Animation Marquee Lights

By John on September 9, 2009 12:10 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The 'Marquee' title tool within Avid Media Composer is a fantastic titling program. In addition to creating stunning 3D titles, you can also use Marquee for other types of effects. Since Marquee is resolution independent, you can import high resolution pictures directly into Marquee without losing any resolution.

Now, you may be asking yourself, why not just use the Avid Pan and Zoom effect that is available within the standard Media Composer effects. Well, Marquee offers the additional benefits of lighting, and true 3D space. This means you can rotate your photos in Z space, and add lighting effects. Better yet, you can have an unlimited number of layers.

This tutorial will give you the basic steps for adding lighting to a picture imported directly into Avid Marquee title tool.

- Launch the Marquee title tool from the Avid Media Composer software.

- To keep things simple, navigate to the Toolsets menu > Basic Animation. You can also press the F4 Function key to activate it.

- Navigate to the File > Import > Image menu. Choose a hi-res mega pixel image.

- Depending on the resolution of your image, it may be larger than the entire Marquee Monitor window. In this case, you will need to adjust the zoom factor. In this example, I have chosen 25%.

- Activate the Safe Action/Title feature. It is located in at the top of the Marquee Monitor window (called the toolbar). Since your image will be larger than the screen area, the title safe area will help you determine the visible area of the screen.

- Click on the Marquee edit tool, within the Marquee toolbox and select the picture so it becomes an object.

*IMPORTANT: Make sure the picture has been selected as an object. You'll know it's been selected when you see red 'bounding box handles'. You can also use these handles to resize your image. Holding down the shift key will contstrain the scaling proportions.

-Find the Quick Titles Properties dialog box. It should be located in the upper left portion of the screen. Click on the Enable Lighting button. This will create a light source within the Marquee Monitor window. At this point, the light source will be hidden.

- Click on the Light Tool within the Marquee toolbox. A light object will appear within the Marquee Monitor window. Click on the light object and you will be able to move it around.

* (optional) You can change the light from a local light to a spot light. Make sure the light is selected and then right click on it. You can then change it to a spot light. At this point, you willl be able to adjust the light and/or the spot light. You can also create additional lights by righting clicking in the Marquee Monitor window.

- To animate a light, it is very easy. Look for the Marquee timeline at the bottom of the screen and place the blue position indicator at the 2:00 mark.

- Turn on the red Animation Mode button within the Marquee toolbox.

- Move the light or spotline to its new location. By doing so, you havve created a keyframe at the point in time. Turn off the red Animation Mode button and preview your animation. That is it! - The last step is to save your animation back to an Avid Bin. Navigate to the File menu > Save to Bin.

* (optional) After you have mastered this concept. You may want to activate the Light Properties Window. To do this, navigate to the Window > Properties > Light menu.

Within the Light Properties window, you can change all sorts of additional parameters including the light color, intensity, spot size, and spot falloff. All of these parameters are keyframable