editing Archives - Video Production News

Using VFX Assets in 60fps (After Effects + Premiere Pro)

in After Effects, Featured, Premiere, Visual FX/by David Blaker

So you’ve embarked on a video editing project at 60fps? Here’s a little thing you might want to know!

For those who need an introduction, the “fps” refers to how quickly a video will switch between individual pictures to create the illusion of a movement, which begins at roughly 15 frames per second.

So why would you want to create a 60fps project if most video formats are at a standard 24-30fps? For one simple reason: it’s satisfyingly silky smooth.

Other than it’s an impressive visual effect, it can also help out for a variety of purposes. For example, gameplay videos are often recorded at 60fps since the games strive for immersion, and so this smooth playback helps gives the game a more natural look.

Another case is for motion graphics, where a clean art style compliments the fluid framerate. This is common in infographics, such as a personal favourite from the YouTube channel Kurzgesagt.

So what do you need to do to your ProductionCrate workflow to make the assets you download fit into your scene? As you may know, most of our FootageCrate elements are 30fps, so here is what we suggest to make it work.

Introducing a much-loved technique, time interpolation! This handy tool is the computer taking a guess at what is happening between two images. From the guess, it then creates an image which is what it predicts the image to look like halfway between the first and the second image. This means you can convert a 30fps asset into 60fps, as the software will create the 30 extra frames out of thin air. We need to apply the interpolation to the 30fps asset to convert it to 60fps.

Most mid-tier editing software supports this. Here’s how you’ll find them:

After Effects

– Right-click on the ProductionCrate asset, go through Effects -> Time -> Time Warp.

– Set the speed to 50%, and make sure your project is in 60fps.

Premiere Pro

– Right-click on your ProductionCrate asset, and select “Speed/Duration”.

– Adjust the speed parameter to 50%.

– Choose Optical Flow as the Time Interpolation method.

Congratulations, your video is now as smooth as butter!

If you’re interested in levelling up your compositing skills, you might also be interested in our recent rotoscoping course!

Download the Powerful Lower Thirds Script for After Effects

in After Effects, Featured, Scripts and Plugins/by David Blaker

Download Crate’s Lower Thirds Script here (Pro) Updated 8-17-2022

Ever wondered how to create lower thirds in After Effects? Pro members can now download the latest After Effects script to generate your own customized lower thirds! We have just updated this free script with 20 New Lower Thirds for Social Media and Youtube Call to Actions!

For those new to the term, lower-thirds are the banners that overlay the base of a video, containing text that helps provide information. This can be the name of the person on-screen, context to some archive footage, or even as the countdown card for a Top 10 video!

Download our script today, and create your own lower-thirds with our one-click solution!

With an astonishing 75 templates to choose from and a huge range of customizations to make, you will have everything you need to create the lower-thirds that matches your branding perfectly. So whether you’re editing for a sports program, an exciting tech-startup or your own YouTube channel, our script is here to give you a professional look you deserve within minutes!

Our main categories each feature their own range of unique designs:

Artistic lower thirds
Corporate lower thirds
Geometric/Modern lower thirds
Floral lower thirds
Minimalistic lower thirds
Sporty lower thirds
Tech lower thirds
Social Media (NEW)
Youtube (NEW)

Let’s take a look at the interface, and see what tools will be at your disposal.

Category: Tell us what your video is focusing on! We’ll then display a variety of different themes for you to choose from which have each been individually designed to fit your needs.

Logo: If we’ve featured an option for you to add your branding in a specific template, here is where you select the specific layer for us to use in the lower third.

Title: Type in what you want the viewer to read!

Subtitle: If the template supports a subtitle, this is the smaller text that will usually appear beneath the title, such as a date, or a job title.

Colour pickers: Use the colour picker to help show off your brand!

Smart Colour Change: This special tool will change the colour of similar elements included in the design, so it automatically matches your picked colour style.

In/Out: Decide exactly when you want the lower-third to appear and disappear!

Create New Comp: When deselected, the lower third will be directly imported into the current open composition. When turned on, it is built in a separate composition.

Create: Once you’re happy with all of your settings, hit this to let the magic happen!

Installing the script is a swift process. Just drop both the “Crate’s Lower Thirds.jsx” and “images” folder into your After Effects > Scripts folder Open up After Effects, and run the script by heading through File -> Scripts -> Crate’s Lower Thirds

We are excited to see how you make use of this lower-thirds generator!

If you’re interested in our other scripts, check out our easy looping animation script.

