Highlighting a section of the video

Hi,

I know there is a way to do this in both Motion and FC but can't seem to get it right so I'm asking for help.

I have a some footage with a crowd of people and I would like to do a circle mask and highlight two individuals in the crowd to draw attention to them. I've tried duplicating my clip and putting a circle mask on the top layer but am not getting the effect.

Similarly, I would like to learn how to use an red arrow to point to these two people.

Can somebody walk me through the process of these two ways to call attention to a particular area of the video?

Thanks

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

> I've tried duplicating my clip and putting a circle mask on the top layer but am not getting the
> effect.

All you're missing is the actual lighting effect. If you just mask the top clip and put it on the original, then all you're doing is putting a circular-shaped image over that exact same image and there would be no difference whatsoever.

What you need to do is to add Color Corrector or something similar to either darken the bottom clip (so that the circle-shaped top clip will now stand out) or brighten the top clip. Usually I find the first approach better -- like dimming the house lights and then shining a spotlight on the desired area. Brightening the circle instead of darkening the rest will tend to overexpose the spotlight area, and the surrounding areas will still be so bright that the highlighting effect will be minimal.

> Similarly, I would like to learn how to use an red arrow to point to these two people.

Create an arrow in Photoshop and import that, or use Title 3D and choose a font with an arrow in it, then put it on top of the image as if it were text. Character Palette under OSX's International options will show you the arrows available.


www.derekmok.com

A really quick way of creating a "spotlight" effect would be to use an Oval shape Video Generator and drop it over the Video on the timeline, then change the Composite Mode of the Oval to "Overlay". Voila!

It darkens the edges nicely but it blows out the highlights and flattens the contrast.

Steve Martin has a tutorial of this on his web site. www.rippletraining.com and go to the bottom where the tutorials are. You will see the highlighted spotlight moving around.

feel free to use my Region Blur plugin to do it [homepage.mac.com]
push up the tint value
pull down the blur to zero
and tick the invert checkbox

For the arrows you can use any of the text generator in FCP or even easier the free Stib's Arrow Generator

Andreas

Andy Mees Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> feel free to use my Region Blur plugin to do it
> [homepage.mac.com]
> push up the tint value
> pull down the blur to zero
> and tick the invert checkbox


cool plugins! thanks!

Regarding Andy's Region Blur:

Cool, Andy.

But now how to I move the highlighted circle around? When I try to change anything the entire image moves with the highlighted circle "married" to the image. In other words I can't isolate the highlight to move it around different areas of the frame.

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC

Double click the clip to load it into the viewer, then select the 'filters' tab in the viewer. Go to the region blur filter (if you have more than one filter applied) and select the small cross next to 'center' so that it is depressed (highlighted) then, on your canvas, click and drag the mouse around to adjust the position of the blur.

Thanks, Jude. Depressing the the small cross next to center did the trick.

In the meantime...

While I was waiting for an answer on this I started playing around with tutorial John Foley mentions where Steve Martin uses the Vector Shape in Boris. But I can't find Boris under the Video Generator pull down menu like the tutorial demonstrates. When I do a spotlight search for Boris Vector shape all that displays is a file called com.Borisfx.Vector.Shape in my user preferences. I'm pretty sure I have seen Boris before. What could have happened to it?

I am on my Mac Book Pro currently and working in FC 5.

Shelley
MacBoo Pro 2015
16 GB Ram
OS X 10.13
Premiere Pro CC