Cont'd from above)
Play the Clips and watch how Toms image is correctly exposed, while everything else is darker and flatter. Things are looking good, but with one exception. Our Title, which creates the Track Matte Key Effect is staying still, while Tom is running down the field, crossing towards the middle, catching the pass and running for a touchdown. As soon as the play starts, he runs out of the circle and into the darkened flatter portion of the image. We need to get our circle to follow Tom. Thats where Motion Keyframing comes in.
Hit Home to move the CTI to the first frame of all of our Clips. Select our Title (which is being used in the Track Matte Key Effect for the duplicate Clip on Video Track 2) and click on the Edit Effects button. We are now going to add Keyframes via the Motion Effects. Since we have positioned our circle over Tom, while hes in formation and static in the first frame of our Clips, we can set a Position Keyframe there (on the first frame). We will ignore the other settings under Motion for now. To do this, we click on the stopwatch icon and can see a little diamond added to orange line in our Title/Track Matte at the first frame. Here, the position is fine. slowly scrub the Timeline to the point that the ball is snapped, and Tom first starts to move. At this point, we want to add another Keyframe to anchor the Position at this point. We click on the little diamond below the title Video 3 (far left side of the Timeline) and a second Keyframe is added. It appears on the orange line in our Title/Track Matte Clip also.
Now, things involve a little labor. For starters, well scrub our Timeline along until Tom slants to the middle of the field. At this point well place a third Motion Keyframe. With the CTI over this Motion Keyframe, we need to move our Title/Track Matte so that it is over Tom at this point. We can do this by either dragging in the Monitor (notice that it has a set of cross-hairs, since we are in the Edit Effects mode, or by dragging on the value for horizontal Position, or typing in a value after clicking ON the horizontal value. We may have to go into the area between our Keyframe #2 and #3, and add additional Keyframes, adjusting our Position, depending on how linear Toms path is, and if he runs at a constant speed, across the field of view. for now, we have just the three Keyframes. PE will fill in the other frames, between these two Keyframes.
At the point of Motion Keyframe #3, Tom slants towards the middle of the field. Well use Keyframe #3 as the anchor for our next change. Scrub the CTI to the point in the Clip that Tom changes his direction again, just before he catches the pass. In our imaginary football game, well say that the pass is caught, just after he breaks off his slant and heads toward the goal line. At the point that he changes direction, we add another Motion Keyframe, and then move our Title/Track Matte to this point with the use of both the vertical and horizontal positioning.
Decision time - Tom has run towards the center of the field, so his image has gotten smaller. We might want to make our circle smaller too. If so, using the position of the two Motion Keyframes that define his slant pattern, we can add Scale Keyframes at those two points. The first is to anchor the Scale, and the second to set where the Scale ends up. At the second of these two Scale Keyframes, we adjust the Scale to something smaller. Use your eyes for this.
Now Tom is running straight for the goal line, but has not caught the ball. Depending on whether he breaks his stride, we may only need to add one more Motion Keyframe. If he pauses, then well add however many are necessary. Lets say that he never breaks stride, catches the ball on the full run and heads straight towards the end zone. Well scrub to the frame where he crosses the goal line and kneels down clutching the ball and raising it above his head. Here, well add the last Motion Keyframe and adjust our Title/Track Matte to that location. Again, depending on how linear Toms speed is, we may have to tweak our Track Mattes Motion with additional Motion Keyframes.
Now, in our example, we created a hard-edged circle to highlight Tom. If we wanted it to be soft-edged, we could add a little Gaussian Blur Effect to the Title/Track Matte. We could even Keyframe its value, so that when Tom kneels in the end zone, it sharpens (by decreasing the value of the Gaussian Blur to 0).
Also, instead of adding the Brightness & Contrast to our dupe Clip on Video Track 2, we could have added a Gaussian Blur to that Clip, so that Tom was sharp, and the background had a slight Blur Effect. We could even do a combo of Brightness & Contrast plus the Gaussian Blur to make Tom really stand out really well. The choices are endless. Hey, how about making the background bluer, or greener, and keeping Tom just as he was filmed?
Now, if the camera has panned with Tom, we will have fewer Motion Keyframes, depending on how well the camera person followed Tom.
As I stated early on, Id have done this in Premiere Pro. Some things are a little different, but I played along in PE (the target of this article), to keep me honest. I might have missed something, as I did the exercise. If I did, especially if I got confused between the two programs, and called something by the wrong name, I hope that others will correct these errors. Steve has my permission to edit this article in any way that he sees fit. I have posted it in the Tip & Tricks sub-forum, and will link to it in the article that prompted this one. Its probably best to have any discussion/corrections in that article, and Steve can then do an edit to this one, where it is.
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