Recently in Marquee Category

Manipulating Keyframes in Marquee can sometimes turn into a complex process.  Here is a quick tutorial to help simplify the process.  If you are new to Marquee, I recommend that you read my Basic Marquee animation tutorial and then come back to this article. I’ve found it’s best to use Marquee’s animation mode to create a basic path, and then manually manipulate individual keyframes later.

Just about everything in Marquee is keyframeable. This makes Marquee extremely powerful when it comes to manipulating lights, colors, shadows, 3D distortion, and movement. The trick to manipulating keyframes is to simplify the process by only displaying the keyframe graphs that you need to adjust. Here are the steps to displaying keyframes in Marquee.

One of our newest 2 day training classes, Google Sketchup, will be offered  at our Orlando training facility November 5th & 6th, 2009.  We are offering a special price for the November class!

Google's Sketchup is an amazing 3D modeling program that has users from all walks of life from professionals to first timers.  Whether you're an architect, civil engineer, or filmmaker, you will be astounded at what Sketchup can do for you.  And the best part?  It's one of the easiest programs out there to learn and use.  With Sketchup, you can build everything from basic 3D models to entire scenes with a virtual walk-through, and it allows you to add your 3D elements into your video projects.

Other features of Sketchup is the ability to facilitate the placement of models in Google Earth, which is a great tool for video producers when trying to figure out where your shadows lie at a specific time of day during a video shoot.  Another great feature is the ability to use the 3D Warehouse, which lets users search for models that are created by other users and lets users contribute their own models to the warehouse.

There's no limit to what you can create with Google's Sketchup.  There is a limit however to our class size, so call today to reserve your spot!

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.

It’s been awhile since I’ve written a tutorial for Avid Media Composer. I thought I’d mix it up a bit and share an extremely valuable tool for creating moving mattes. The ability to create moving mattes is a critical skill when building effects. This tutorial demonstrates how you can use Avid Marquee to create a giant title with a ‘glassy’ appearance that travels through a scene.

This exercise is not for the light hearted and requires some basic knowledge of the Media Composer interface. I’ve done my best to include as many screen shots as possible to help you along. GeniusDV teaches these types of exercises in its 5 Day Media Composer training course.

I’ll admit, I probably went a bit overboard with the length of this tutorial, and it does take on the assumption that you have some basic Media Composer editing skills. However, I wanted to give everyone a taste of some of the things we like to teach in our Media Composer training course.

Marquee is a complex 3D title tool supplied with all current versions of Avid Media Composer. One of Marquee’s strengths is the ability to animate objects with relative ease. Take a look at the effect above.  Here are the basic steps:

If the following dialog box doesn’t appear, look for the Marquee Title settings in the Project window. Set the Marquee Title Setting to 'Marquee or Ask me'.

After Marquee launches, change the Toolset menu to ‘Basic Animation’. You can also use the keyboard shortcut F4. The Basic Animation toolset will open a timeline window so you can easily animate a moving matte.

Set the main Monitor Window’ to 25%. This will reduce the workspace so you can see outside the visible picture area.

Type some text Using the ‘text tool’ from the Marquee toolbox. Change the text size so the title is very large. In this example, I’ve chosen a font size of 430. I also recommend that you use a relatively basic font set. In this case, I’m using the Arial Bold font.

Place the text object off to the extreme right of the visible picture area.

Next, place the blue timeline position indicator at the end of the timeline at the 5:00 mark. You can change the default timeline duration by right-clicking on the value, but I’m going to leave it at 5:00.

Next, click on the Animation Mode button. The animation Mode button is located at the top of the toolbar. It looks like a filmstrip.

Move the text object over to the left portion of the visible picture area. Holding down the shift key will constrain the horizontal movement so your object moves in a perfectly straight line.

Okay, that’s it! You can now turn off the Animation mode button. If you back up and press the play button in the timeline window, the title should crawl across the screen. Navigate to the File Menu and exit Marquee. It will now take a minute or two for Marquee to save the title to an Avid bin.

*Now, you may be asking yourself, why not use Marquee’s automated crawl function? Well, I must tell you, I started off writing this tutorial using Marquee’s the crawl function. That method will work perfectly fine until you attempt to finish the last part of this tutorial. It turns out using this manual method of animating the title yourself is less confusing.

Next, find some background media to place onto V1.  Since the Marquee animation is 5:00 you'll want to edit at least 5 seconds of material onto V1 which will be your background.  Next, edit the Marquee title onto V2, and then again onto V3.  Your timeline should look like this:

The next step is to add an edge to the title that is on V2. De-activate the V3 and V1 tracks. Enter into effects mode by clicking on the Effect Mode icon in the upper left corner of the timeline window.

The Avid effect editor window will appear. Click the ‘other options’ icon in the upper left corner of the effect editor to change the title on V2. This will re-launch the Avid Marquee title tool.

The key to making this effect work is to add an edge to the Marquee title. Remember that we are adjusting the title that's on V2. Select the title object by activating the ‘edit tool’ within the toolbar. *You may need to zoom out a bit from the Monitor window in order to see your text object.

Activate the ‘change edge properties’ parameter within the Quick Titles Properties dialog box. Also activate the Enable Lighting and Enable Gradient parameters. Set the Size to a value between .30 and .40. In my example, I am using a value of .39.

*Navigate to the file menu and exit Marquee. Make sure you choose EXIT. DO NOT perform a ‘save as’, otherwise you’ll break the link between Marquee and its ability to update the Media Composer timeline.

You should now have three layers that are laid out as follows:

V3: Marquee Title without an edge
V2: Marquee Title with an edge
V1: Background Video

The next step requires that you edit the same background video that you used on V1 into the nested track of V3. Nesting can be a tricky thing to learn, and you may need to practice the concept a few times or read up on how nesting works.

To open up the nest, activate the ‘red segment arrow’ located in the lower left corner of the timeline window. Double click on the V3 clip segment. This will open the segment into three nested tracks. (1.3 – Alpha Matte, 1.2 The Fill, 1.1 Empty background track).

The trick is to place a copy of the original background into 1.2. Load the original background clip into the Media Composer source window. Patch V1 to V1.2. Mark In-Out points for V1.2. Overwrite an exact copy of the background video that you used on V1 into V1.2. Make sure your timeline looks like this before you move onto the next step.

Click the image for full rez picture.

When finished, you can collapse the nest by using the red segment arrow and double clicking on the clip segment located on V3.

To make the title stand out, add a color effect to V1.  Then enter into Effects Mode.

Then adjust the saturation parameter to -100 to change the V1 background clip to black and white.

This next step requires that you’ve installed the Boris Continuum Filters.  Boris Continuum now ships with every retail version of Media Composer.  Unfortunately, Boris Continuum does not ship with the Academic version of Media Composer.  You’ll have to purchase it separately if you own an Academic version of Media Composer.

Place the BCC Rays_Puffy filter into the V2 track that contains the Marquee Title

Then enter into the effect editor for V2.  Twirl down the disclosure triangle for Title Matte and click on the ‘Apply to Title Matte’ parameter.

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