Izzy Video 017 – Opacity

Good tip on using opacity to make your own watermark, I may start doing that with my home videos, never thought about it for that.

A few ways I use opacity is similar to your ghost tip, but to create the effect of someone fading away completely. Like in the TV show “Without a Trace”, it starts out with someone doing something, then usually them walking away and fading away.

You can also use special effects to add to the fade and create the Star Trek “Beam me up Scotty” effect, that’s always fun.

I use particle Illusions from Wondertouch for the special effects.

Slugs can be very useful for fading in/out a large stack of layers. Look at 1:58 in this week’s Izzy Video — do you see how halfway through the fade in of Blake and Trinity, they already look like ghosts? That’s because when both layers are halfway transparent, you will see through them both, making for some weird effects, depending on how your layers are set up.

In Final Cut, generate a slug in the Viewer, and adjust the in and out points so the clip is just a few seconds. Lay the slug in the track above the rest of the layers, aligned to the beginning of your clips. Now, apply a fade out to the end of the Slug clip, and it will reveal all of your layers, without any strange ghosting effects.

Another thing I’d recommend, and maybe Izzy just said this to get the point across, but when getting video of the scene without the actors, don’t “stop” your camera, just let the actors walk away, and edit the walking away part with your video editor.

The reason being is that when you touch your camera even ever so slightly to press stop then record again, you take the chance of moving your camera a tiny bit, creating the overlay effect that you don’t want.

Great tips as always. I will definitely use those in a few videos I have planned. Also, not sure if you noticed, but the “copyright” at the end of the video is misspelled.

Thanks for the tutorials!
One added suggestion to the “ghost effect” where footage is shot with and without the subject in the scene. Depending on where the subject is in relation to the background, it would be good to turn off auto focus (use manual focus) to avoid having the focus point change in the footage without the subjects.

Love the podcast, Izzie. I’m just catching up and can’t wait to publish a link to you from my weblog.

Maybe it’s stating the obvious, but a good use of opacity is the plain old crossfade (or cross-dissolve as it’s known in Premiere). As you probably know, the crossfade is a transition where one clip goes from fully opaque to fully transparent over a sequence of frames; the effect is that the first clip fades or dissolves into the second. I think it’s the most elegant and simple of all video transitions.

Hi, were can you get some tool like that?