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While working on a video my wife needed recently, I got wondering how one would go about making a realistic Star Trek style transporter effect. After working out in my own mind what the basic steps were, I found a set of instructions at mediacollege.com that detailed exactly how to do it if you happen to own several hundred dollars worth of products from Adobe. Since I don’t, and I’m not likely to in the foreseeable future, I put together this guide detailing how to achieve the same effect using 100% free software.

Software needed

As promised, the software used for this project is all freeware*.

You will need:

• The GIMP
• T@B ZS4 Video Editor
• VLC Media Player

Filming

The first thing you’re going to want to do is film your actor who is going to be transported. This will have to be a steady shot, so use a tripod. I don’t have the remote for my Canon Powershot G2, so I used it’s 10-second delay when shooting so I didn’t jar the camera while hitting the shutter button.

Film the empty room for a second or two then have your actor walk into the frame and assume the “beam-in” position then hold it for a second or two before starting the rest of the scene. When it’s time to “beam out”, he walks over to the proper location, holds the “beam-out” position for a couple of seconds, then walks out of the frame.

mvi_4006.avi is a sample video you can download.

Gathering needed clips

There are a few parts of your new film that need special attention.

First, start VLC Media Player and click the Settings menu and select “Preferences”. On the list on the left, click “Video” and set the “video snapshot directory” to a folder that’s easy to find. Also, set “Video Snapshot Format” to jpeg and check the box next to “use sequential numbers instead of timestamps”. You may have to restart VLC Media Player to get these changes to take effect.

Once that’s done play your video with VLC, and pause it at the last frame of the empty room. Click the Video menu and select “Snapshot” to save that frame as an image file. To make things less confusing, locate the file you just created and rename it to something like “empty1.jpg”.

I discovered, quite by accident, that if you tell ZS4 to export to a still-image file type, such as .png or .jpg, it will cheerfully generate the image you need and it has the added bonus of being able to advance along the timeline by single frames. This makes it a LOT easier to get exactly the right frame.

So, put the insertion point at the point where you see just the empty room, click the compile button, click the browse button, find the desired directory, and choose a name like “empty1.jpg”, then click the EXPORT button..

You’re going to need similar snapshots of the last frame of “beam-in” before the action starts (beamin.jpg), the first frame of the “beam out” position (beamout.jpg), and a shot of the scene after the actor has left the frame (empty2.jpg).

when you take the shots for “beamin.jpg” and “beamout.jpg”, note where on the timeline they are. In a little while, you’ll need to trim the movie so that “beamin.jpg” and “beamout.jpg” are the start and end points, respectively.

Here are the snapshots I took:

There’s just one more thing you’ll need: The sparkling effect. The guy at mediacollege.com put up a set of instructions on how to draw and animate some sparkles, but it required software I don’t have. I couldn’t duplicate his results with my freeware, so I took another route. I tuned the television to an analog channel with no broadcast signal and filmed about 15 seconds zoomed in on the white noise (aka “bug races”) and saved it as “static.avi“.

And, what good is the sparkle effect without the classic transporter sound? I found this one on mediacollege.com.

Building Masks

Adobe Premier has this neat feature that allows you to have a layer that is the sparkle effect and drop a still image of a mask on it and your sparkle effect is confined to where the actor is standing. ZS4 doesn’t do it quite that easily. We are going to have a couple of extra steps to create our masks.

Load the “beam-in” image into The GIMP and select just the actor. You can use the lasso or any other selection method you’re comfortable with. I like to use the Paths tool to draw a path around the actor then click Select->From Path.

With just the actor selected, click Edit->Fill With BG Color after making sure the background color is set to white. Next, invert the selection (Select->Inverse) so that everything BUT the actor is selected and click Edit->Fill With FG Color after verifying that the foreground color is black. Do this for beamin.jpg and beamout.jpg, saving the files as beaminmatte.jpg and beamoutmatte.jpg, respectively. This will give you these twp pictures:

Now we need to make two short video files that have the sparkle effect confined to where the white area is in these mattes. Start ZS4, click the FILE button and browse to where your clips are saved.

Once you’ve found static.avi, click on it. There’ll be a small delay while the program examines the video file. When it’s done, drag the green triangle to the “mediamixer” in the lower right part of the window.

You only need about 5 seconds of this, so move the insertion point to the five second mark by putting a 5 in the text box at the bottom and click the equals sign. Once you’re at the five-second mark, verify that the track for static.avi has a red background.That means it is the track being edited. Click on the track name on the project tab of the lower left portion of the window to set it as the track being edited, if necessary. Now, click the button with the tooltip “trim current position to end” and the clip will be cropped to five seconds.

At this point we need to make sure the dimensions of the video we’re making match the dimensions of the clip we just imported, so, in the lower left window paine, click the PROJECT button, select the MediaMixer track, go to the upper window pane and click TRACK then PROPERTIES. change the WIDTH box to 320 and the HEIGHT box to 240 then click the UPDATE button.

