Fun with Kdenlive

Posted on March 24, 2010 by Daniel Veazey

Here’s a video I made with my dad singing to my mom and playing his baritone ukulele. Watch the video, then we’ll talk about how we made it.

We set up two cameras. Even though I have told you the on-camera mic isn’t good enough for sound with videos, I didn’t have my MiniDisc recorder with me. So we went with the best sound from the two cameras. Before he started playing, I started both cameras rolling and had him clap his hands in frame.

When I imported both video clips into Kdenlive, I put them in two different video tracks. I discarded the audio from the track that I didn’t want, and I placed it above the track in which I was keeping the sound. Then I found the frame from that clip where my dad’s hands came together, and I lined it up with the spike in the waveform from the other clip’s sound so the audio and video were synced up in both clips.

Whichever clip is highest on the stack of video clips is the video that will be shown when you render. It’s similar the layers in Gimp. To switch back and forth between the two camera angles, I simply used the razor tool to slice up the top video clip and deleted the portions I did not want. I left the bottom video clip (with the sound) intact.

I didn’t like the harsh cuts between camera angles, so I put Dissolve transitions on the ends of the top video clip, giving the smooth cuts back and forth, and the sound stays nice and constant through the whole thing. Finally, I added a Fade from black/Fade to black video effect and a Fade in/Fade out audio effect to the bottom video clip. Click on the screenshots below to see them full size:

The dissolve transition between the two video clips

The finished project of "When You're Smiling"

Tracing with a Wacom tablet

Posted on March 22, 2010 by Daniel Veazey

I bought a Wacom Bamboo Touch recently and after a little rigmarole, I got it working. So I was playing with it and drew this. I don’t think it’s particularly good or anything. I just wanted to see what kind of stuff could be done with the tablet. I imported a photograph that I took and drew the outline with the pencil tool. I traced around the glasses, then around the lenses, and then I cut the lenses out with Path -> Difference. I filled that with black. Everything was very squiggly. I used Path -> Simplify to smooth a lot of it out. Then I used the calligraphy tool to color it, with varying colors and opacities. Most of the time I arranged the colors below the original outline, but I left some of them on top. I didn’t really think about it too much. I guess one thing I could have done to make sure the outlines stayed on top would be to put them on a separate layer. I duplicated the whole thing and filled it completely with black, blurred it by 5.0 and offset it for the drop shadow over a radial gradient background.

I hope I get better at this. Comments are appreciated.

Gimp Tutorial: Super Groovy Wallpaper Part 3

Posted on March 15, 2010 by Daniel Veazey

Wow, we’re already to the third and final installment of our Super Groovy Wallpaper project. Let’s dive right into the video, shall we?

Well, that was fun! What have we learned?

Gradients

Gradients are a way to fill an area with a nice blend from one color to another. You can even put several colors into the same gradient, and blend them all together.

More about drop shadows

We’ve already learned one way to put a drop shadow under text. Here we used a different method to make one. An important lesson to take from this is that there’s almost always more than one way to get what you’re after. You might find multiple ways to do the same effect. Don’t be afraid to experiment. It’s fun.

Layers and locking the alpha channel

We duplicated layers, we applied layer masks, and we locked the alpha channel on a layer. The alpha channel is just a fancy way to say “transparency.” When you lock the alpha channel, the transparent areas of that layer won’t be affected by whatever editing you do to that layer. It’s a very handy feature and it was mighty useful when we made that drop shadow.

Thanks for checking out this tutorial. Like always, I’d love to hear from you.

“Beware the Ides of March.” – The Seer in William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.

Gimp Tutorial: Super Groovy Wallpaper Part 2

Posted on March 14, 2010 by Daniel Veazey

Did you remember to set your clock forward?

Alright, here we go with part 2! If you need to catch up, check out part 1 here. There’s lots of fun, new stuff to learn today. A big part of today’s lesson is about:

Layer masks

Adding a layer mask is a great way to control the opacity of portions of a layer. We have all that plasma cloud on one layer, but we only want the colors from that to show up on our letters. So we use a layer mask to make the parts around the letters disappear. The online Gimp documentation explains a little bit more about layer masks:

A transparency mask can be added to each layer, it’s called Layer mask. A layer mask has the same size and same pixel number as the layer to which it is attached. Every pixel of the mask can then be coupled with a pixel at the same location in the layer. The mask is a set of pixels in gray-tone on a value scale from 0 to 255. The pixels with a value 0 are black and give a full transparency to the coupled pixel in the layer. The pixels with a value 255 are white and give a full opacity to the coupled pixel in the layer.

So, here’s the video of what we did:

Another important lesson I learned today is that I still have a lot to learn. I sure do appreciate you stopping by to see what I’m doing. If you have a minute, please leave a comment and say hello.

Gimp Tutorial: Super Groovy Wallpaper Part 1

Posted on March 13, 2010 by Daniel Veazey

Finally, my voice has come back enough to talk for a few minutes without hacking up a lung. So we’re going to work on our Super Groovy Wallpaper. This is a really fun project and I really like the way it looks when it’s finished. In this video, we learn a little bit about some of the features in Gimp, including Layers and a couple of filters: “Gaussian Blur” and “Plasma.” And we touch a little bit on file formats.