Matrix style Bullet-time effect in Vegas Video

Satish Kumar Video/graphics enthusiast and software developer http://www.debugmode.com/ San Diego, California, USA ©2003 Satish Kumar and Creativecow.net. All rights reserved.

Article Focus: In this tutorial, Satish Kumar demonstrates the famous Matrix style Bullet-time effect in Vegas Video: 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 Vegas. 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 vegas project - btime.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 vegas project) can be downloaded here. WinMorph plugin for VV 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 VV.

First create a project with dimensions 420x184 (that is the size of the images/videos we would be using).

Insert the "start.avi" file into the timeline in Trak 3. 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 uncheck the "Maintain aspect ratio" option in the image's properties, and use "Event Pan/crop" to pan the shot from left to right, as show below. You can also view how it is done from the vegas project.

Insert Image1 and Image2 into track 1 just above "backgnd.jpg". Resize them to be exactly 4 frames long and overlap them for 3 frames. Go to the "Transitions" window and you will find the "Morph - WinMorph" transition. Insert that transition between the two images in the timeline. Similarly, insert Image 2 and Image 3 into track 2 next to the first pair of images. Resize them to be of 5 frames in length, overlap them for 4 frames 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 we need to enable alpha channel in these images. Right click on each of  the 10 images, choose "Media" and select "Straight (unmatted)" for alpha channel.

Double-click the first Morph transition and it will open the transition settings dialog. Click "Open WinMorph" 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 Vegas. Close the transition settings dialog. Similarly, open the second Morph transition dialog and do the editing in WinMorph. Do the same process for all five transitions.

That's all folks, we have finished our tutorial. Render and see the result. There will be a few glitches when you watch it frame by frame, but this tutorial does not aim at producing the perfect output - only to teach how to use WinMorph for producing good effects.

The original tutorial created by Marco von Moos can be found at http://www.nccinema.ch/esfx11.html

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