Creating the Graphic

The graphic used in this example is really very simple to make. In Ulead Cool 3D Production Studio, start by creating a new project if you don't already have one open (Figure 2). Since my video is standard NTSC DV, I chose to use the dimensions of 720x480. You can change the dimensions of a project at any time by bringing up the project dimensions menu (Figure 3) and selecting/entering the desired values (Figure 4). To create the graphic, bring up the Path Editor window (Figure 5).

Figure 2	Figure 3
Figure 4	Figure 5

In the path editor, perform the steps outlined below. In Figure 6, select the shape tool and the ellipse shape. Draw a circle. Don't worry about getting a perfect circle exactly in the center of the window, that will be addressed in the next step.

Figure 6

In Figure 7, select the object tool, adjust the circles dimensions by entering the values shown and align the circle in the center of the window. You have just created the center of the graphic disc.

Figure 7

Duplicate the path that you just created, enlarge it and center it in the window (Figure 8). This creates the outer portion of the disc. When you have finished, click OK to exit the path editor.

Figure 8

Your new object should look something like the one shown in Figure 9. If it looks more like the one in Figure 10, you need to improve the curve quality of your project (Figure 11). This will smooth out the round edges.

Figure 9	Figure 10
Figure 11	Figure 12

Now would be a good time to save the project. Periodic saves after you have performed several operations is a good idea so as not to lose a lot of work should something happen. Since this is the first save of our new project, we need to do a save as (Figure 13) in order to give our project a name (Figure 14).

Figure 13

Figure 14

Let's give our disc a little more character. In the attribute panel select the bevel attribute (Figure 15) and enter the values shown in Figure 16. The result should resemble the object shown in Figure 17.

Figure 15

Figure 16

Figure 17

Looking at the Object Manager, notice that there is a single object named "Graphic Object1". This is the name that Cool 3D Production Studio has assigned to the object. I usually try to give each object a descriptive name. When you have a lot of objects in your composition, this can make identifying the one that you want to work on much easier. To do this, double click on the object that you want to rename (Figure 18). This activates an edit box where you can type your new name (Figure 19). Click on any other object in the object tree to deactivate the edit box (Figure 20).

Figure 18

Figure 19

Figure 20

Figure 21 For this project, I wanted the graphic to have a metallic appearance on all sides except the front face which is to be in the schools color, purple. To do this go to the Face Toolbar and select all faces except the front face (Figure 21). In the EasyPalette, go to the Object Style/Material Attributes/Image Texture section and double click on the chrome texture (Figure 22).

Figure 22

The texture should show on all sides of the object except the front face as in Figure 23. Notice that the texture of the object has a different color than the chrome texture that we selected. This is because the texture is being combined with the original object color. To eliminate this, go to the Attribute Panel and select the Texture attribute. Click on the icon shown in Figure 24. Now the texture should be closer to the image texture that was chosen (Figure 25). FIgure 23 Figure 25

Figure 24

Figure 26 To put to final touch on our disc, we need to change the front face color. Go to the Face toolbar and select only the front face as shown if Figure 26.

In the Attribute Panel, select the Color attribute and click on the color icon to bring up the Color dialog box (Figure 27). In the Color dialog box, select the purple color or enter the values shown in Figure 28.

Figure 27   Figure 29

Figure 28 I want the front face of the disc to be a little duller in appearance than the rest of the object, i.e. not so metallic. To do this, change the specular color of the front face. Click on the specular color icon in the Color attribute dialog (Figure 29). In the Color dialog box, select the black color or enter the values shown in Figure 30. The object should now have a metallic appearance with the front face in colored in a dulled purple as in Figure 31. Figure 30 Figure 31

That completes the disc portion of our graphic. To finish it off we will enter the school initials 'THS'. First lets make sure that the disc is centered in our window. Highlight the position attribute in the timeline and check the X, Y and Z coordinates in the Location Toolbar. All three coordinates should be set to zero (Figure 32). Do the same check for the orientation attribute as well (Figure 33). If any of the coordinates are not zero, enter zero in the location toolbar.

Figure 32

Figure 33

Figure 34

Figure 35

Figure 36

Figure 37

Figure 38	Figure 39	Figure 40
Figure 41		Figure 42

Animating the Graphic

For this particular project, the transition will be 3 seconds in duration. The graphic will enter into view on the left side of the screen, travel to the center and then fly at the viewer in such a manner that the graphic appears to fly off-screen leaving only the center portion of the disc. To make that happen, first  increase the duration or number of frames of our project. Looking at the current settings, the project is set for the default number of frames, 10 (Figure 43). Also, this project will be used with NTSC DV video so the frames per second has been set at 29.97. To get a 3 second transition, change the total number of frames to 90. To do this, just click in the number of frames box and change it to 90. After entering the increased frame count notice that additional frames have been added to the timeline (Figure 44).

