Morning John,

Thanks, but either I'm being especially dense today or we are using different  programs. (Or none of the above).  Under which MEP tab are you seeing that information?

Can you place a JPG on the timeline, apply a BlurPro or other Creativease effect , and show me a screenshot please?

I have queries about your other points too but will cover those after we've cleared up this one.

Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry,

Here are a couple of screen shots of MEP showing the object and the keyframe screen. To see the effects on the keyframe, you have to click on one of the effects, like Movement Effects.

Hi John,

Thanks a lot. Both of those were hidden here. For one thing the timeline objects were too small. I've got into the habit of swiching immediately to Size/Position, if that's not active already, to see the full filename. But, of course, that doesn't show any added effects. And neither of the two KF rows happened to include the Pixelan entry without scrolling.

Will come back tomorrow with other points.

Sunday 16 March 2014, 19:23

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Will come back tomorrow with other points.

Sunday 16 March 2014, 19:23

Well, maybe not today! Rreckon I'll need to play with the controls a lot more before I can post clear questions!  For the time being I'm experimenting with ChromaWarp. My main hangup is with animating the effect, the spice or both. But hopefully I'll master it soon.

Meanwhile, can I quickly apply one of the animated spice effects shown in the lower part of my screenshot, say one of the 39 under Irises 1, without opening and fiddling around with the KF window?

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry,

You can apply the Spice effects without touching the keyframes.

If you use the Spice effect from the Choose Spice File button, then no presets are applied and, depending on the type of effect, the Spice effect may not be turned on, as I showed in my previous posting. You then have to turn it on in the Spice tab and apply your own parameters. 

If you click on the lightbulb beside Spice effect under the Spice tab, then you are also selecting some presets.

In both cases the Spice effect is applied linearly, according to the amount of Progress that is shown under Spice Effect - Progress.

If you want to vary the progress over the length of the clip, then you can modify the keyframe by clicking on the small button to the left of the Progess slider. This will open the keyframe window for Progress only. In this window, if you click on the Bezier button at the top right, it will open a series of presets. You can simply select one that is the closest to what you want and then fine-tune it. Remember, all key-framing for the effects are done under Pixelan and not under MEP.

The series of images below shows what I did with the ChromaWarp2 effect. In the Image 1, I then clicked on the lightbulb beside Warp and selected an effect (Warp - Warp 2). If I had selected a Spice File first, selecting the Warp effect would have reset it to default.

I then clicked on the Choose Spice File and selected "wi Beamer V" but nothing happened. In the right-hand screen of Image 1, you can see that the Spice Effect - Animate says "None." In Image 2, I changed Animate to "Effect Mask" and moved the Progress slider to 42.8. You can see the effect at the left window of the image. The mask eliminates the Chroma effect overtop of my friend with an inverted V, which is the "wi Beamer V" effect. The width of the V depends on the Progress.

In Image 3 you can see that I moved the Progress slider to 49.8 and the V got wider. I also clicked on the small button to the left of Progress.

Image 4 shows the Keyframe screen with an inverted V (coincidence). Image 5 shows the Completion presets where I selected the inverted V(not the Spice effect, but the keyframe effect). In the Keyframe screen of Image 4, the horizontal axis is time as a percentage of the length of the clip. The vertical axis is the amount of Progress as per the Progress slider. In this case, the Spice mask is at 0 at the beginning of the clip and then the inverted V starts to widen as the clip is played. The full mask is applied at 50%, or half way through the clip and he Chroma effect is no longer visible. This is where the inverted V is completely open. Then the V starts to come back and closes up at 100%. The Chroma effect is now fully back on the screen.If I had selected the diagonal line starting from top left to bottom right, the Spice mask would have been fully applied at the start and then the inverted V would have started to close up until fully closed at the end of the clip where the Chroma effect is fully applied.

Note that most of the effects have the small button to the left of them for keyframing. Thus each parameter or those that have the button can be keyframed. This gives you a lot of creative freedom.

For the next variation, I increased the softness from 10 to 50. You can see in Image 6 that the edges of the inverted V are not so pronounced. I did not apply keyframing to softness, but could have.

As a last variation for now, in Image 7 I inverted the Spice Effect by clicking on the invert button. You can see that the inside of the inverted V now shows the Chroma effect and the outside shows normal. Right above the Invert button if the V flip or vertical flip. Clicking that turns the inverted V into a V. The other button H flip does nothing because the Spice mask is symetrical.

I will put this series together in a pdf when I get home in a couple of days. I'm in Charlevoix right now working from the portable and I don't have access to all of my toys. I had a lot of trouble trying to expand the above images out for some reason.

Terry,

Further to my last posting and for a little more clarity, if you select one of the Spice Effects from the Spice tab, depending on which one it will automatically include keyframing for the mask. An effect that says "In" will create a keyframe that has the mask at 100% reducing to 0% at the end of the clip. Thus the mask is applied and the ChromaWarp appears gradually. An "Out" does in the inverse. The others are static. The mask is applied at the Progress percentage of the Preset. This can be changed by moving the Progress slider and verifying that the keyframe remains null or horizontal.

Hi John,

Brilliant, thank you! Much appreciate that thorough tutorial which I'll step through in more detail shortly.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi John,

I'm making some progress thanks to your excellent tutorial.

One thing I really would like is to use the animated spice masks without any effect. That would be a much easier way of quickly applying that result than by using a mask and KFA. Do you think it's possible? It needs a sort of 'zero' or 'null' effect. But I don't see one in the comprehensive set of presets.

Edit: Pleased to report that I found out how to do it.

1. Set Animate to Both

2. Add KF animation to the Spice effect, typically 0 to 100 over the duration of the clip.

3. The crucial step I'd been looking for: in the Warp section set R, G and B to zero.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK