Stone Design Forums

Transitions do not seem to be working right. I am on a 15" macbook pro with 2 GB of ram running the latest OS X and quicktime 7.1 pro.

Here's what happens. I put two video clips together. I then set the start point toward the end of the first clip and the end point toward the beginning of the second clip. I then select the transition from the FX area. The transition is applied over the selected area. However, a 3 second still picture is then inserted at the end of the transition. The sound plays, but the video is stopped. Then, the video seems to pick up in the right place.

I'd be happy if there were no still picture at the end of the transition. It would seem the transition effect should apply to the end of the first clip and the beginning of the second. That's what seems to happen in iMovie. I like videator because I can just work in QT. It would be great if transitions could work.

Videator is not just a clone of other apps - otherwise, why bother?

In Videator, transitions are dynamic - that is as the first video image keeps changing you'll see those changes in the transition.

You can easily do what you want though - that is move from one static image to another in a transition.

Go to last last frame of first video.
Set In and Out marker to that point.
Drag TIFF/JPG from ImageWell into Movie - add it to the selection.

You can set the duration of the still in Preferences, as well as what transition you want.

If you want to add some other transition, set the In marker to the beginning of that still image, and the Out marker to the beginning of clip 2, add transition.

What I can't figure out is why when I put in a transition on two dynamic videos, a still image is inserted after the transition and at the start of the next video. I like the idea of a dynamic transition. I am getting a wierd still artifact.

I can't replicate your situation - did you make sure the transition ends on the first frame of the second video? Videator takes the destination (final) image from the location of the end marker in the transition effect.

Hint - click in upper right or upper left of time line in Effects Options of that transition to bring up the full window width timeline where you can precisely set the end frame.

Another really easy way is to paste in the second video, and type the "O" key which sets the Out Marker to the Playhead which gets set at the first frame of the pasted video. Then adjust the In marker for the length of the transition desired, and then add the transition effect from the fX tab of the library.

Maybe I've misunderstood you and you are saying that the final transition image should be dynamic too? I can see how this might be possible in a future version if the transition is well into the start of the second clip, currently, it uses a fixed end frame for the transition.

One trick you could use for now is that you could just overlay another qt movie, and set the fade-in and transparency to start at 0% and move to 100% to get a dynamic fade-in.

Thanks! The first post was a helpful clarification. On my own, I wound up going for option 2 with a twist. I created a 640X480 jpeg file and then overlaid it with a fade in and fade out. This creates a rather simple but still effective transition effect.

I may try your 1st option in a future effort. Do you set the in marker by typing "I"?

I do think dynamic transitions would be worthwhile. If you read the QT developer doc, it suggests how you could do it (about what you suggest doing by hand).

In a future version, it might be interesting to also have some sort of visual cue on the timeline about where clips start and end. That would make editing much more efficient.

Haven't you been using the Time Lines panel?

I usually add the Toolbar for Time Lines to my tool bar for instant access. It gives a nice visual representation of when an effect begins and ends compared to all the others, and by clicking on one, it selects it in the options area for easy editing. You can also delete, move, expand effects from that panel, so it's pretty useful: Tools -> Time Line...

For the dynamic transitions, I can imagine perhaps a way where if you straddled the transition and the end image was taken from a sequentially moving place. It's tricky because it would require the user to place the transition half into one clip and half into the other clip, and the machinery would have to know that it needed to update the end image frame (that could be simply a UI switch). More thinking about it is needed! Note, in the case of slides or live video, it would have no effect (except maybe to show the wrong image!)

Wow, timelines looks great. I'll try it on my next project.

Bud - I'd love to see whatever you've been making - if its something intended for the net, please send us the URL. The main thing the Videator site needs now is cool videos made by real users!

Andrew

I've looked at timeline, and it seems good. One addition that would be good in a future release would be to have the clips that you've added one after the other also appear in the timeline.

Here's a link to a blog post that I created with videator:

http://www.michiganmuscleboy.com/2006/0 ... in_an.html

It's a gym visit (my training partner Nancy and I are gym fanatics). We use very simple effects (the transition ones I hacked together).

We have a pair of video blogs dedicated to interviews and exercise analyses. I'm thinking videator could be a boon for exercise analyses because we could overlay grids, etc. to show range of motion. Here's the URL for that:

http://muscleventures.com

Most of the muscleventures site has been done with imovie and videos captured by consumer still cameras in video mode. We are transitioning the site to videator and already our last podcast was done in videator (we still have a couple of legacy imovie ones in the pipeline).

Feel free to put any of these up with a link back to muscleventures.com.

Bud

Nancy's commentary is pretty funny as are yours! Nice job.

I made a sample video for my website to show them a lot of the videator effects in one video. Came out pretty well for what I was trying to show them. You can find my video on my website.

http://maclectic.com/B2/index.php

You'll also find my interview with Andrew Stone there, but it's also listed here already. I'm preparing for a demonstration of Videator for our user group in September, so I'll hopefully have more videos to show by then.

Bobrocky

That's a pretty cool intro Bob - I'm going to add that to our Tutorials page tomorrow!

Andrew