Figure 43

Figure 44

First, make sure that you are working with the subgroup that was created by selecting it in the object manager. Remember, we want to animate the entire graphic as a unit rather than its individual components. Alternatively, you can select it in the timeline itself by using the dropdown box (Figure 44).

Figure 45

Figure 46

Figure 47

Figure 48

Figure 49

Cool 3D Production Studio will calculate the movement of the graphic between keyframes. It will automatically move the object frame by frame from the initial keyframe to the orientation and position of the next keyframe and so on. The trick is to set the keyframes such that you get the movement that you want. The keyframe values that have been presented here were arrived at by considerable trial and tweaking. Another method of setting attribute values is available. You can use the mouse to grab the object in the project window and move it where you want for a given keyframe. As you move the object, the X, Y and Z values in the Location toolbar will automatically be adjusted to reflect where the object currently is located in the 3D space. This is easier to use than entering the values manually but it does take a little getting used to. We can preview the animation by clicking on the Play button in the Navigation toolbar (Figure 50). This will cause the animation to be rendered in the project window so that you can get an idea of how it looks. If you turn on the "Use Smart Rendering" option (Figure 51), subsequent previews will play back at near the frames per second speed. However, once you make a change to the project, it will have to be re-rendered.

Figure 50   Figure 51

The Video Overlay

1. You can use the Cool3D project file itself, the .c3d file, in MSP 8's timeline. This works well, however, there is no way to select the output quality of the overlay or adjust the overlay settings in MSPs timeline. Also, if your final video will be shown on an interlaced device, such as a television, you cannot set the field order of the animation. I have had problems in the past with jittery movement when using this method. Also, every time you use the overlay in MSPs timeline, Cool3D must render the animation again.

2. You can create an uncompressed 32-bit .avi file in Cool3D for import into MSPs timeline. This method, to me, is preferrable because you can control the output quaility that Cool3D uses to generate the animation. As well, you can set the field order in the output .avi to match your MSP project. For field-based projects, this ALWAYS results in a smooth animation. There are drawbacks to doing it this way however. Cool3D takes FOREVER to create the .avi file. As well, the .avi file that is generated is enormous. For this particular animation, the .avi overlay file that Cool3D generated was 119 MB in size and took around 4 hours to render. On the up side, once you create the .avi file, it does not have to be rendered again no matter how many times you use it. Another advantage is that you can use a video overlay of this type in most other video editing packages.

3. Finally, you can create an Image Sequence file. It consists of one .tga image file per video frame.

For the purposes of this project, I used an uncompressed .avi. To do this, select Export Video Overlay/AVI from the file menu (Figure 52). This will bring up the Save as Video File dialog (Figure 53) where you can assign a name to the video file being created. Be prepared to wait after you click Save. It will take a while.

Figure 52

Figure 53

Using the Video Overlay as a transition

When Cool3D Production Studio finishes rendering, you will have a video overlay that you can use. In MediaStudio Pro 8, open a new project (Figure 54). This should bring up a dialog box that lets you select the type of project. Since this example assumes NTSC DV, make the selections indicated in Figure 55 and click OK. This will create an empty video project. In the timeline, add a short video to the Video1 track. This will be the video that we are transitioning from. Click on the "Insert Video File" icon in the timeline (Figure 56). This brings up a dialog box where you can select a video clip (Figure 57). Select a video of your own to add to the timeline and click Open. Remember, the video overlay is 3 seconds in duration so be sure to select a clip that is at least that long.

Figure 54

Figure 55

Figure 56

Figure 57

Figure 58

Figure 59

Lastly, left click on the video overlay clip in the Video3 track to select it. Now right click to bring up the context menu and select "Media Source Options" (Figure 61). Make the selection shown in Figure 62. This tells MSP that the video overlay was created with fields rather than being frame based. See Figure 53 to review the options used when the video overlay was created.

Figure 60

Figure 61

Figure 62

Notice the little red icon on the video overlay clip in the Video3 track. MSP automatically detected that this clip was generated with a transparent background and set the overlay options for you. With the clip in Video3 still selected, click on the first keyframe in the Effects manager. You can see that MSP selected Alpha Channel as the overlay type (Figure 63).

