This week I went back to the “CGI” flame edit I was working on, and edited it so it seems like the flame is giving off light. You can find my video here, showing the raw footage, the flame with motion-tracking, and the newest edit of the flame giving off light.
To be clear: this ‘lighting’ is not finished, I’d love to figure a way to make the lighting flicker like a flame’s light would. I also am not finished editing the flame itself: I would like to make it ‘bend’ and shrink with the movement.
I followed a video tutorial for this edit. Simon Zeng uploaded a video showing how to animate a mask. A “mask” in video editing is basically just an outline that the edit either fills or avoids. In this case, I wanted to avoid where I wanted the flame’s light to be, and fill the rest of the screen with shadow. Making it appear lighter by making everything else darker.
I found another video tutorial by NCH Software for how to edit the colour of a video clip, and planned on using the ‘Colour Editing’ tool to darken the screen.
I was originally going to mask out the spot that I wanted and then use the ‘Colour Editing’ tool to make the rest darker, but I had a hard time using the ‘Colour Editing’ tool in an effective way. I pushed on anyhow. I did finish editing this way about half of the video clip before finding the ‘spotlight’ editing tool on VideoPad, which was doing the exact thing I needed to do. I deleted all my work with the mask and used what I had learned from Simon Zeng’s video to edit the ‘Spotlight’ to where I was happy with this step.
I didn’t have as much control over the feathering on the ‘Spotlight’ tool as I wish I did, but fiddling with it I could probably figure out a way to make the edges less harsh. “Feathering” in video editing basically just means how harsh the edges of an imputed image/edit/object is (more specifically, it helps ‘blend’ the clips together).
I learned from Simon Zeng‘s tutorial that I can just drag imputed images/edits/objects to where I want them in the preview ‘window’! This knowledge made this edit so much faster than it would have been if I edited it the way I edited the motion tracking.
Learning from videos was not difficult for me, but forcing myself to sit and watch it was. I didn’t wanna start the project, so if I didn’t know how to do the edit, then I couldn’t start the edit.
Simon Zeng spoke clearly and their instructions were easily replicated and easily understood. Learning from their video was easy, the fact that I have no spine (metaphorical) was the tricky bit.
As before, the clip of fire I used was ruwan isuru‘s, and I removed the background with unscreen.
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