Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Adult Beginners Forum The Audio, Video Music Production Thread

That was great Ben! Both your playing and the video. Love the piano action shots too. I thought it was Einaudi until I read you composed it. I always enjoy your video work as well. I think the extra time for these creations is well worth the effort. The work can be saved forever and will be around when we are all gone...

I use Sony Vegas 10, but have not added or really knew about the panning and zoom. Excellent tip...must figure it out.

Thanks, Mark. I don't have vegas on this computer, but when I get the chance I'll put up some screenshots to better explain the feature.

That would be great. I was just look at it and wasn't getting to far... lol

I use FCP too (version 6, bit old now) and I HAVE been doing garbage matte. From top of my head, the built-in uses squares but there are plugins for multipoint (polygon) garbage matte. And you can always make the overlay transparent by multiplying with an image mask if you need more advanced.

FCP is a pro tool, not something you learn in a few minutes like movie maker or iMovie. But you can do about everything imaginable with it (in combination with Motion). I have been scaling, warping parts of the video, tracking fragments, extreme slowdowns, rotations, time warps, compensated shakes of elements in the video, Green screening, generate overlays, sweeps, fades. You can make custom filters to do special effects on pixel base. Every effect can be time-dependent.

The compressor tool coming with FCP is quite flexible but imho too fragile. Sometimes it fails alltogether but usually it is just ok.

Correct, I forgot to mention that. The plug-in I am using is a 8-point polygon type.

Good points Ben and what a lovely piece you composed for your late co-worker!! To see the action like this in your video was great too!

On Mac computers there is also iMovie (similar to Movie maker on Windows) which also can be used for those who want to do basic editing. It is included in the OS so it is a good way to start out I think.

So, you have your video inserted into the timeline. Right click, and a menu comes up. Click on "Video Event Pan/Crop"

You should get this sub-window:



Now, you have to set the points that the pan / crop will "bounce" between.


Below, the BIG arrow shows the diamonds, or the points that you fix. Here, there is automatically one set at the beginning.

If I want to add one at the point I scrolled to, the circled part, I click on the "+" (little arrow) to create a new diamond, or fixed point.




So now, you have to tell the software how you want the pan and zoom to begin and end.

Below, I click on the very first diamond to put the clock back at 0.00, and zoom in , rotate, do whatever, to tell this thing where I want the frame to begin.

The part inside the box with the "F" is the part the viewer will see, with the straight edge on the bottom of the box on the bottom of the screen.



(Pic below) Then, you gotta click on the second diamond (the one you added), to set the camera for the second point.

Zoom it in, zoom it out, rotate it a bit, do whatever (in the case below, extreme and too close). The software will create a path from the first "F" box to the second "F" box as the video plays during the times that you set up with those little diamonds.




You can create more than just 2 diamonds, and have the camera bounce or ping around all the points you set up. With images or different clips, you gotta set each one up.

I hope that helped a bit!

Another fun one I did more than 2 years ago with an older version of Sony Vegas. I made this video just for an experiment, and had a little fun with a piece I had recently finished, "The Sick Doll".

I wanted to figure out how to do split screen (or more). Both frames are independently panned / zoomed from still images. My old computer at the time struggled rendering this. I would imagine newer pc's and the newer software don't sweat this at all.

The video is a sort of educational and slightly misleading:

Worked all night, but I will be using your tutorials this weekend. Thanks Ben!


And the "Sick Doll" video was great...the music alone is a lesson in itself too...

Hey Ben!!!!!!!!!!!! I used your Vegas tutorial and did the following video. It just has some panning in the very beginning. If you notice it takes the video off to cause black bars on the side and bottom. I played with it for a long time but couldn't get it to zoom in and out. I was able add the diamonds, but how you get the video to do what you want between the diamonds is still a problem. Any suggestions?

Just remember that the box with the "F" in it is the screen that the viewer will see. I'm not sure exactly what's going on, but I suspect that where you set the box with the "F" for the initial diamond was slightly off the edge of what your camera recorded.

If this what I think it is, make sure the box with the "F" is always entirely within the video you recorded or the picture you're using

To zoom in and out, you place your cursor on the box with the "F" to click and drag it in and out. To get the film to rotate, click and drag on that big circle on the outside to select you orientation.

There's got to be a video tutorial somewhere that would explain this much better than me here jabbering!

p.s. - nice piece!

Thanks Ben, I have to try it again. I'll check U tube for a tutorial too...

I found this decent tutorial:

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?annota...LhYF8&v=HLsRAMf0-S0&noredirect=1[/video]

Using Ben's advise and the previous video tutorial I was able to add the zoom feature to the previous video in the very beginning:

I'm very new to the Piano, but not to video and sound. Vegas or even 64 bit Movie Studio record decent sound if you have either a good sound card or an external mixer. Audacity is a free "sound" program, but there are others that I think are better if you want to play with your sound. Sound Forge (I tend to use Sony products but there are many others that are very good) is also a good was to manage a sound file. So it comes down to does your video editor do sound good enough for you or do you need to add a digital audio workstation/software?

I have a lot of Acid loops and have use Acid for a long time, there are newer programs that are 64 bit and allow for more special tools, but I got AcidPro with a very neat Garritan library which is useful as my P105 has very few voices. That being said to just start at a low price (check Amazon) Sony Movie studio does a very fine good of recording sound and working with Video for less than $100. You can also get a free version of Acid to work with the sound free. I'd start with the video editor and see if its sound functions work for you.

Be advised that HD (even 720) takes a pretty powerful computer - one running at least a 64 bit system with 8 megs of ram with a fast multicore CPU if you don't want to be frustrated. Rendering (making it useable on the web or DVD) at HD (I'd recommend 720 for Youtube or Vimeo) can take a very long time on a underpowerd computer if it renders at all.

D7K, welcome to the thread...after I bought my Sony Vegas HD 10. last year I found my old computer would take forever to render a file. I upgraded to an i7 and now it flies.

Beside the Sony I also use Audacity to process the audio. I do have the free Acid program that came with Vegas, but haven't used it.

Right now I'm looking for cheap HD video cameras to ad other angles and eventually more microphone options as well.

In the mean time just trying to add more skills to the Vegas software.

So true (changed mb typo to gb)!!! For those of you who are on the fence looking to start out, make sure you try the video editor on your computer before you buy it. Not all systems (Windows especially) are created equally and an editor that freezes your computer is not very fun to work with.

Mark, great use of the zoom! It makes a huge difference I think. The trick is to use it in a natural way and you nailed it here!

Speaking about zooms... I think it would fun to use some sort of a "flycam" in a piano video sometime. Here is one type (which is often used by the famous PianoGuys) called the GlideCam:



But, which is obvious, this requires a person who holds the camera.

Here is one good example of a glidecam in use (PianoGuys & Jarrod Radnich):

[video:youtube]n4JD-3-UAzM[/video]

Thanks Amaruk, got lucky on the zoom...