Figure 63

Now is a good time to save your project. To do this, follow the same basic steps outlined in Figures 13 and 14. Finally, we are ready to preview the transition. In the preview window, click on the Play icon (Figure 64). Now we can see that the graphic comes into view on top of the video as we expected.

Figure 64

But wait. As soon as the graphic appears on the screen, the entire backgound is replaced with the video clip in the Video2 track. We wanted the clip in the Video2 to only show through on the inside portion of the disc. Something is missing! We need to somehow mask out the portions of Video2 that are not in the disc's center. We need a video matte. A video matte can be used on the clip in Video2 to mask out the portions of the video that we don't want to appear. Ok, so how do we get this magic video matte?

Fortunately, we already have most of what we need. Lets go back to Cool3D Production Studio and load our project. Using the same procedures that we used in Figures 13 and 14, save it with a different name (THS3VMatte.c3d for example).

The Video Matte

We are going to create the video matte using a modified version of our original animation. This clip will be used to mask or key out the portions of the clip in the Video2 track that we don't want shown according to the colors in the video matte itself. In our case, the color black will be used. Any part of the video matte that contains the color black will cause the corresponding portion of the clip in Video2 to not be shown. Our copy of the original animation already has the center portion of the disc defined and it is animated in exactly the manner that we need to produce the video matte. We just need to get rid of the text and outer portion of the disc to get the effect that we are after. In Cool3D Production Studio, go to the Object Manager and click on "+" icon next to the SubGroup0 to reveal the objects subordinate to it. This should be the disc and the text objects that we created earlier. Select the text object "THS" and click on the delete object icon (Figure 65). Now select the "Disc" object and click on the Edit Object icon in the Object toolbar (Figure 66). This brings up the path editor window showing the circles that we created earlier. Follow the steps in Figure 67 to remove the outer portion of the disc from our object and click OK.

Figure 65   Figure 66

Figure 67

Now we have just the center portion of the disc as our graphic. It should appear in the project window as shown in Figure 68. We are almost done. Remembering the original animation, at the end the graphic goes completely off-screen. That won't do for the video matte because if the matte goes completely black at the end, we will be masking out the entire video clip in the Video2 track. We need to shorten the video matte to the point where the graphic fills the entire screen.

Figure 68

In Cool3D's timeline, move to frame 86 (Figure 69). This is the first frame where the graphic fills the entire screen (Figure 70). We are going to remove the last 4 frames of our project, but if we just delete them, Cool3D will adjust all of the key frames in the animation accordingly since we don't have keyframes set at frame 86. So we must first add keyframes for orientation and position in frame 86 to hold everything in place as it currently is. To do this, make sure you have the SubGroup0 object selected in the Object Manager (Figure 71). Select the Orientation attribute in the timeline and click on the Add keyframe icon at the bottom of the timeline (Figure 72). Now select the Position attribute and add another keyframe. Finally, click on the checkmark icon in the timeline (Figure 73) and select Remove Frames. In the Remove Frames dialog, enter the number of frames that we want to delete, 4, and select From current frame and click OK (Figure 74). We now have a Cool3D project that we can use to produce our video matte.

Figure 69

Figure 70

Figure 71

Figure 72

Figure 73

Figure 74

Unfortunately, this means another lengthy render of our animation. From the File menu, select Create Video File (Figure 75). This will bring up the Save as Video File dialog. Enter a new filename for our new video matte (Figure 76), but before clicking on OK, select the Options button.

Figure 75

Figure 76

Figure 77

Figure 78

Using the Video Matte

Back in our MediaStudio Pro project, click on the video clip in the Video2 track to select it. Right click to bring up the context menu and select Overlay Options (Figure 79). The Overlay Options dialog will appear where we can select an overlay type of color key and a mask type of Video Matte (Figure 80).

Figure 79

Figure 80

This will bring up the Open Video File dialog (Figure 81). Enter the file name of the video matte that we created earlier and click Open. Review the Overlay Options dialog to ensure that it resembles that of Figure 82. Make sure that the key color is black. This is the color that will be keyed out in the video matte. If it isn't, click on the color box to change it.

Figure 81

Figure 82

That should do it. Click on the Play button in the preview window. The video clip in Video2 should now only be visible in the center of our graphic disc as in Figure 83.

Figure 83

The graphic overlay clip and video matte can now be used as a transition between any 2 video clips of your choice and can be used over and over again just by inserting the overlay into the timeline and applying the video matte.

That concludes this tutorial. I hope you found the information presented here useful.