Insight: Making a Broodwar Movie Part IV

Last time we finished with the basics. You now know how to create audio and video tracks, how to add scenes into your projects and how to set up the camera and the speed of your recordings. Now we're going deeper, starting with a little theory. What I know describe are my own experiences, I taught most of them to myself. So it's quite likely that I use different terms you won't find in the literature, and I can only describe some things quite vague. That doesn't change the fact that most things described work well and can be used by you even though you have only little understanding what you'll be doing at first.

Understanding the Tracks

It doesn't matter which song you put in which audio track. A song is even to another song in terms of it's volume. You can turn up one track and make one song louder than each other, but it that has only little effect on what you hear. If you put two songs on top of each other you will always hear them at the same time. This is different for video tracks and scenes.

When you put content (text or scenes) in a video track it will be displayed. This is not as redudant as it seems. If you put two scenes on top of each other, so that they would start at the same second and end in at the same second, you would only see one scene. And that scene that dominates the second will be the one that is on top. For example: if you put a latter box on top and don't use the chroma keyer on it, you would only be able to see a blue screen, even though there are scenes placed beneath it.

There are several ways to play around with the different video tracks and the way they dominate each other. We learned how to create a split screen in the last edition of my blog. This is one way to change the video track settings. The place the video track fills out in the final project is now limited and leaves more space for the tracks and its scenes that are below the changed track. It changes the capability of its domination so to speak.

We will now learn to manipulate some tracks and scenes via different tools: the composition mode of a track, the mask function of the pan/crop, the oppacity and finally different effects that can change the order of your tracks. Zere vill be order in our tracks!

For now all you have to remember is this: a track can dominate each other. The higher a track is placed (it's position among the number of tracks) the more it covers all other tracks.

Pan/Crop & Mask

I will now go on and explain to you with examples on what we can use to manipulate the track and its domination. As mentioned in the very first edition water always gets fucked up when it's recorded with Camtasia. There are ways to cut out that mess. If you're not knowing what I'm talking about take a look at the screenshot below:

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What we will do now is replace the water with a nice blue color. To do that we have to change the mask of our scene. This has no impact on the overall track and does only effect the one scene.

Let's do it step by step. I now will insert the scene into one video track of my project.Underneath it I will put in a solid color. You can add it by simply choosing the tab 'Generated Media'. If you haven't got that tab (because you use a different version of Vegas) you can add it like the Credit Roll (described in the last part of my blog). Instead of Sony Credit Roll you select Sony Generated Media. Anyhow I selected a solid blue color and expanded it, so it starts and ends with my scene.
My project looks something like this now:

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The Pan/Crop for the blue color has to be set in the same size as the scene, else it tends to overlap sometimes. We now create a mask for the scene. This means we cut away the parts we don't want to see and set it to a transparent mode. The part we cut away will be blank. If there was no blue color below it, it would be filled with black by default.
A mask can be created with the pan/crop Menue of the scene (the fight at the bridge in my example). Open that again and activate the check box for mask. A pen tool will ne appear which you can use to select the areas you want to cut out. Make dot for dot and always connect the last dot with the first one to close your selection area. You can cut more than two areas, simply finish the first cut-area (with connecting the first and the last dot) and you're good to go. It now should look something like this:

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The yellow box is quite important. It tells you what happens with the area you just selected. If you select the mode „positive“ it would cut away the areas around your selection. The mode „negative“ cuts away the area itself. For our purpose we use the negative option.
With the help of the drop menues in the black box you can make things look smoother. You can create edges and make them slowly fading inwards or outwards, so you don't have sharp edges.

Our scene would now look something like this when it's rendered:

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A few notes:

- If you want to cut away water make a ingame-screenshot and use that as replacement for the solid color. It doesn't look good, you can see that in the screenshot above, but I'm too lazy to use an actual ingame-screenshot.
- Masks are fixed. If you scroll in the recording the area will stay the same. If I scrolled only 2 pixels to the right parts of the land would be replaced by a blue color and parts of the water would re-appear. You have to use the anchor points to create a new mask everytime you scroll. So: the mask is limited for scrolled scenes / moving units.

