use. oh and it allow's you to create track motion for objects realy easily (like, the object follows the line you drew, i think, havent used it in ages). so just use that to create the moving ball thing.

oh and, ya can do te same effect with vegas (4 and 5, mabey 3) with keyframs, but itl probaly turn out taking ages unless a want a crooked zigzag effect

Scintilla · Post by **Scintilla** » Thu May 27, 2004 1:09 am

TaranT wrote:It's going to be difficult to create nice curves (cycloids?) whether you use Premiere or Vegas. I believe Vegas will do some Bezier or Bezier-like interpolation, but sometimes that's more of a hassle than a help.

Premiere Pro 1.5 is also supposed to be able to do bézier curves on things like motion paths, if I've read the advertisements correctly...

TaranT · Post by **TaranT** » Thu May 27, 2004 2:23 am

Joykiller wrote:Wouldn't it just be easier to render out a movie of the ball bouncing straight up and down against a blue or green background to the timing that you desire, and then reimport that movie, chroma key it and move it from left to right and back as needed? Seems like that would give you all the smooth curves you need, as well as infinate control.... Might take a little time, but really any of the methods mentioned will....

This actually works...almost. Took me about 10 minutes to set up in Vegas. If you make a clip with two or more bounces, and then use the left-right motion settings, what happens is the ball looks like it's riding a wave or sine curve. In other words, it doesn't bounce. Which may be ok depending on what you want.

To get the bounce, I made a clip with only one up-down cycle. Then I just placed copies of the one clip on the timeline making sure the pan-crop setting at the end of one matches the setting at the start of the next.

If the single clip is long enough, then you can squeeze it to fit different time lengths for each word (assuming this is for karaoke).

TaranT · Post by **TaranT** » Thu May 27, 2004 2:31 am

Scintilla wrote:Premiere Pro 1.5 is also supposed to be able to do bézier curves on things like motion paths, if I've read the advertisements correctly...

I hope they do it better than Vegas 4 which doesn't give you the Bezier controls. Instead you get about half a dozen preset curves that attach to each keyframe point. Even that's not too bad, or wouldn't be if Linear was actually linear. It's one of the few gripes I have about Vegas.

Vegas 5 has completely reworked the track motion functions. Maybe this has been fixed or improved.

bum · Post by **bum** » Thu May 27, 2004 5:35 am

think ive found the answer. click here

. (oh and, ya can get more examples from http://www.creativecow.net/articles/vegas_veggies.html )