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Need help looping video clip
I have some footage of a static shot of beach, slight waves rolling in, boats tied to trees on beach, etc. Camera’s steady but obviously the positions of the waves, boats, and ropes change over time. I need to create an infinitely running loop of this so I figured I’d create a Quicktime Player-compatible file because it can play video full-screen and loop it continuously. To test the player I simply and rather randomly made 3 copies of the roughly 10 second clip, overlaid them so there’d be long dissolves between them, rendered to a h264 file, and it worked fairly well in QT Player. The dissolves smoothed out the jumps in the transitions between the 3 copies of the footage, but when QT looped back to the beginning the jump was more noticeable. All that was just luck so I figured I could be more precise. Ha!
And indeed I was able to find better points in the video where the end of the first copy of the clip matched nicely with the beginning of the second copy, and the dissolve really makes it look like one long clip except for a distant bird taking off and then fading out, but that raises my first question:
Is it possible to create dissolves between video tracks in Vegas 7? To be able to find a good point for the dissolve I put copy #1 of the footage on video track one and reduced its video level. Then I placed copy #2 on the second video track, so I was able to slide this track back and forth underneath the end of copy#1 until I found a point where the waves and boats lined up pretty well. But I coudn’t figure out how to dissolve between those tracks, so I moved the footage up to track 1’s timeline and the dissolve was created automatically. That’s okay but I would’ve preferred the precision of leaving the tracks on separate timelines. Possible, and if so how?
Now to my next question. Backing up a bit, the reason I edited together 3 copies of the same clip with dissolves between them is so that I could have roughly 30 seconds of relatively clean jump-free footage before QT loops it. The odds of noticing a jump in the video when QT Player loops are lowerd if the jump happens every 30 seconds instead of every 10. Right? But I’d still like to try to minimize the jump at the loop point, which means I need to find a point at the end of the clip that most closely matches a point near the beginning. At first I figured: “The point where I’m doing the dissolve is pretty good, why not just start and end the rendered video there?” But the absence of time code in the footage makes this difficult. Plus, I really like how I was able to superimpose the start of copy#2 over the end of copy #1 so I could see how well they line up. That was easy, but I can’t figure out how to superimpose the footage at the end of the piece with the beginning. My brain’s in an infinite loop. Any suggestions?
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3 Replies
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Not sure about the second part of your question – I don’t quite understand it. But dissolving between tracks is easy. Right click on the track header and choose Insert/Remove Envelope> Composite Level. This will give you a line on your track which you can make handles on by doubleclicking the line. Drag the handles up and down to gradually change the “video level” and get your dissolve.
Mary Waitrovich
UW-Madison -
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Creating a seamless loop is easy. The trick to making the ends line up is to make the middle the ends! Place the event on the timeline. Split it in the middle. Move the right event all the way left and the left event all the way to the right right. What you now have is two ends that will seamlessly loop because they were split at the same point. But there’s a jump cut in the middle. No problem, overlap the middle for 1 or 2 seconds until the transition is seamless. What you are left with is a perfect seamless loop.
I do this with generated media all time. In fact, this is how the VASST BackPak’s were created. If you look at one of those projects you’ll see how I did it.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com
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