Going to Tape
By Nadya Emanuel
Whether you are creating animated illustrations using DPaint III
or overlaying titles with Pro Video Post, your first attempt to
put your work on tape can be a disappointment--even a
catastrophe. Typical complaints are of bleeding colors,
illegible titles, poor resolution, unstable/fluctuating video,
unacceptable hues, and a host of other not-so-nice surprises,
some of which don't show themselves until you run your copies.
If you own video equipment, at least you have the wherewithal (if
not always the time) to fix such mistakes. If you are renting
time on someone else's editor, every problem which demands
correction is a major, additional expense. With that in mind,
here are several basic tips designed to ward off time-consuming
repairs when laying titles and/or animations to videotape.
First and foremost, whether you are purchasing your own equipment
or renting someone else's for the afternoon, be aware that there
are genlocks and then there are genlocks; whether you have heard
otherwise or not, the right genlock can make or break your
finished result. Once you've slaved for hours on an animation
for your client, the last thing you want is a bleeding or fuzzy
end-product. Unfortunately, what looks stable on your RGB
monitor often turns to mud on video, even when you use the best
equipment. Saturated colors tend to barber-pole (dots of color
blur and dance along the edges, most noticeably at the top and
bottom). Saturated colors also tend to blink and bleed. Yellow
sometimes turns to sickly green, red to murky orange. With low-
end equipment, you do not have much chance of circumventing such
unwanted effects. Be sure you have a Y/C genlock; I can't stress
that enough. Composite genlocks just don't do the job. Y/C
genlocks separate the luminance and chrominance which creates a
cleaner, sharper image. Also, if you can, go to Super-VHS. The
higher resolution is a real boost, especially when it comes to
graphics.
Be prepared. Even with the best equipment, you may have to do a
little color juggling to produce a satisfying end result. If you
can, ignore your RGB and work directly to video. This will save
the time and trouble of correcting colors later. I have found
this to be particularly true when laying titles over video.
Titles over backgrounds of your own and titles over black are far
less difficult. With video, your background is constantly in
flux. A yellow caption may be legible in one frame and
completely illegible in the next.
The most important thing about your captions and your titles is
their readability. Some of us are tempted to dazzle the client
with four-color fonts, complicated shadowing, and showy
transitions. The fact is, unless your titles can be clearly
read, all such artwork is worthless. Characters which look
professional against a plain black screen on RGB are often lost
completely when they are run against a busy image. Use fonts big
enough to see; step away to see if they are still legible from
the back of the room. Sitting at your monitor, you are much
closer to the screen than viewers usually are. Generally, use
light colors against dark backgrounds; use dark colors against
light. The busier your background, the simpler the lettering
should be. Pro Video Gold and Pro Video Plus offer many
shadowing effects, but the fact that these look striking on an
uncluttered black screen in no way guarantees that they are
going to look the same against your video. I have found the
edging tool to be much more effective than the shadowing tool. A
thin black trim around your letters often makes the difference
between an illegible caption and one that can be read easily.
My rule of thumb is, "If in doubt, throw it out." If you have to
ask somebody, "Is this readable?" it's not! Whether your client
is the president of a global corporation or a parent who has
requested captions on her daughter's grade-school play, chances
are your client watches TV at home, and like it or not, "real"
video is going to be his standard of comparison. Ten years ago,
clients might have overlooked blurry colors, fonts too small to
read or characters that flickered, but not today. If that lovely
peacock blue you tried so hard to get turns muddy; if that
brilliant yellow blurs into the speaker's podium; if those
scarlet letters blink and barber-pole, swallow your artistic
pride and tone them down. In some cases and with some
backgrounds, peacock blue may work. In others, you will be
forced to turn that blue into almost-white. Remember that you
do not want your titles to move across your speaker's face. You
will need to fit them somewhere else, and oftentimes there
simply is no plain, uncluttered place. Bold, pale-colored fonts
outlined in black are sometimes your only recourse.
Remember that when you duplicate that tape, you will lose
resolution. If your master tape is borderline, your copies will
be less than borderline. Aim for a perfect master and you will
steer clear of disappointment later. When you show your
finished product, the last thing you want to hear is, "It's all
right, but could you take a couple minutes out and make those
letters bigger? I can barely make them out." (It will take you
"a couple minutes" just to explain that changing all the titles
constitutes re-editing the tape, and that one of you is going to
have to eat the cost of all those extra hours.)
Incidentally, be extremely cautious with the grids. Pro Video
Gold and Pro Video Post both provide some innovative backgrounds
of their own. If you use your colors carefully, you can get
some striking effects. However, if your lines are too close
together you will get an irritating flicker, especially with
saturated hues. This will not be evident on RGB, but it will be
painfully obvious on video. You will find too, that colors shift
and change before your eyes. What comes out kelly green on RGB
can turn chartreuse. What looks cobalt blue may turn to muddy
purple on your video. Again, if you can work to video instead of
RGB, you can avoid a lot of palette-changing later.
So far, I've dealt with titles, but DPaint III also has some
dark surprises, whether you use it for titles, or as I do,
strictly for animated illustrations. What looks pleasing on your
RGB can look downright atrocious when you transfer it to video.
If you are sharing animations on diskette, as many users do, this
need not concern you. If you are working specifically for tape,
you should keep some basic facts in mind.