Composition Mode

The composition Mode is probably on of the most powerful tools Vegas has to offer. I learned about it a year ago, though my knowledge about it is limited. The normal setting for each Track is called „Alpha“. The Composition Mode usually changes the way colors are displayed. It highlights some colors, makes others transparent – depending on what Composition Mode is used. It can also change the angle of a track, but this is of no big use for our 2D game.

I will know show you only one thing you can use the Composition Mode for. We will find more use of the Composition Modes later.

There are scenes in which a building finishes just in time to protect a raid, or survives with only 1 HP. You want to show that. You could do that with a Split Screen, but to be honest, this looks crappy.

For my example I used a scene from the game Nal_rA vs Chrh. Chrh stopped one of Nal_rA's DTs from destroying a turret with an SCV slide. To show how much HP are left on the turret, and how long it will take until the turret is finished, I will place the grid and the time frime of the turret over the real scene.

I now will put the scene in one of my video tracks. I set up the pan/crop so the menue at the bottom is cut out. Now I copy the scene and paste it in top of my original scene. I reset the camera of my new scene in a way that only the grid and the progress bar is visible. My scene now looks something like this:

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We certainly don't want to have that. So I want to make two things now: first the turret grid should cover the turret in the original scene and second: the turret grid shouldn't be covered black, but be transparent floating over the turret that is just about to be built.

Here comes the Composition Mode into play. You can change the mode from „Alpha“ to something different. What we need is the mode „Screen“ (or Overlay, I'm not sure about the English term, just try it out!). The Composition Mode can be found in the drop down menue, marked yellow in the screen shot here:

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When the screen mode is selected the black color disappears and leaves only the turret behind. Now we can resize and change the position of the top track with the Track Motion (explained in the last edition). Once we're done we should see something like this:

[image loading]

Note:
The composition mode works like the track motion: it is global. That means it is changed in your entire project.

Oppacity

There is another way to make tracks less dominant. It's quite easy and it makes a nice effect for sure. You can make a track more transparent with the yellow marked tool in the screen shot:

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Kinda hard to explain but really easy to understand. I will make a few examples with screens. So, I will put again the same scene twice in my project, so that they are on top of each other, just like in the screen shot you just saw. I will now re-size the camera of the top scene just a little, so it zooms in the scene. After that I will set the oppacity to something like 80%. Now the units seem to have a blurry shadow drawn behind them. Quite funny actually and works quite well on songs like „Insomnia“ by Faithless. The result:

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If you use this on identical scenes you can set the top track to a slower or faster pace if you want. You don't need to use a zoom.

Effects

We now enter the world of the real interesting things: effects. They are very useful to create a connection between the flow of your music and your movie. They create the atmosphere. Today, I will give you only a short introduction here. I will explain how the so called „Sin City Effect“ works, and how you can add it to your project.

Any effect can be added to a scene or a text with the effects-symbol.

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Once you pressed that symbol a big list of effects will pop up. You can add as much effects on a scene you want, there is no limit. You can even use an effect twice or more. Generally speaking: you can always add them and fool around with its settings. You don't really need me to explain how they work as you can figure out most of them with try&fail&repeat methods.

A word of warning: effects are there to underline your movie, not to blast out the eyes of viewers. If you use too much of them you will get flamed. Don't get overexcited and only use them to highlight actions or to make the scenes getting in a flow with your music.

Sin City Effect

Anyhow, back to our guide: press the symbol and select Sony Vegas Color Corrector (Secondary). Now select the preset-drop-down-menue (described in the first edition of the blog). There find the options „surpress (? english fail for me sorry) hue but reds“. Close the window. A few screenshots for orientation:

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That was it. Kinda easy, right?

I think this again is enough for today. In theory I taught you everything I know this far. Of course I know which mixes of effects & track motion and composition mode changes look best. In the future guides I will give you a few examples of the most popular things. I guess we're done for today

Insight: Making a Broodwar Movie Part IV

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