Cool, always like to learn more

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well, I'm sorry to say that this may be letting your hopes down a little, but it's a cool effect and always impressed people who watched it.

It's stop-motion. What I did...
1. I taped myself jumping across the yard, over and over, moving just an inch forward with each jump.
2. I put the footage tape in my vcr and hooked up my camcorder with blank tape to my vcr input.
3. I paused the tv screen at the top of my jump.
4. I recorded the image onto the camcorder for a split second.
5. I stepped the frames forward onto the next jump and recorded that for a split second.
(since I had a 20 inch vertical leap back then, it looked even cooler)
I wore a suit and tie and dark sunglasses so I looked kind of psuedo-men-in-blackish.

Luckily, my camcorder was a good editor and didn't allow any "snow-transitions" Additionally, after the flying scene was complete, I was able to dub in a song afterward and turn it into a music video.

For the beginning of the video, I jumped off of my pool deck and stop-frame-recorded that to match the format. The song I used was "I got the devil in me" by Porno for Pyros (Perry Farrell of Jane's Addiction)
Then, I did another cool stop motion effect which I call the "float and revolve."

I would jump up with my right leg fully extended parallel to the ground. Each successive jump would be about 10-15 degrees counter-clockwise. After a full turn, I jumped with my left leg up and revolved clockwise.

This effect was particularly cool for the song because after I jumped off the deck and began to float-revolve with my leg extended, the first verse of the song came in, "I got the devil in me."

Another funny music video I did took place in NYC, Manhatten around Times Sqare. I called it "The Search for the Perfect Pushup." My friend and I went around taping each other doing push-ups in all sorts of public places, including the middle of broadway with the "big tv" in the background. Another was while going down an escalator (quite awkward)

The song I used was "Runaround" by Blues Traveler. Anyway, the effect I call the "glide," which you may have seen before, at least something similar probably. You raise one leg up, lean back, take a small step forward. Repeat over and over till you're across the street. Stop-frame record each time your foot is raised.

The cool thing about adding a very lyrical song to random edited footage is that things always tend to fit in and seem appropriate in ways that are quite suprising.

I may be in the minority, but I've always thought that the stop-frame effects to be very stimulating visually. It suprises me that we don't see more of it in videos and on TV in gereral, epecially with how much easier it is to do with computer editing.

Hi there

I'm coming in a bit late but I'm wondering whether I can help. I have an ATI All In Wonder Radeon (the first one with a Radeon chip) and I have got analogue capture working pretty nicely. Then, I can use any software at all to burn it to DivX / XviD or DVD discs. The capture quality is largely determined by the card, and you don't need capture software to also be burning software. You can mix and match. I think having a good DVD authoring software is separate from getting good captures to some digital format... because DVDs mean menus and stuff too.

Capturing direct to MPEG-2 requires a LOT of processing power. Capturing to HuffYUV or something is possible, you can do like 10 minutes at a time, then compress those to MPEG-2 without having to be real time, etc, even if you have very little hard disk space.

Please let me know a bit more about your system spec and actual requirements. If you are capturing analogue video footage from a video player? If so, you won't get better than VHS quality... unless you have Hi-8 or something like a Betacam. Anything digital, you want to transfer direct as a digital stream to your PC, via Firewire or something.

Get back to me if I've been any help so far - and I can certainly give tips for capture with ATI cards and their MMC (Multimedia Center) version 7 and 8.

Cheers!

That's brilliant, WeenFan. I've done a little stop motion stuff---getting the effect of someone spinning really fast. It's time consuming and tedious. But I never thought of a flying effect. Gotta try it.

--George

P.S. I'd also like to thank you for the forum and website, Marc.

WeeFan, yours is a case in point - you can have the flashiest top of the range, bells and whistles system, but that ain't gonna get you results without imagination and planning . Some clever ideas you have there - if you can get the file sizes small enough, I'd be happy to host a few of your example videos if you still have 'em. Gives me some inspiration

Not sure if I have the patience for stop motion, but it does look cool!

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I thought it would be fun to try and cause some inspiration. I'm glad it worked.

Plus, guess what....stop motion editing doesn't have to be as mundane and tedious as you'd think it needs to be. You can put a few seconds worth of them together and throw them in here and there, which looks very cool.

For instance, Mark's dance club video used some cool little effects that were quite eye catching. Especially the first one, because it was a cute chick gettin down, bobbing her head back and forth @ @ 4 X speed for an instant.

With my primative arcsoft showbiz, I'm sure I could pull it off after a few minutes pretty close. Does your adobe program have the ability to do it as an effect, or did you play around with the time-code?

Anyway, I'll try to keep my posts shorter in the future, but there are a few things I need to clear up.

1. I had a great time playing around with arcsoft showbiz today. I figured out how to put multiple effects on top of the same clip. What ticks me off about it though is that the help files don't really show much of any concern for making sure that the stuff will be utilized to it's fullest creative capabilites. I've discovered so many wild and asthetic results from tweaking and multiplying different functions....that are nowhere to be heard of in the manual. I feel like I should have written it.

I checked out their website to try and find something more comprehensive, not for technique or a guide, but to find some techie info on some things I was doing which there was no description or mention of in the.....blah blah, point is, I couldn't even find the damm software on their page. They only list Showbiz DVD. Do they expect the people who visit their page to be soooo intuitive?

2. Today, the main thing I made was a 35 second video jam packed with 3 texts, 20 effects, a few multi-layered effects too (which I'm sure more than half of arcsoft users don't know is possible), 8 audio 1s, 7 audio 2s, plus most of the original audio from the 5 video clips.

I saved it in every format, and a few different qualities. The thing that I don't understand yet is the "video email." I opens in it's own little showbiz browser, and file says it's only like......ooops, gotta run now, and finish this later

I speeded the clip up, then slowed it down again at intervals, then took out a few frames here and there

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I pretty much figured out how I can do that Marc, but arcsoft doesn't allow you to speed up part of a clip, just the whole thing. I have to cut the clip into smaller clips and line up the time code. It's not very accurate on showbiz, but since you said you took out a few frames, maybe it won't be such an undertaking after all.

Question. I have no problem downloading free software because of I have a cable modem...but most of them have time limits. Is one allowed to download it again, or are there things in place that don't allow you to reuse it again?

P.S. I know I'm a cheap bastard. :P

Alas, no :lol:

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If I used the same cable modem on my friends computer, would that work.

For what reason does this not work. The website knows you already downloaded it? or your computer knows that it was already installed? :evil: