Fast Flowing Montages for FCP & Motion

Roger Bolton London, United Kingdom ©Roger Bolton and CreativeCOW.net

It's 6pm, you've just completed a six hour edit and you're looking forward to heading out and downing a favorite beverage or two.  Everything's looking rosy, then all of a sudden the client pulls out a CD. "We took these stills on the shoot, can you use them as a background for the titles?"

Panic, sweat, what to do?  Call one of the After Effects artists?  They've all gone home, or more likely they're all working on a job till late.  So cut to six hours later and you've painfully finished cropping, resizing and hand keyframing 50 still image layers.  Your timeline is now 30 layers deep, then you hit the render button. Uh oh.

Ok, so is there a better way?  Well, lets take a look.

ImageFlow Fx is a set of plugins for Final Cut Pro and Motion which reduce the complex task of creating an animated photo montage to a process which takes only minutes.  This tutorial will run you through creating a photomontage and what's more, you get to keep two of the plugins absolutely free, with no watermarks or restrictions.

Download links, project files and installation instructions are at the bottom, but for now, let's jump ahead and take a look at some end results.

It's much simpler than you think to get results like these. 

Let's start off with that CDROM of random images you've been handed.  It could be all different resolutions, size, file formats, types, even a mix of CMYK and RGB.  Now you could straight away select that whole folder and plug it into ImageFlow Fx, as the plugins will handle all sorts of mixed file types and sizes (up to 4096x4096).  If you don't care about image order or the images have already been scaled and sorted, then skip the next step.  If you don't want to use your own, the Sample Project files linked below include four folders of images which are already scaled and sorted.

Optimizing and Setting Image Order with iPhoto

You can do this by hand or with any other image editing program, but everyone has iPhoto and there's a few tricks built into it which can save you some time.

Start up iPhoto and select the "File -> Import to Library" menu option.  Choose the folder of images you want to use and then let iPhoto import them all.  Now, before you click on anything else, choose the "File -> New Album from Selection" option and name the album "Photomontage Selects". 

You can now use the iPhoto interface to delete images you don't want to use in the animation, crop, or make any needed level adjustments.  Drag the order of the images to be the order you want in your animation as well.  When your album contains only the pictures you want in the order you want, then choose "Edit -> Select All", then "File -> Export".  Don't hit export yet!

Export settings in iPhoto

 Change the default settings for the export, select "scale images no larger than" and enter a resolution that

is just higher than your Final Cut Pro project resolution.  For example if you are working in a PAL or NTSC project, then try the images scaled to 800 pixels wide and let iPhoto preserve the aspect ratio.  For HD projects use either 1500 pixels wide for HDV or 2048 if you are working in uncompressed HD.

Then, it's very important to change the Name option from "Use Filename" to "Use Album Name", this will export the images with names which keeps the order you choose in the iPhoto Album.  Now hit the export button, then make a new folder on the desktop called "Photomontage selects" and hit "OK". 

Fire Up Final Cut Pro and Let Her Rip!

Believe it or not, you've already finished most of the work by now. 

First, make sure you have "Unlimited RT" enabled in the "RT" menu on the timeline. This lets third party plugins do realtime previews. 

Then, in your Final Cut Pro Project, go to the browser and open the generators tab, scroll down until you see "CM ImageFlow Fx".

The generators in Final Cut Pro browser

Now drop the "Multifader" plugin onto your timeline, then double click on the clip to bring it's controls up in the viewer.  Click on the "controls" tab, and it will bring up the following menu, for Multifader Controls.

Hit that "Choose" button highlighted above, and use the file browser to select our "Photomontage selects" folder on the desktop.

Select the frame rate of your project (this is done automatically in FCP6), then hit play, you've immediately got a montage playing in real time on the timeline!

There is a set of built in presets which set different image movements. Try "top to bottom" and "infinite zoom" to see some different styles. Then, try adjusting the parameters manually, "secs per image" controls how long every image stays on the screen for. "Num Images", chooses how many are displayed at once, up to eight. 

No matter how many images you pick it will always cycle through the images in the order that they are displayed in the finder folder window (and the order you selected in iPhoto).

Click image to see the "Multifader" generator in action

You can also choose to randomize any of the x,y or z positions of each image by using the "random x,y,z" checkboxes, and then adjust the "random spread" to influence how far apart the images will be placed.

