AV News 189 - August 2012
One thing that you might find annoying is that the sound track from the video
will play over the music track you have included. Wouldn't it be nice to be
able to fade that in and out, or drop its volume down a bit? Unfortunately
that isn't possible at the moment. You have two choices, you can let it do
it's own thing or mute it completely. In the 'Properties' tab in O&A you will
find a check box which allows you to mute the audio for this clip.
Hopefully in future versions we will be able to adjust the video sound in
PTE. For the moment, where I want to mix the video sound, then I've
extracted the audio in a separate program and then mixed it into my normal
sound editing software. You then have the task of sliding the video up and
down the timeline to get exact lip-synch.
Adjusting the appearance of the video
As the video clip is just another object in O&A, then all the facilities of that
processor can be used. We have already seen how the clip can be sized
and panned, but this can also be done dynamically. Using keyframes the
video can be made to change size as it is playing, moved about the screen,
or even moved in three dimensional space, using the same facilities as you
would for still images. (Rotating cubes with different video on each face is
possible !)
You may want to refine the start and end points of the video and in the
O&A 'properties' tab you will see the ability to trim bits from start and end
(Start time and duration). You can also delay the start of the video within
that slide by setting an 'offset'. For example, setting the offset to 2 seconds
will mean that the slide will fade in, but the video will only start to play two
seconds after the start of the slide.
Masks can also be used to show parts of the video. I saw an example of
this recently in an Italian AV, called 'Tee9', where, at one point, video flames
appeared above the irregular skyline of a the still image of the burning villa.
I won't go into the detail of making and using masks in this article (it needs
an article of its own), but suffice to say a mask made from the original villa
image in Photoshop would have a black cut out where the flames are to
appear. In O&A a new mask object is created, with the video placed in the
mask object and the image of the villa above it. A .png of the villa might work
just as well, on consideration.
More than one clip?
As a video is treated like an object, it is quite possible to have more than
one video on the screen at a time, This could be a video inserted over a
video, two videos side by side, or something similar.
All that is needed is to go into O&A for that slide and add video clip(s),
then resize and position them. I have found that two simultaneous clips
work fine on my lap top, but after that it starts to depend on the computer
power. Mind you, I do think that this could be the source of some
outstandingly bad visual effects !
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