BSEffects
- Pinnacle Studio Plug-in
Author:
Bryan
Sturdy
e-mail:
BSEffects at barnaclebill.co.uk
This is the initial
development version of a plug-in for Pinnacle Studio 9 and Studio 10.
This plug-in will add a new Effects category called Sturdy Effects (Studio 9)
or BSEffects (Studio 10). This currently contains the following effects:
- Bounce
- Circle
- FadeToColour
- OneColour
- Stretch
- Wave1 and Wave2 (currently
in the Studio10 download only)
Sorry that most of these
effects are not very original, but when I wrote them I was just finding my way
around the Studio SDK. Work takes up too much time, there’s lots of video
to edit too, so actually writing effects has really taken last place priority…
Click on the following link
to download the effects for Studio9: BSEffects.zip
Click on the following link
to download the effects for Studio10: BSEffects for Studio10.zip
These are just trial effects
developed using the Pinnacle RTFx interface – they’re not meant to be ground-breaking
and most (if not all) are available as part of other effects packages.
The effects are outlined in more detail below.
Links
Many thanks to Werner Loettgen for his
help getting the effects working for Studio 10. See Werner’s
excellent Studio9 effects here: http://www.wloet.de/index.html
Also, for some other great effects, try Jan Peter’s great effects here: http://www.jpseffects.de/JPsEffects_EN.html
Bounce
This effect resizes the
window according to the parameters specified and then bounces it around the
screen. It’s a bit like a screen-saver and probably a novelty effect but
might be useful for someone. An Angle of 0º will set the image moving to
the right.
|
Parameter |
Description |
|
X |
Percentage of screen width for left-hand side of start position |
|
Y |
Percentage of screen height for top of start position |
|
Width |
Percentage of screen for width of bouncing image |
|
Height |
Percentage of screen for height of bouncing image |
|
Angle |
Start angle – 0º - 359º – Specifies the direction in which the bouncing image moves at the start |
|
Speed |
How fast the bouncing image should move |
Warning: This effect isn’t perfect yet. If you
use the effect multiple times with different settings and scrub along the timeline,
you don’t see the different effects – you normally only see one version.
Still, it seems to render correctly or work OK if you play along the timeline
rather than scrubbing. (Techy bit: I’m using class variables to
store current x, y and angle (which changes as the image bounces off the edge
of the window. I don’t think I’m allowed to do this as it seems Studio is
using the same instance of the effect across multiple clips when
scrubbing. Maybe I need to turn this into a two-pass effect and store the
variables in meta-data. Or perhaps it’s simpler than that.
Suggestions are welcome – I can post the code if people are interested)).
Circle
This effect maps the video
onto a circle. There are no parameters associated with this
effect. Use this in conjunction with Bounce (to get the circular image
bouncing around the screen) or Stretch (to have a smaller circle).
FadeToColour
This effect gradually fades
the clip to the specified colour. The colour can be selected from the
colour-picker dialog or from the video source. This was my first attempt
at an effect and so it’s not very exciting.
But using key-frames in Studio10 does add a bit more versatility (as can
be seen in the example clip).
OneColour
This effect tries to keep
one colour on the clip and turn all the others to black and white. The
colour can be selected from the colour-picker dialog or from the video
source. This was my second attempt at an effect and so it’s not very
original! Using this in conjunction with FadeToColour can give some
interesting results. Tip: Put the threshold to 100% to pick the colour then
reduce it until only that colour is seen, or un-tick the check-box next to the
effect before picking the colour.
|
Parameter |
Description |
|
Threshold |
How close other colour have to be to the specified colour for them not to be turned to black and white. The higher the value, the more colours that are included, |
Stretch
This effect resizes the
window according to the parameters specified. It’s really a more limited
version of the 2D editor included in Pinnacle’s Fun Effects category. On
the plus side it seems quite fast and I think the quality’s not bad.
Plus, of course, you can use it in conjunction with Pinnacle’s 2D editor (say
that’s already applied to a clip and you split the clip, you can add this one
afterwards). It might be useful since you don’t seem to be able to apply
the same effect more than once to the same clip. It won’t let you stretch
the image off the screen…
|
Parameter |
Description |
|
X |
Percentage of screen width for left-hand side of stretched image |
|
Y |
Percentage of screen height for top of stretched image |
|
Width |
Percentage of screen for width of stretched image |
|
Height |
Percentage of screen for height of stretched image |
Wave1 and Wave2
These two effects are
identical – but there are two versions so you can apply them one on top of the
other. They can be used to create a
variety of effects
Here
both Wave1 and Wave2 have been applied, both set to crop and vertical.
Here the title editor was used to create a
very basic flag and then Wave1 used to animate it.
There are a number of parameters which can be applied on either Wave1 or Wave2:
|
Parameter |
Description |
|
Vertical |
Whether the wave will be applied top and bottom (if checked) or left and right (if unchecked) |
|
Crop |
Whether to just crop the video (i.e. overlay the waves) rather then stretch the video |
|
Style |
The type of wave (Wave, Triangle, Square or Saw) |
|
Amplitude |
The size of the wave |
|
Frequency |
How many peaks the wave
has |
|
Offset |
Allows adjustment of the
start position of the wave (0 – 360 degrees) |
|
Indent |
With an indent of zero,
the lower half of the wave will be off screen. Set the indent to be the amplitude of the
wave to keep all the video on screen (or see the whole wave if cropping) |
|
Sector |
The default is to use all
360 degrees. Vary the sector to use
only part of the wave |
|
Colour |
The colour of the wave |
The
parameters in blue above are
repeated. Value 1 is the left (or top)
setting; value 2 is the right (or bottom) setting. In addition, a speed can be specified – this
will animate the wave. If the speed
specified is negative, then the wave will bounce from start to end value. Finally, an end value can be specified. If the end is the same as the start parameter
then the animation will loop through all values, otherwise it will loop between
the start and the end. If the end is
before the start, it will loop from the start to the maximum value, then from
the minimum to the end.
More
information to come…
Acknowledgements
Circle and
Stretch are based upon an algorithm for fast bitmap manipulation which I found
through Google – this is also adapted to help with the Wave effect:
http://www.acm.org/pubs/tog/GraphicsGems/gemsiii/fastBitmap.c