Now you need to put the matte over the static. Since we want the matte to appear at the same instant the static does, click the |< button below the timeline. That rewinds to the very beginning. Click the FILE button again, find, and click on, beaminmatte.jpg. When the program finishes analyzing it, drag the green triangle and drop it on the MediaMixer track. Still images are rendered as 30-second video clips, so you’ll need to make this track active, go to the 5-second mark (just click = if you haven’t changed anything else) and click the “trim to end” button.

What you’ve got now is two layers of video. The top layer is a still image and the bottom layer is the static. The next step is to cut a hole in the top layer where the white portion is, so the static will show through. This is what chroma keys are for.

In the lower left window pane, click the F/X button. expand it as shown and drop the “yuv/chroma key” onto the track for beamin.jpg.

The window that comes up shows just the currently selected track. Find the button that a tooltip which says, “select rectangular color sample for keying” and press it. Now, draw a rectangle in just the white part of the image.

After you do this, the top part of the screen will show two images. The one on the right is just the current track and the one on the right shows the combined effects of all tracks.

Before rendering your video, zs4 needs, for some bizarre reason, to be told to render each track as opaque. Click TRACK in the upper window then click the RECTANGLES button. Beside the image on the right is a column of buttons. The middle one is a solid white square. Make sure that button is pressed for all tracks. (The button is not available on the MediaMixer track, but you’ll want to go through the other three tracks to check it.)

Okay. Now you’re ready to render this part of the video. Click the compile button on the Media Player track and give it a name like “beaminmask” and click the EXPORT button. When the next screen asks what codec to use, click the right arrow until you see “ZS4 motion-PNG (save alpha)” and click “ENTER”. That way it’ll save the transparency we worked so hard on.

Now, you click “PROJECT”, “NEW” and repeat the process above using “beamoutmatte.jpg” to create “beamoutmask.avi”. That’s not really as dauntin as it sounds. Without taking time for the explanation, I just made the second mask video in about 5 minutes - and that includes the time needed to export it.

Sample files: beaminmask.avi beamoutmask.avi

Putting it all together

Now that you’ve got all the necessary parts, it’s not hard at all to do a little trimming and piece them together.

Start by creating a new project and drop “empty1.jpg” onto the MediaMixer track. Trim it to about 8.5 seconds. Next, drop “beamin.jpg” on the mediamixer track with the insertion point at the 3.5-second mark. Trim beam-in.jpg to 5 seconds.

Now, you’re ready to drop your original clip (mvi_4006.avi, in my case) on the media mixer with the insertion point still sitting at the end of “beamin.jpg”. That way, as soon as the still shot ends, it goes right into the main video. The main video needs to be trimmed. We want to cut out everything from the beginning to when the actor is in “beam-in” position. If you’re using the default setting of 15 frames per second, you can enter 0.067 in the text box at the bottom, then the right and left arrows will move one frame at a time so you can trim more precisely. Make sure the insertion point is at the beginning of mvi_4006.avi and, in the text box at the bottom, put the time index reading from where you saved “beamin.jpg” then click the right arrow beside that text box. This puts you at the exact frame you copied earlier. Make sure you’re editing the right track, and click the “trim from beginning to here” button.

Once it’s trimmed, you’ll need to hold the shift key and slide the clip back over. While you’re at it, click on the TRACK button, then the PROPERTIES tab and click the red triangle that has a line under it. This will move that clip to the bottom of the stack.

Go back to the 3.5 second point (where beamin.jpg begins) and add “beaminmask.avi” and “tos_transporter.wma”.

In the left pane, click “F/X” and find that YUV/Chroma key we used before and drop it on “beaminmask.avi” and select an area that is completely black for the color sample.

Now all that’s left is to set some keyframes to fade stuff in and out at the right times.

The basic procedure is: select a track, go to the point where the keyframe will be, click the VARIABLES button, point to “output opacity” and press the down-arrow for zero or the enter key for 1.

Here are the keyframes to set:

0 seconds:

• empty1.jpg - set opacity to 1

3.5 seconds:

• beamin.jpg - opacity to 0
• beaminmask.avi - opacity to 0
• tos_transporter.wma - opacity to 1

5.5 seconds:

• beaminmask.avi - opacity to 1
• beamin.jpg - opacity to 0 (just for grins)

7 seconds:

• beamin.jpg - opacity to 1

7.5 seconds:

• beaminmask.avi - opacity to 0

8.2 seconds:

• empty1.jpg - opacity to 0

So, what happens is you see the empty room, the beam-in effect fades in, once it’s fully faded in, the actor fades in, then the beam-in effect fades out and the rest of the action starts.

Adding the beam-out effect is the same procedure in reverse, so I’m not going to repeat all that here.

Happy beaming!

Technorati Tags: photography, video, special+effects, star+trek, transporter, movie

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