Subtitles of the Movie

There's a really nice tool called Compare that will allow you to look at your footage in different ways and this is really helpful, especially when you have a client sitting right next to you and you want to show them what a project could look like all in one sitting. So let's go ahead and get started. I'm going to create a brand new composite as always and I have NTSC, 640 by 480 and we're going to work with a 2D composite. I'll click OK. The footage we're going to bring in is a test piece of footage that I did with our favorite shark, Crunch, and it's animated and it has some particles on him. So I'll bring that in. I'll zoom out a little bit and press Play so you can see what we have. So the idea is this; the client is thinking about having the color treatment of the film presented in several different ways. So that maybe one leans more towards green hues and one leans more towards a sepia kind of tone. So we want to be able to compare them literally right here in real time. So what I want to do first of all is I'm going to add to this footage here, let me just go ahead and tear off my monitors, is I want to add an operator to the shark. So I'm going to add an operator that's located in Color Correction and one of my favorites is Color Shift. And you notice that we have these storage bins down here. These are going to be very important when we do our comparisons. So for the first one I'm going to leave it at Normal. I'll go over to bin two and I'm going to change the hue to more of a green color like so. Then I'll go over to bin three and I will lean more towards, let's see here, some kind of, I think a magenta kind of color there or something so I'm just going to play around until I find something that's a little bit more different from what we have here. So I'm going to try to get a different color. Something like that. Yeah, some kind of copper, sepia color. So I have these three different bins and you see what they're for. Just clicking on them allows you to store different data. So now what I want to do is use the Comparison Tool, which is located in our Toolbar. So I'm going to double click on my Composite so I can return to the Main Composite and I'm going to click right here. You see this little A guy in the little box? This is our Compare Tool. I'll click, move my mouse to the right and click here on the bottom to turn it on. And I'll put this, let's see, right here. And I'll move this workspace out of the way. So we have our Compare Tool on and now let's talk about the Compare Controls. And as you see here, we have the ability to split the view in several different ways. Currently it's horizontally, or rather vertically so I can move this line and I can have a rectangle and I can also split it horizontally and move that line. So I'm going to go back to the vertically and we're going to bring in another piece of footage so we can actually have something to compare. I'm literally going to bring in the same, exact piece of footage. So in the Toolbar, under the Current Button, click and choose Operator. The Operator Picker opens up and at the very bottom we can open up footage again. So you can open up an entirely different clip of footage if we want to, but I really want to show you how you can compare the same piece of footage against, well, itself. So I have the shark open two different times. Alright? Now what I want to do is I want to then go to one of the bins. So I'm going to go to Current and the I'm going to slide this like so and go to my workspace. I'm going to click here on Color Shift. This is the operator that we added. And here is where the magic will happen. So I'm going to click on the different bin and you see that we have our different colors there. So from this list, I can choose the operator again and I can choose the footage here for our shark, which gives us the very original footage. And now I can go like this and I can even play it by scrubbing and we see we have two different pieces of footage that we can then look at in any of these tools here. By the way, when you have it on rectangle, you can draw your own rectangle anywhere. So you can make your own comparisons in different little chunks like so. I'll go back to vertically and I want to show you one more important thing that's really going to help you a lot. When I go to the very beginning of this footage, the shark is pretty much in full view. But I want him here as well in full view. That's where this little lock symbol will do for me. I choose where I want to lock my footage and I click this guy and now he's locked and now I can move my playback head to advance the other piece of footage that I'm comparing and I can once again do this to show more or less and now I have a way to show my client the different bins that we created earlier. And this is really going to be helpful when you want to come up with something for a fantasy setting or underwater setting or anything where you have some ideas but you really want to see things side by side and playing in real time. You can also click here to invert your selection at any time as well. And unlock when you want to free up your footage so they can both play again. And that's it. That is the Compare Tool. Just one more quick thing though by the way; if you don't like the white line, just deselect where it says Region Limits and then you can click anywhere and not have that white line distracting you.