A couple (five of them) of questions from a n00b.

[Dan-E]

Hi I’m kind of new at making AMVs, and I have a couple of questions…

1. If I want to cut a piece of say a certain video frame out of its original context and put it over another piece of video (like say I want to cut out Goku from a frame capture I have and put him into a Naruto background), how do I go about doing this to make it look ‘nice’?? I’ve watched Shounen Bushido, and the people were cut out so well, that they didn’t have a border around them, something which I ALWAYS get when trying to do this. (I use photoshop 7.0, and premiere 6.0 if that helps).

2. I’ve seen a lot of videos where a ‘shaking’ effect is used, where the video shakes around like someone is well…shaking it. I’m assuming, since I’ve been searching for a while in Premiere, that I need After Effects to do this, but if there is another way…

3. Another effect, used in ‘Whisper of the Beast’, that I’ve been referring to as the ‘image pan,’ I don’t know how to do. What happens, is that the screen is focused on one half of the image to begin with, and then pans over to the other half. Again, I assume this must be after effects as I cannot find it in premiere, but if not…

4. I have several video files that become ‘pixely’ whenever something fast happens i.e. someone getting punched. This ‘pixeliness’ or whatever you want to call it happens only when I put samples of the video on the timeline. The playback is fine everywhere else. I’m guessing it’s the compression, but before I go around reconverting the files, I want to find out which kind of compression works best. Currently, the video’s compressor is DivX Pro 5.1.1 ™, and MPEG Layer-3 Codec.

5. Also, how do you install different fonts into Photoshop?? I downloaded a particular font, and it just kind of sits there on my desktop… doing nothing… well I guess that’s kind of my fault, but I don’t know what to do with it so that it ends up as a choice within Photoshop.

I think that’s it, and thanks in advance.

[Scintilla]

1. If I want to cut a piece of say a certain video frame out of its original context and put it over another piece of video (like say I want to cut out Goku from a frame capture I have and put him into a Naruto background), how do I go about doing this to make it look ‘nice’?? I’ve watched Shounen Bushido, and the people were cut out so well, that they didn’t have a border around them, something which I ALWAYS get when trying to do this. (I use photoshop 7.0, and premiere 6.0 if that helps).

Paths (via the Pen tool) in Photoshop should work pretty well. I'm sure After Effects has a similar tool that you can keyframe.

2. I’ve seen a lot of videos where a ‘shaking’ effect is used, where the video shakes around like someone is well…shaking it. I’m assuming, since I’ve been searching for a while in Premiere, that I need After Effects to do this, but if there is another way…

Lots of keyframes on the motion settings in Premiere should work.

3. Another effect, used in ‘Whisper of the Beast’, that I’ve been referring to as the ‘image pan,’ I don’t know how to do. What happens, is that the screen is focused on one half of the image to begin with, and then pans over to the other half. Again, I assume this must be after effects as I cannot find it in premiere, but if not…

Motion settings. If your image isn't bigger than the project resolution, you'll have to zoom in to get this to work right. If your image IS bigger than the project resolution, make sure you set it to "Maintain Aspect Ratio" or whatever the option is called on the clip's right-click menu in the timeline.
(That was quite annoying about Premiere 5.1... I love Premiere Pro for not resizing anything you import unless you tell it to.)

4. I have several video files that become ‘pixely’ whenever something fast happens i.e. someone getting punched. This ‘pixeliness’ or whatever you want to call it happens only when I put samples of the video on the timeline. The playback is fine everywhere else. I’m guessing it’s the compression, but before I go around reconverting the files, I want to find out which kind of compression works best. Currently, the video’s compressor is DivX Pro 5.1.1 ™, and MPEG Layer-3 Codec.

Does it look like this? If so, that's called macroblocking:


Oh yeah, and:
<i>Don't edit DivX/XviD/any other kind of MPEG-4 footage in Premiere.</a>
It will either look ugly, give the program headaches, or both.
Go back to the DVDs and re-convert the clips you need to something lossless, like HuffYUV. Or just edit straight from the VOBs.

Sousaphonist explains <a href="http://www.animemusicvideos.org/phpBB/v ... 1">here</a> in a little more detail why it's a bad idea.

Also, decode your MP3 audio to uncompressed PCM (in a .WAV) before feeding it to Premiere. Premiere doesn't play nice with compressed audio either.

5. Also, how do you install different fonts into Photoshop?? I downloaded a particular font, and it just kind of sits there on my desktop… doing nothing… well I guess that’s kind of my fault, but I don’t know what to do with it so that it ends up as a choice within Photoshop.

Stick it in your C:\Windows\Fonts directory.

[inthesto]

Questions 2 and 3 can be solved using the same function.

If you right-click a clip on the timeline, one of the options ought to be "Motion" or "Zoom". Select that, and hopefully you can figure out how to manipulate it for your desired effect.

[kasitl]

I’ve watched Shounen Bushido, and the people were cut out so well, that they didn’t have a border around them, something which I ALWAYS get when trying to do this.

What technique are you using? If you were to pull in the Goku image and Naruto images frame-by-frame and have Goku on a layer above the Naruto background, you could zoom in closer on Goku and used an eraser set to brush mode and carefully erase around the edges once you erase the majority of the DBZ background. I have done this technique for still-images, but I actually haven't tried mixing video like this yet, so there may be better techniques for this.

What happens, is that the screen is focused on one half of the image to begin with, and then pans over to the other half. Again, I assume this must be after effects as I cannot find it in premiere,

I think I've seen something like that while playing around (Note, I use premiere 6.5 so it might not be in 6.0. Also, I have not seen the video and am just guessing as to what you are talking about). Try right-clicking on the clip in question, selecting Video Options/Motion, and see if that gives you what you want.

Also, how do you install different fonts into Photoshop??

Putting them in the right location helps. Depending on your OS, it will be somewhere around the vicinity of Windows/Fonts.

Sorry I couldn't be of more help on the other two questions, but I hope that these answers help out some.

[Dan-E]

wow you guys are freaking awesome.

You answered all my questions pretty thoroughly, but I just need some clarification on the first question. Someone said that they went in and edited each frame at a really zoomed in level to achieve a real nice image, and then the first person who responded suggested the pen tool, and 'paths' which I'm not familiar with (i've been using the magic background eraser or whatever it's called). Can you go into more detail on the pen tool?

Also, the footage that gets all 'pixely' looks more like this. (taken from Majin Kenshin's Toushi vid). (ok nevermind, Imageshack is down). The compression is actually XVID and NOT DivX, though I do have some DivX files that when converted to HuffYuv, freak Premiere out even more. Anything besides HuffYuv that I can use?? It's also not the audio giving it trouble as I tried taking it out completely, and I just get Premiere to quit out even faster.

I'll try and give a more detailed description of what the 'pixeliness' looks like. Heck, it actually does have that macroblocking going on it too. But, macroblocking ALONE wouldn't be that bad. My problem is more like someone went in and took pixels from part of the image, and put it in another part. So if I'm looking at a yellow sun surrounded by blue sky and white clouds, you might see some yellow pixels in the clouds, and blue in the sun. It's really annoying, VERY obvious, and not possible to just cut out of the footage because it lasts for about 9-10 frames at a time.

[badmartialarts]

That's definitely caused by cutting between I-frames. The decompressor has to guess what the scene looks like by looking ahead to the next I-frame, so you get scene bleeding. The only way to solve that is to

a) Resave the video in either a lossless format like HuffYUV or Uncompressed or, alternately, you can try to resave as a XVID file with the following settings:

Constant or Target Quantizer=1
Maximum I-frame interval=1
Minimum I-frame quantizer=1
Maximum I-frame quantizer=1

Premiere should theoretically be able to edit that just fine (it'll more or less be as lossless as XVID can get). Can't say I've tried it yet because I usually use AVISynth scripts, which is below...

b) Serve Premiere the XviD file as a AVISynth script. I really don't wanna go into the explanation of the setup of AVISynth, the guides do that. But basically, your script should be something like:

AVISource("c:\my videos\blah.avi")

with your choice of filters afterwards (I recommend Deen(mode="a3d") and Msmooth(threshold=8) for something that was compressed to get rid of some of the compression noise, adjusted to taste of course).

[Scintilla]

You answered all my questions pretty thoroughly, but I just need some clarification on the first question. Someone said that they went in and edited each frame at a really zoomed in level to achieve a real nice image, and then the first person who responded suggested the pen tool, and 'paths' which I'm not familiar with (i've been using the magic background eraser or whatever it's called). Can you go into more detail on the pen tool?

Unfortunately I've only worked with it in Photoshop 5.5. But the basic principle is that you use it to specify points on the path, which are connected automatically, and you can drag the handles on each point to make bezier curves between the points to fit the outline of the subject you want to extract.
I'm sure the manual (or help files) explains the what and how better than I can.

The compression is actually XVID and NOT DivX, though I do have some DivX files that when converted to HuffYuv, freak Premiere out even more. Anything besides HuffYuv that I can use??

Try checking the "Always suggest RGB mode for output" in the HuffYUV codec options and see if Premiere will take them then.
Also, if the files you're trying to use are over a gig or two in size, try making smaller clips and seeing if those work better.