Horror Story: After Effects and Photoshop

Prime Suspect · Post by **Prime Suspect** » Wed Apr 11, 2007 11:24 pm

My friend and I are starting one of THOSE projects. Y'all know what I'm talking about. The twenty-minute-long, requires-editing-for-EVERY-frame, should-we-use-fandubbers-or-subtitles type of project. In other words, we're making a vid of her crossover fanfic that, oh yeah, involves a fandom that DOESN'T EXIST IN ANIME.

Laugh. Or put me out of my misery quickly. Either one will make me feel better.

Anyways, long story short, I asked a more experienced AMV creator about changing backgrounds (and probably annoyed the heck out of him). He suggested that I use Photoshop or After Effects and refer to the tutorials here. The whole thing went down kind of like this: "Okay, tutorials, check. Nice, nice, great explanation on masking, ohhh you even tell me where I can buy this stuff? Thank you---NANDA?? I DON'T HAVE $1000 FOR AFTER EFFECTS!!"

So, uh... Any ideas? I'm already going to have to animate the anime-that-isn't-an-anime, which I guess I can handle (I'm pretty good at drawing and have enough patience to watch paint dry). Editing the anime that does exist requires more than patience, though. Any thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated...and hey, if nothing else, this should give you something to laugh over.

Purge · Post by **Purge** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 1:54 am

you dont need after effects for masking if thats all you wanted it for?

Willen · Post by **Willen** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 6:04 am

Just use Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, GIMP, or whatever image editing program you prefer to manipulate the individual frames. Theoretically, this could be done with Microsoft Paint and Windows Movie Maker. (Of course, you'll probably despise WMM after the project is done...)

Phantasmagoriat · Post by **Phantasmagoriat** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 11:39 am

Purge wrote:you dont need after effects for masking if thats all you wanted it for?

x2

Magix Movie Edit Pro has masking tools... runs for ~$50

Prime Suspect · Post by **Prime Suspect** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 3:08 pm

I'll look into Magix Movie Edit Pro. Thanks for the help, everyone!

Keeper of Hellfire · Post by **Keeper of Hellfire** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 3:48 pm

Wax has masking tools either, and it's for free.

And has Magix really masking tools? At least in all examples that I've seen they used chroma keying instead of masking. And I can't remember any masking tools in the trial that I tried, but maybe the time was too short to explore it.

Phantasmagoriat · Post by **Phantasmagoriat** » Thu Apr 12, 2007 4:43 pm

O.o I must be confusing the two, I'm sorry, what is the difference?

[chroma keying in Magix should at least help to some degree]

Phantasmagoriat · Post by **Phantasmagoriat** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 12:23 am

Wax looks pretty promising.

Blender is another one for free.

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Tutor ... /ChromaKey

It has a lot of other stuff to offer too, like 3D rendering. I think you can do just about anything with it...though it seems a little advanced [I tried it once, and decided I would never find the time to learn the whole program.] ...really impressed that it's free though

There's probably more... check the Effects Editing Software list in the sticky for General Video

CrackTheSky · Post by **CrackTheSky** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 12:44 am

Wax is alright; it seems like it has quite a few functions, the most useful of which is probably a particale generator, but it's not the most user-friendly program out there.

Same with Blender. There's a LOT you can do with Blender, and it has a SLEW of other features outside of things that would be useful for AMV editing - it's mainly a 3D compositing program - but in order to understand the stuff that would be useful for AMVs you have to go through a lot of other steps, and it can take a LONG time to learn. I probably spent a good 20 hours learning how to make simple 3D figures before I put it aside and haven't really touched it since - although I intend to sometime in the future. I never even got to how to use the timeline, keyframes...the things that would be more useful for an AMV editor.

...Wasn't this thread about masking or something?

Brad · Post by **Brad** » Fri Apr 13, 2007 12:59 am

Phantasmagoriat wrote:O.o I must be confusing the two, I'm sorry, what is the difference?

[chroma keying in Magix should at least help to some degree]

Chroma keying (or just "keying" in general) is a term used for taking a specific color, or set of colors, and "knocking them out" or in other words, making them transparent. You're likely familiar with green screening or blue screening. This is a method of keying and it's pretty common in most video editing applications.

Masking is a term used for manually assigning a region of an image to be transparent/opaque. This typically means going through video frame by frame, and selecting the region that you want to remain opaque, via several methods depending on the application. For an AMV-related example, with Adobe Photoshop and After Effects, you can use the Pen tool to create a path around a character that you want to put on a different background. But with masking, it almost always involves going frame by frame. The trade-off for all the work is, it almost always looks better than keying alone (in addition to most of the time being the only real way to do it).

Hope that helped