Now add a mask to each image, scroll down to the "image mask" option, tick the "enable mask" check box and select "Rough 02" for a ragged edge effect on each image.  You can choose from a whole range of built in images or use the image well to drop your own on.  Similarly, the "apply frame" option allows you to apply a variety of picture frames or digital grunge borders to the image.

More photo montage styles

Now try dropping the "Polaroids" generator onto the timeline on a new layer with a slight overlap. Choose the "St Petersburg Lions" folder or one of your own, set the project frame rate and hit play.  You've just got a flash frame effect instantly with nice soft glowing falloff.

Try adjusting the time per image and "rest time."  Rest time is the time each image will stop before the transition starts to the next image in the sequence.  Almost all of the plugins in image flow include rest time as a parameter. 

Something else you can try, if you are editing to a music track and know the BPM (beats per minute) of the track then you can tick the "use bpm" check box and type the BPM in and the pictures will change on every beat, or use the BPM modifier to select "x0.25" to only change on every fourth beat.  Again, almost all the effects include the BPM option, which makes things a lot easier for editing music videos.

Click image to see the "Polaroids" generator in action

The ImageFlow Fx pack will render with a watermark after 14 days, but two of the effects, "Continuous Random Pan" and "Image Filmstrip" are exclusive to Creative Cow readers and free to keep and use for as long as you want. 

"Continuous Random Pan" is a similar animation style to the built in screen savers like "Beach" or "Forest." It will dissolve images continuously over each over with a random direction of movement.  You can choose to have movement only in x,y or z and also choose the spread of the random move using the "x,y,z range" parameters under Random Movement.

Click image to see the "Continuous Random Pan" generator

"Image Filmstrip" generates a continuous scrolling film strip of images with a variety of different border styles, and you can even rotate it in 3D space to create some dramatic styles.

The film strip is not infinitely long. Iit displays eight images at once and if you position the camera too far away, you'll see the edges fading off to nothing.  For some nice effects you can put a curl on the film strip using the built in "Effects -> Perspective -> Curl" effect.  Or you can create a flock of film strips in 3D by using the "3D Image Random Spacing" filter which is included in the Noise Industries Motion Pack under "NI Stylize".

Click image to see movie of "Image Filmstrip" with the Final Cut Pro "Perspective -> Curl" effect applied

Below, you can see a variation that combines the Cow-exclusive "Image Filmstrip" filter with the "3D Image Random Spacing" filter from the Noise Industries Motion Pack.

More Photomontage Styles to experiment with

"Liquify In" will dissolve images in with a liquid rippling effect, while "MultiSwoosh" let's you "fly" though up to eight images at one which curl off to the sides as they approach the viewer.  With the fourteen animation styles and the different movement presets, images and frames there is literally hundreds of styles of Photomontage which you can create in real time.

Click image to see the "Liquify In" generator in action

Click to see the "Multiswoosh" generator in action

A better way 

Now let's rewind to that moment before.

You're handed the CDROM of images, you relax, load up ImageFlow Fx and say "No problem. Why don't we try a few styles and see what you like?"

7PM, the job is on tape and you're out the door.

It sounds easy, and it is. You can see for yourself, with a few short downloads.

ImageFlow Fx uses the FxFactory engine, which is a free download from Noise Industries. Download and install that first. This is a link, so go ahead and click on it.

(If you've installed an earlier version, make sure to get version 1.0.7 or later of FxFactory to use the ImageFlow Fx plugins.)

Download The ImageFlow Fx pack here.

Most of the effects will render with a watermark after 14 days, but two of the effects, "Continuous Random Pan" and "Image Filmstrip" are exclusive to Creative Cow readers and free to keep and use for as long as you want.

You can use your own images, but you can also grab a set of image files and a sample project to use, here.

Enjoy!

"Roger Bolton is a London based Visual Effects artist who has been working in post production since 1997. His list of film credits as a compositor include "Lord of the Rings", "Kingdom of Heaven" and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory".  He has also been working with Noise Industries to design effects packs since their first versions and recently created CoreMelt to house his own effects designs.

http://www.coremelt.com
http://www.eskatonia.net/vfx/
http://leaders.creativecow.net/leaders/bolton_roger/

Feel free to discuss this tutorial and the download effects in the Cow's Noise Industries community.