Bullet-Time Effect in Adobe Premiere
Creating the Bullet-Time Effect in Premiere using WinMorph
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Satish Kumar
Video/graphics enthusiast and software developer
http://www.debugmode.com/
San Diego, California, USA
©2002, 2003, 2004 Satish Kumar and Creativecow.net. All rights reserved.
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Article Focus:
In this tutorial, Satish Kumar demonstrates the famous Matrix style Bullet-time effect in Premiere: A man leaps in the air with a gun, fires a shot, and then hovers in the air while the camera moves around him 180 degrees. To create this effect, we have the shot of the man leaping in the air as a video and 6 still shots of him in the air at different angles. We will morph between the still shots using the WinMorph plug-in for Premiere. This morphed video is composited with a moving background giving the 180 degree camera rotation effect. |
To create the moving background, different shots of the same background were
taken and stitched together in an image editor. This is very similar to the
method used to create panoramic views of a scene.
The sample video and shots are used with permission from Marco von Moos.
Thank you very much Marco.
Here is a rendered output of the tutorial Premiere project - btime_premiere.mov,
to have a look before starting.
The beginning video shot with the guy leaping in the air...

The 6 shots of the guy leaping in the air, taken at different angles... The
images are TGA files, with the blue portions keyed for transparency.

The stitched background...

The files to use for this tutorial (including the premiere project) can be
downloaded here. The Free WinMorph plug-in for Premiere (Windows only!) can be downloaded here. You
need to have WinMorph installed for this tutorial. Help and tutorials on how
to use WinMorph can be found in the above page.
| Here is how we do the effect in Premiere. |
First create a project with dimensions 420x184 (that is the size of the images/videos we will be using). Import all the files in the above zip file into the project.
Insert Image1 and Image2 into Video1A and Video1B tracks. Re-size them to be exactly 4 frames long. Go to the "Transitions" window and you will find the "Morph - WinMorph" transition under the "DebugMode" category. Insert that transition between the two images in the timeline. Similarly, insert Image 2 and Image 3 into Video 1A and Video 1B tracks next to the first pair of images. Re-size them to be of 4 frames in length and insert the Morph transition between them. Do the same way for Images 3 to 6. After this, the timeline will be as shown below...

Now double-click the first Morph transition and it will open the transition settings dialog. Click "Custom" to open the WinMorph window. Draw the required shapes and associate them with their corresponding shapes.. (This tutorial will not go into detail on how to use WinMorph, you can find tutorials for WinMorph at the download page mentioned above). Once you are done with drawing the shapes, the WinMorph window will look like shown below...

Close WinMorph and return to Premiere. Press "OK" in the transition
settings dialog to save the settings and close the dialog. Similarly, open the
second Morph transition dialog and do the editing in WinMorph. Do the same process
for all five transitions. Once you have completed drawing the shapes for all
five Morph transitions, the core work is done. Now all that is remaining is
to composite the tracks.
First insert the "start.avi" file into the timeline next to the
five images in Video 1A. Insert the "backgnd.jpg" next to this in
the timeline. Our idea is to first run the start.avi clip and once the guy has
leaped into the air, use the stitched background still image to pan from beginning
to ending (this will appear as if the camera is rotating from the guy to the
other side, like a panoramic view). On top of this panned background we will
place the morph sequence to create the effect.
To pan the background still image, use the "Motion settings" for
that element and pan the shot from left to right. You can view how it is done
from the Premiere project.
Now we have to place the morph sequence in tracks above Video 1. This
is not directly possible in Premiere since transitions can only be placed
between Video 1A and 1B. So we have to use a technique called "Virtual
clip" (you can find more about virtual clips at here).
Choose the "Block select tool" in the Timeline tool palette, and select
frames 1 to 4 in the timeline (these contain image 1 and image 2 with a
morph between them). Now if you drag the selected portion and drop it on track
Video 2, a virtual clip will be created. Now this virtual clip is actually a
copy of the rendered portion of frames 1 to 4, and we can place it anywhere.
Drag it and place just above the start of the image "backgnd.jpg"
in the timeline.
Similarly, select frames 5-8 and drag onto track Video 3 next to the first
virtual clip. Same way for frames 9-12, 13-16 and 17-20. Select each of
these virtual clips and set their transparency to "alpha channel".
The timeline will look like shown below.

That's all folks, we have finished our tutorial. You need to render only from the beginning of "start.avi" (i.e. from frame 21 onwards). Render and see the result. There may be a few glitches when you watch it frame by frame, but the aim of this tutorial is to demonstrate using WinMorph to create a "Bullet Time Effect".
The original tutorial created by Marco von Moos can be found at http://www.nccinema.ch/esfx11.html
All graphics, ideas, etc. are used by permission in this Creativecow version.
Please visit the forums and read other articles at Creativecow.net if you found this page from a direct link.
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