How to add Snow to your videos – VFX Tutorial

in After Effects, Featured, HitFilm, Visual FX, Written Tutorials/by David Blaker

Download HD snow effects for your videos here

With only a few days to go until Christmas takes over, it’s time to go over one of the most fundamental uses of VFX compositing – snow!

Whether you’re shooting a Christmas comedy or a reflective and chilling scene for your film, snow can always help add value to your project. But not everyone has access to weather manipulating machines or industrially sized snow cannons, and so in these cases, we must rely on VFX to composite the snow into our footage.

FootageCrate has a huge library of snowfall effects, ranging from realistic to cartoon styled. Similar to all of our content, these snow effects are pre-keyed, meaning that transparency is preserved when you drop the snow footage on top of your shot without any further hassle! You can take a look at our collection of snow effects here.

Let’s get started with the tutorial! You can use almost any software for this, including After Effects, Hitfilm, Nuke and Premiere Pro!

I’ve taken this stock image from Pexels.com, so if you want to follow along, be my guest and download the image.

One step I’ve often seen people skipping is that they don’t add depth to their snow effect. What I mean by this is that it’s quite clearly visible that there’s just a snow effect simply being placed on the footage, giving it a “flat” feel. We’re going to give the snow volume by first creating a solid that matches the colour of the lighter clouds, and making it so that the further away the footage is, the higher the opacity. This can be done through masking or opacity painting.

Already we’ve given a nice volumetric feel to the scene. This will look like snow that is too distant to be seen by the camera individually, and so appears like a cloud.

We can now mask out or rotoscope the foreground so that it doesn’t sit behind this fog.

It’s now time to drop the snow effect into our video. I’ve taken two different effects from the FootageCrate website, which is the “snow background” and the “slow snow falling”. I’ll have the first placed behind the foreground, and the second in front of it. This makes it appear as if the subject is sandwiched between the two snow assets so that they feel part of the scene!

Apply these snow effects with an add/lighten/screen transfer mode so that the dark halos around the snowflakes are invisible, and admire your now far more chilling scene! You can add further colour corrections to then cool the image with bluish tints.

Thanks for reading this tutorial! If you’d like to learn more VFX, take a look at our helicopter compositing tutorial!

Download Christmas and Winter Holiday Video Effects!

in Featured, Motion Graphics, Visual FX/by David Blaker

Download HD Christmas and Winter Holiday video effects here!

Find Christmas and Holiday themed sounds and Music here!

Happy Holidays!

ProductionCrate is here to help you celebrate the season with some festive and fun video effects for your projects. Here’s a peek at some of the wonderful assets we have wrapped up for you.

Snow Effect Overlays

Edit in our looping snow effects with no time at all thanks to it all being pre-keyed. Our snowfall assets range from realistic blizzards to gentle cartoon snow. You can edit these snow effects into Premiere Pro and any other editing suite.

Transitions

Give your video cuts a merry makeover with our animated Christmas themed transitions. ranging from snowmen, Christmas trees, gifts and more. Place these effects over two clips at the point where they cut in an editor such as Premiere Pro or After Effects.

Backgrounds

Use an exciting Christmas backdrop for your greenscreens or presentations. We’ve made sure that these backgrounds loop, meaning you can have them endlessly play without any visible seams or cuts where the footage repeats itself.

We hope you enjoy editing your festive videos over the holidays!

Interested in becoming a part of our growing community? Take a look at our forums!

Backgrounds

in Featured, Motion Graphics/by David Blaker

One easy and quick way you can make your presented videos more exciting is to have a great background!

We’ve built out one of the largest libraries of HD backgrounds you can find, all ready for you to download from our motion-graphics category today, with some of them even being completely free!

Use them in your green-screened presentation videos to give it a more dynamic look. Our low-poly backgrounds are perfect for these, as they keep your video fresh without distracting your viewers.

One of our low-poly backgrounds

We have plenty of themes, styles and variations to fit any look you’re going for, even backgrounds fit for holiday seasons such as Christmas, Halloween and Valentines day!

Using these backgrounds has been massively helpful in our videos on our YouTube channel, especially for our title sequences. Here we used the “That’s All Folks” from the Toon and Anime category for our Saturday Morning Tutorial shows!

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Tag Archive for: editing

After Effects

Premiere Pro

Download Crate’s Lower Thirds Script here (Pro) Updated 8-17-2022

Snow Effect Overlays

Transitions

Backgrounds