CoreMelt Visual Effects

It's 6pm, you've just completed a six hour edit and you're looking forward to heading out and downing a favorite beverage or two. Everything's looking rosy, then all of a sudden the client pulls out a CD. "We took these stills on the shoot, can you use them as a background for the titles?"

Panic, sweat, what to do? Call one of the After Effects artists? They've all gone home, or more likely they're all working on a job till late. So cut to six hours later and you've painfully finished cropping, resizing and hand keyframing 50 still image layers. Your timeline is now 30 layers deep, then you hit the render button. Uh oh.

Ok, so is there a better way? Well, lets take a look.

ImageFlow Fx is a set of plugins for Final Cut Pro and Motion which reduce the complex task of creating an animated photo montage to a process which takes only minutes. This tutorial will run you through creating a photomontage and what's more, you get to keep two of the plugins absolutely free, with no watermarks or restrictions.

Scroll to the bottom for the links to the tutorial sample files and ImageFlow Installer

Click on Quicktime icon at left to play tutorial final result

Ok, now how to make those, it's much simpler than you think. Let's start off with that CDROM of random images you've been handed. It could be all different resolutions, size, file formats, types, even a mix of CMYK and RGB. Now you could straight away select that whole folder and plug it into ImageFlow Fx, as the plugins will handle all sorts of mixed file types and sizes (up to 4096x4096). If you don't care about image order or the images have already been scaled and sorted, then skip the next step. If you don't want to use your own, the Sample Project files linked below include four folders of images which are already scaled and sorted.

Optimizing and Setting Image Order with iPhoto

You can do this by hand or with any other image editing program, but everyone has iPhoto and there's a few tricks built into it which can save you some time. Start up iPhoto and select the "File -> Import to Library" menu option. Choose the folder of images you want to use and then let iPhoto import them all. Now, before you click on anything else, choose the "File -> New Album from Selection" option and name the album "Photomontage Selects". You can now use the iPhoto interface to delete images you don't want to use in the animation, crop, or make any needed level adjustments. Drag the order of the images to be the order you want in your animation as well. When your album contains only the pictures you want in the order you want, then choose "Edit -> Select All"

If you have iPhoto '07

Export settings in iPhoto 07 Change the default settings for the export, select "scale images no larger than" and enter a resolution that is just higher than your Final Cut Pro project resolution. For example if you are working in a PAL or NTSC project, then try the images scaled to 800 pixels wide and let iPhoto preserve the aspect ratio. For HD projects use either 1500 pixels wide for HDV or 2048 if you are working in uncompressed HD. Then, it's very important to change the Name option from "Use Filename" to "Use Album Name", this will export the images with names which keeps the order you choose in the iPhoto Album. Now hit the export button, then make a new folder on the desktop called "Photomontage selects" and hit "OK".

If you have iPhoto '08

First use from the menus "Photos->Batch Change->Title to Text" as shown at left With all the images in the album selected, sequentially rename them using the menu option "Photos->Batch Change->Title to Text" with attach number to each file checked.

Export settings in iPhoto 08 Then export using the File->Export->File Export menu option and select custom size option, and enter a width just wider than your project resolution, then change filename to the "Use Title" option. That will give you file names as "filename-01.jpg", etc. correctly padded with zeros so the images will be in the same order in ImageFlow as they are in the iPhoto album.

Fire Up Final Cut Pro and Let Her Rip

Believe it or not, you've already finished most of the work by now. First, make sure you have "Unlimited RT" enabled in the "RT" menu on the timeline, this lets third party plugins do realtime previews. Then, in your Final Cut Pro Project, go to the browser and open the generators tab, scroll down until you see "CM ImageFlow Fx".

Now drop the "Multifader" plugin onto your timeline, then double click on the clip to bring it's controls up in the viewer. Click on the "controls" tab, and it will bring up the following menu:

Multifader control settings

Hit that choose button and use the file browser to select our "Photomontage selects" folder on the desktop.
Select the frame rate of your project (this is done automatically in FCP6), then hit play, you've immediately got a montage playing in real time on the timeline. There is a set of built in presets which set different image movements, try "top to bottom" and "infinite zoom" to see some different styles. Then, try adjusting the parameters manually, "secs per image" controls how long every image stays on the screen for. "Num Images", chooses how many are displayed at once, up to eight. No matter how many images you pick it will always cycle through the images in the order that they are displayed in the finder folder window (and the order you selected in iPhoto).

Click to view the "Multifader" generator in action

You can also choose to randomize any of the x,y or z positions of each image by using the "random x,y,z" checkboxes, and then adjust the "random spread" to influence how far apart the images will be placed.

Now add a mask to each image, scroll down to the "image mask" option, tick the "enable mask" check box and select "Rough 02" for a ragged edge effect on each image. You can choose from a whole range of built in images or use the image well to drop your own on. Similarly, the "apply frame" option allows you to apply a variety of picture frames or digital grunge borders to the image.

Moving on to more photo montage styles

Now try dropping the "Polaroids" generator onto the timeline on a new layer with a slight overlap. Choose the "St Petersburg Lions" folder or one of your own, set the project frame rate and hit play. You've just got a flash frame effect instantly with nice soft glowing falloff. Perfect for Wedding Videography. Try adjusting the time per image and "rest time". Rest time is the time each image will stop before the transition starts to the next image in the sequence. Almost all of the plugins in image flow include rest time as a parameter. Something else you can try, if you are editing to a music track and know the BPM (beats per minute) of the track then you can tick the "use bpm" check box and type the BPM in and the pictures will change on every beat, or use the BPM modifier to select "x0.25" to only change on every fourth beat. Again, almost all the effects include the BPM option, which makes things a lot easier for editing music videos.

"Polaroids" generator: perfect for Wedding Videography

TIP: Check your rendering resolution sequence settings.

In Final Cut Pro 6.0.1 Apple has changed some defaults for some "easy setup" sequence settings to default to Resolution "50%" of sequence frame size on final renders. This makes your final output look very blocky and rough. Make sure you increase this back to "100%" under the "Sequence Settings -> Render Control" when doing a final render.