“I fired the set designer!” bellowed Yuri, barging into the editing room in a gleeful
rage.
"You fired Manfred?!" I squeaked. Manfred was the best science fiction set
designer in town who would still work for pizza.
"Yeah!" shouted Yuri, waving his gigantic meaty fists in the air, "and I
fired that idiotic special effects team too! Bunch of losers!"
Firing the set designer and the special effects team halfway into Alien
Zombie Revenge (or is it Zombie Alien Revenge? I keep forgetting), was one of those
things Yuri did without thinking. He did a lot of things without thinking, but he was
the director, and he was signing the checks, so I figured that was his business. Though
it left me with a lot of questions.
"How are we going to shoot the scenes on the alien planet, Frabjuous-5, where
the Brainclaw Warriors live?" I asked.
"I've already shot it!" beamed Yuri confidently. He handed me the tapes. I
stuck one in the editing deck.
"Yuri, this is the playground outside of the middle school, it's just not an
alien homeworld."
"Hey!" barked Yuri, pointing a thick, wet finger at me. "You're the whiz-kid
editor. Make me an alien planet. I'm not in a talking mood tonight. I'm in a firing
mood." He slammed the door.
Using Filters
Video is no more than a string of digital still images. Just as you might manipulate a
graphic image in a program such as PhotoShop, you can manipulate video in your editor
using filters in ways that would have knocked the socks off any linear editor plugging
away 20 years ago.
Almost every editor comes with built-in filters. Typically found under
"effects" or "tools", they apply changes to blocks of selected video frames. There are
two types of filters, ones that adjust the image quality of a clip, and ones that add
visual effects. The first type allows you to tweak things such as brightness, contrast,
sharpness, etc. The second type do things like blur, add motion like ripples on the
surface of a pond or even twirling the image around on the screen. You can also create
transparency effects using things such as Chroma key filters and mattes. Multiple
filters can be applied to a single clip; you may, for example, brighten and sharpen a
clip. I figured filters might save this editing job.
Real World Example:
Making an Alien Landscape with Hue and Stop Motion Filters
The Hue of an image is the color map it's using. Changing the hue of a clip replaces the
original colors by shifting the color wheel in one direction or another. I figured
radical color changes might make our park look like an alien planet. I selected the clip
in my timeline, went to the filter menu, and added a Hue filter. The preview window let
me see what the filter would do. When I was happy that the colors looked sufficiently
other-worldly, I applied it.
Figuring that aliens might look or move a little differently on their
homeworld, I also added a Stop Motion Blur filter. This is a visual effects filter that
fades multiple copies of the clip over itself with a bit of a shift in time. The result
is a slow-moving, weird-looking image. It's frequently used for POV shots of people who
are drunk, sick, or taking dangerous drugs. I figured aliens would look like that on
their blue-grassed home planet, and it would disguise the fact that the nearest building
was a jungle gym. I applied that filter. When I played the clip back with both filters,
it looked very other-worldly. Pleased with myself, I turned off the lights. And went
home.
Color Correcting
The next morning I was waiting around for praise like an anxious puppy. Yuri, chewing
on a slice of pizza that looked like a wet napkin, watched the alien footage and didn't
do more than grunt. He gave me some new tapes and left. Yuri had plenty of bad habits.
Firing people on a whim was hardly the worst. Another of Yuri's faults was that he never
sets the white balance on his camera. The white balance was off on all the tapes.
Not all light is created equal. Light has varying "temperatures" which affect
its color, ranging from "cold" (bluish) to "hot" (reddish). Mercury vapor and quartz
lights have a "cool" look and incandescent bulbs have a "warm" tone. The color white
looks different under each of these light sources. So if your video footage involves
several different light sources, your cast's costumes will change color as they walk
from room to room. How much will they change color? Not so much that nobody will
recognize that they're the same clothes, but enough so that you'll never win an Oscar
and when you're sitting in the alley crying about that, other videographers will walk
past laughing and pointing. You'll hear them say " … never sets his white balance!
Hahaha!" as their limos whisk them away to trendy parties. You can check your own
footage out yourself by using a special effects wipe on a single monitor and showing
both sources at once.
Well, Yuri hadn't set his white balance, and he didn't have a limo, but he
did have me. I selected the offending clips, and readjusted them with the color balance
filter.
Making Black and White or
Sepia Tone
"The aliens are going back in time!" bellowed Yuri, pointing a copy of the script at
me in an accusatory manner. He was wearing one of those orange hats with ear flaps that
hunters wear. "They're going back to 1954!" Because they want to meet Ike! "
"Period sets? Vintage cars?!" Suddenly this turkey was getting exciting.
"Are you looking for a job, Cassidy? Because you should be. We don't have the
money for period sets or vintage cars. I'm going to do the whole thing in closeup, but
in black and white! So you know it's old!" He thought that was a pretty great idea.
Yuri was tickled pink when I told him that we could do the whole thing with
software filters in our editing program. By selecting a clip and adding a desaturation
filter, a color clip can be rendered black and white. This pleased Yuri so much, he sent
the aliens back in time again, to 1863, because they suddenly wanted to meet Abraham
Lincoln. This time we used two filters, one to remove all the color, and another to add
red, which gives a sepia toned result. (Some programs have a separate sepia filter
already installed.)
Yuri was so excited with the results, he asked me to show him what some of
the other filters in our editing software can do.
Changing Brightness and Contrast
Brightness and contrast are useful, especially in conjunction with Gamma correction,
to lighten or darken a shot. Typically I use it to punch up detail in an underexposed
scene.
Sharpen
The sharpen filter doesn't really sharpen your clip, it only makes it seem sharper.
It does this by increasing the contrast between pixels. It won't save a chronically out
of focus clip, but it can do a lot to enhance a slightly out of focus shot.
Blur
Blurring a clip is just like sharpening it, only in reverse. Why on earth would you
want to blur something? Well, how about blurring your title card, then fading from the
blurred one to a sharp one. That's why Yuri hires me. The Big Ideas.
TCG
Some editors (Final Cut Pro, for example) also ship with a filter which will add the
timecode to the bottom of the video image (producing what is known in the biz as a
window dub.) I find this very useful for two things: first, when people are viewing the
rough edit and want to comment, they can be very precise, and second, it obviously
identifies the cut as rough.
Epilogue
Yuri forgot to pick me up for the premiere, so I missed the red carpet, the
paparazzi, and a supermodel who showed up with one of the actors and then got in a big
fight. I made it in time to see the video filters do their magic on the big screen. I
was the only person who could tell that one clip had been a little fuzzy to begin with,
or that at one point in time the color balance was way off between some of the shots,
and it gave me a nice feeling. With all the money we saved after firing the special
effects team and set designers, Yuri gave me a big bonus and told me he'd be sure to
call me for Son of Zombie Alien. I'm sure that'll start shooting pretty soon, hopefully
before the reviews start to come in.
Kyle Cassidy is a network engineer and a video artist.
