Braving the 3D Elements

Adding a 3D program to your motion graphics toolset can greatly increase your creative options. However, many are daunted by learning an entire new set of skills. Relax: No one expects you to create a pod race or Jar Jar Binks your first month out. Instead, think of 3D initially as a way of generating graphical elements to composite into your 2D creations. We’ll cover a handful of basic tricks well within the skills of most beginning 3D users.

Spinning Gold

In a perfect world, clients supply gorgeous video clips for you to use in the graphics they’ve hired you to create. When that doesn’t happen, there are a few tricks in our bag for adding punch to these clips. Our goal is not to add “effects” or to make video look like film - but rather to make your client say “How did you make our video took so great?” We covered tinting movies using various tint and tritone effects in Getting Behind The Color Wheel, and those techniques can be combined with the tricks contained in this column.

Getting Behind the Color Wheel

Ever composite a number of clips, only to have the result like an explosion in a paint factory? This month we’ll search out a variety of plug-in effects for adjusting color and applying tints to video clips. I’m using Adobe After Effects, but many of the same effects are available in other programs.

Timing Video to Audio

In the days of yore, editing video and audio used to be considered two different disciplines. Today, most desktop and non-linear video editing programs also edit audio with the same tools and capabilities. As a result, video editors are all but expected to also edit their own audio.

For most, this means just mixing together narration, music, and the occasional sound effect. However, if go one step further and make your video edit decisions based on the audio - and vice versa - you will end up with a final program that is tighter, and more compelling to watch, than if you just let the respective cuts fall where they may. The same goes for 2D and 3D animation: Allowing audio to inform your timing decisions results in a stronger overall experience.

Don’t know anything about audio or music? Hang on and we’ll give you a crash course in the next two pages. Already have a good idea of how audio and music work? Jump ahead to the section titled Cut Time on Page 3 and we’ll go over a few tips and tricks to keep in mind, followed by a brief case study. As with any artistic discipline, rules are meant to be stretched and broken - but they give you an important head start.

The Magic Tempos

Vibrations in a sound’s wave happen at a much faster pace than frames happen in video or film. Likewise, a musician may pick a tempo where the peaks of these vibrations - the beats in the music - don’t land on nice, even frame boundaries. However, there is a way to determine tempos that exactly line up with frames. If you can get your composer to use them, your job spotting the audio will be much easier later; you can even animate at these paces without hearing the music, knowing it will line up later.

Field Order - Who’s on First?

If you thought most NTSC video ran at 29.97 frames per second, that’s only half the story - literally. It actually runs at a speed of 59.94 fields rather than 29.97 frames per second (fps), with pairs of fields “interlaced” to form a complete frame (see the illustration at left). When you shoot footage with your camcorder, it does not record whole video frames unless you are explicitly in a special mode known as “progressive scan.” Instead, most of the time it captures one field, then a second field, and lays these fields down in a linear fashion to tape.

Playing Squash: Blobby Text Effect for NBC

Back in 1997 - still fairly early in our motion graphics career - one of our more enjoyable gigs was creating promotionals for NBC. These promos didn’t appear on television; they were destined for the Big Screen - namely, NBC’s huge AstroVision screen in Times Square. Rather than showing upcoming episodes of specific shows, they often took the form of puzzles, trivia, and other bits of information about their stars (see the sidebar “Multithreaded Information” for more musings on that subject). As a result, each clip usually took the form of a simple animation or site gag. Well, they look simple - some of them took a bit of thought to pull off. This is the story of one of those gags.

I Can’t Hear You: Correct Audio Connections

I felt compelled to write on this subject because of a real-life experience that happened years ago. Trish and I were scheduled to show tapes and speak about our work at an event. We had both BetaSP and VHS tapes, as well as some QuickTime movies to show from a Mac. As is our custom, we asked to inspect the gear before we were scheduled to go on, just to make sure everything would go smoothly.

I started at the BetaSP deck. There was nothing connected to its normal audio output connectors - a problem, since we really focus on the interplay between audio and visuals in our work. However, there was something plugged into the “monitor” output on the back of deck. This is an extra RCA-style output jack meant to be connected to the corresponding input on some video monitors (to hear your work through that great two-inch speaker so generously built in). They were using this, but not with a phono plug inserted - instead, they managed to jam into a Walkman-style headphone plug into it, which then went to a pair of RCA connectors. An inauspicious start.

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