Final Cut Pro Tip of the month - Presented by Steve Martin, DV Creators.net

Our tip this month is really cool. We were saving this one for our upcoming "Secrets of Final Cut Pro" CDROM, but we have plenty more so were giving this one away!

35mm films use shallow depth of field to help tell a story. By shallow depth of field, I mean that parts of the picture are in focus and the other parts are very out of focus. (for example, the main character's face is focused and the background is very blurry.) This helps the storytelling aspect of film because the viewer knows what to look at.

If you study TV commercials recently, there has been a big trend towards the use of shallow depth of field as a dramatic effect.

With a DV Camera, however, because the chips are about 7 times smaller than film, its much more difficult to achieve this effect. Often, everything in the picture is in sharp focus, making it hard for the viewer to figure out what they're supposed to be focusing on. They might be distracted by a car going by in the background when they should be seeing the expression on someones face. In day one of our DV Revolution Workshop, we teach how to reduce depth of field when shooting.

But what if you have a certain shot in which you need to create a shallower depth of field in post production, where you need to blur unimportant elements or where you just want to create a very cool look for a clip?

Here's the "DV Creators Shallow Depth Of Field Trick." This works best when the area you want in focus is not moving around the frame. A good example would be a shot of a person, in which the person is sitting or standing in the same place, and the camera is not moving.

Here's how to do it:

1. Position the 'playhead' in your timeline exactly to the beginning of the clip to which you wish to apply this effect. (if your playhead is not 'snapping' to the beginning, press N to turn snapping on.)

2. Drag the clip up to the canvas Window and drop it on the purple 'Superimpose' tab.

3. Now, you have the same clip on 2 tracks. Double-click the lower clip (on V1) then select Effects>Video Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur. Click the filters tab in the Viewer Window and take the Radius up to about 10.

4. Now double-click the upper clip (on V2) Select Effects>Video>Filters>Matte>Mask Shape.

5. Now select Effects>Video Filters>Matte>Mask Feather.

6. Turn off the lower clip in the timeline by clicking the green light all the way to the left on Video Track 1 (V1).

7. Click the filters tab in the viewer Window, change the shape to Oval, click on the center Point crosshair button, then click in the Canvas Window in the center of the area you want the view to focus on (e.g.if it's a face, click on the nose) Now adjust the horizontal Size and Vertical Size sliders so that the visible area is the part of the frame you want in focus.

8. Make the "soft" slider in the Mask Feather filter about 50.

9. Turn Video Track 1 back on (with the green light) and voila! Hold Option and scrub in the ruler area for an instant moving preview. (If the screen is not updating fast enough, change to Draft Render.)
10. Try things like:

Making V1 black & white (with Desaturate Filter) - Inverting the Mask (For that Cops, incognito effect) - Darkening V1 with the brightness/Contrast Filter.

11.Of course, this effect must be rendered, so this would be the very last thing you would do in your edit before final output.

This technique can give you results equal to the coolest looking films and TV commercials out there!

© Steve Martin, DV Creators.net

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