Transitions provide visual segues between clips and can be used to influence the mood and pace of your program. Without transitions, your clips move from one to the other using cuts, which are instantaneous switches from one clip to another. While this type of edit should be used most often within your story, some aspects of your movie may be enhanced by using a transition between scenes.
FreeDV provides a variety of transition effects. You can choose transitions that gently fade your images into and out of the surrounding clips, or you can opt for exciting transitions that explode from one frame to another.
Transitions create an overlap between the clips using the images from beyond their cut points. This way, adding a transition does not affect the overall program length, which is useful when you have edited a "rough cut" of a project and wish to add transitions without altering synchronization between your video clips and your music and narration tracks.
However, you must have frames of video beyond theStart and End Cuts of your clips for FreeDV to create the necessary overlap. If you have added clips to the Story without adjusting their Start or End Cuts away from the very beginning and ending of the clip, you will need to adjust the length of the clip as described in Editing clips.
Furthermore, many transitions will not appear to have an effect if applied to an edit created using the Split Clip command. This is because FreeDV will blend identical frames together, which produces no change. You may therefore need to adjust the length of the clip as described inEditing clips.
Each transition has default settings, such as starting and ending locations, blurring percentages, shapes, angles, and borders, which you can edit or customize to enhance the look and feel of your video story.
FreeDV uses standard Apple QuickTime® transitions. A brief description of each transition is listed in the following table. Many more transitions and special effects become available when you upgrade to the complete version of IntroDV.
Adding a transition is a drag and drop procedure that opens a dialog box in which you can view the transition's behavior. You can choose to keep the transition's default parameter settings or change them before you add the transition to your clips.
Click the Transitions button on the toolbar, or choose View>Effects.
The Effects window opens showing a list of available transitions.![]()
- Drag the transition you want into the Story window and place the cursor between the two clips where you want the transition to occur. When you see the insertion cursor (a vertical black bar), release the mouse button to apply the transition.
A dialog box appears with the name of the transition at the top. The dialog box contains the settings that change the transition's look and behavior, and a small preview window.
- Keep the default settings, or change any settings you want to customize the transition. The results are shown in the preview window.
You can edit or customize your transition settings at any time--while you're adding the transition or after you've added and previewed the transition in the Story window. See Editing a transition for details.
- Click OK.
The story automatically builds and includes the transition. When the story finishes building, you'll see the transition name between the clips in the Story window.
At this point, you can add more transitions, preview the clips with their transitions, or edit the transitions to further customize them.
NOTE: This is a good time to save your project if you haven't done so already. Even if you're going to continue to make changes, it's a good idea to save your project periodically.
When you're ready to preview the transition, you can do so byscrubbing through the clips and transitions in the Story window or playing the Story.
In the Story window, grab the Story Time marker (the red vertical bar) with your cursor and move it to the beginning of the clip you want to preview.
- Click play to preview the Story and your transition, or slowly drag the Story window marker to the right. You'll see the clips and the transitions playing in the Story Player.
As you preview your clips and transitions, you might find that some transitions could use a few alterations. Perhaps they fill too much of the image area, or need a border for a sharper look. Or perhaps you want to change the transition shape from a square to an oval. You can change any of these effect settings by editing the transition settings.
Editing your transitions is a matter of changing their settings after you've previewed your clips and transitions. You can customize your transitions at any time.
Each transition has its own set of parameters. If you've experimented with the settings, you probably have a good idea of the types of things you can do with them. If you haven't examined them yet, here's a brief list of the types of things they can do:
- Change the size of the new image and specify whether or not it will completely cover the old image during the transition
- Add borders, soft edges, and background colors
- Change the shapes of the transitions (for example, from a square to an oval, or from a triangle to a matrix pattern)
- Change the center location for the starting and ending points
- Specify the direction in which a matrix pattern travels to cover the old image
- Specify a gradient and edge blur
You edit transitions directly from the Story window.
In the Story window, click the transition to highlight it.
A yellow border appears around the transition.
- Right-click the transition and choose Transition Settings from the menu or choose Edit>Transition Settings.
A dialog box appears with the transition name at the top. The dialog box contains the settings that change the transition's look and behavior, and a small preview window.
- Change or set the parameters by using the sliders for percentages, by choosing items from a drop-down list, by selecting checkboxes, or by choosing X and Y axis parameters.
As you change each setting, the preview window shows the results.
- Click OK.
The story automatically builds and includes the new transition. You can view the new transition by scrubbing through the clip in the Story window or playing the story.
Go ahead and experiment with the different transition types and their parameters and see what kinds of effects you can create. After previewing your clips and transitions, you may find that one or two aren't quite what you wanted. Removing a transition is very easy.
After previewing and editing your clips, you might decide to remove a transition altogether. Perhaps it doesn't quite fit into your program, or perhaps you want to add another type of transition in its place.
The story automatically builds and removes the transition.
In addition to editing your transition settings, you can change the length of the transition itself. By default, each transition is 30 frames, approximately one second long. You can shorten or lengthen a transition by dragging its edges in the Story window.
Because a transition blends the clips from beyond the cut points, lengthening your transition obscures a bit more of your clips and shortening your transition leaves longer portions of your clips showing.
As with most visual programs, experimenting with the settings and viewing the behavior is the best way to achieve the aesthetic results you want.
Digital Origin |