First, always work in hi-res overscan. I prefer eight colors;
this may seem self limiting, but by using stencils and gradient
fills, you can mix more colors than you think. Even using hi-res
overscan, you may find a frame around your image or an unwanted
strip of color down the left-hand side. Some monitors will show
this; others will not. Generally speaking, most professional
video monitors have two modes of operation: normal scan and
under scan. Check those levers! If you work in normal scan, you
will not see that frame until it is too late. The unwanted strip
of color probably will not show on anyone else's monitor either
(that's why they call it "normal" scan), but video equipment has
proliferated to the extent that many people now own professional
machines in their homes. The fact is, you should be aware that
maybe, somewhere, somebody is going to see that red, gold, or
chartreuse frame. Therefore, I don't want it on my illustrations
at all. Check your palette when you do your animation. If you
keep your top left color black, you will alleviate the problem.
If someone does play your tape in under-scan, that strip or frame
will be an unobtrusive black.
By the same token, do not trust your computer screen or a monitor
in under scan to give you an accurate image of your work.
Normal-scan will cut a frame away, but it will also cut a little
from the top and bottom of your picture. Never put essential
artwork right at the bottom of your screen. I once did a
sequence featuring a house with flowers all around its base.
Well, the house showed up, but not a single daisy, rose or lily
did. While you can move a static portion of an animation (pick
it up as a brush, go into perspective, then use your Move
selector, making sure all fields are zeroed out), doing so with
something already animated is a daunting job, to say the least!
It is worth stating here that if you're working for video, think
video. I will bet I am not the only DPaint artist who, in the
beginning, wasted untold time perfecting every animation as
though I was "locked in" to what I did on disk. The beauty of
videotape is that you are not constrained to what exists on disk.
You can edit to your heart's content, so give yourself a lot of
leeway.
Chances are, whether you are creating an entire tape of animation
or creating moving charts and illustrations for a long
presentation, you will be transferring your graphics to a master
tape which you or someone else will later edit to the finished
tape. Your raw footage does not have to look correct, or even
approximate your finished result; you are going to cut and paste.
That is what editing is all about. Leave your first frame up for
several seconds, and do the same with the last. Run your
animation at various speeds. Run it backwards. You may find,
when editing, that you can use footage in a way you hadn't
dreamed. If eight colors are too limiting, lay a portion of your
animation down, change the colors that you need to alter, then
lay down the rest. You can even animate with video, creating
effects that do not exist on your computer. It may take some
time to get attuned to this, especially if you have worked with
your Amiga without video for any length of time.
Also, leave a lot of black between your sequences. If your
client wants to fade to black between your animation and his
speech, you could run into problems if you have banked one
animation up against another with no break between the two. I
stress that it is prudent to blacken your tape from start to
finish before you even begin. If this is your first foray into
editing, you should know that blank, new tape directly from its
plastic wrap is free of sync. In other words, it has no
electronic signal, and the editing device searches for sync in
order to perform its job. Once video is recorded from a camera
or a VCR, the tape has sync and images, but you do not want to
see images between your animations. You can blacken a tape by
running it from start to finish on Play/Record (recording
nothing) or you can record your black computer screen (be sure
you have hit F10 to hide the menu and Delete to hide the arrow
from the mouse). I prefer the latter method, simply because the
black of the Amiga screen is somewhat greyer than the black
generated by the VCR; I want my animations fading into black,
not grey and then to black and then to grey again.
For your first raw footage, or the tape from which you will take
the animations, you can use assemble-edit (where each segment
must be laid in sequence, one directly after the last). For
this, it is not imperative to use a pre-blackened tape, but it is
a good idea. Chances are you will use the insert mode for your
final editing. If you have lost your sync even for a single
frame, you are going to have unusable results. Be warned: on
some equipment you will not know you have lost your sync until
you try to run your copies. Sometimes, the edit will take, only
to produce an ugly drop-out on your dubs. Again, if you blacken
your tapes before you start, you will eliminate this problem.
An additional hint: once you have blackened your tape, give
yourself some pre-roll; 60 seconds isn't too much. This will
give you room for color-bars, music, and/or additional titles at
the start. Keep in mind that duplicators need a pre-roll time to
wind and catch the tape. If you start your video at the
beginning, your copies will begin mid-stream.
Finally, be ruthlessly observant! Always preview what you have
done. This may sound simplistic, but there is nothing more
disheartening than spotting ZZZ's on your completed work. True,
you can keep it out of sight most of the time by pressing Delete
when you are ready to record your animation. Now and then,
especially if you are running in reverse, it can, and does, crop
up. Move your mouse before you press Delete to make double-sure
it does not show. I like to move it to the far upper right. If
that arrow is out of sight, then the ZZZ's are too. You may also
find that the final frame of your animation jumps, either to
another frame or to re-appear a second later. Usually this
occurs in a relatively complex animation when you run it from a
central screen. You can usually do away with this by going to
the first frame (Shift-1) prior to hitting 5 (Run Forward).
Sometimes, when you are working with a portion of the animation
and you want to start toward the middle or the end, this method
is not practical. In that case, leave the glitch. You can
smooth it out in post production by imposing the desired footage
over the frames you want to remove (another reason why you want
to leave your crucial pictures on the screen for several seconds
longer than you normally might).
One more note of caution: keep copies of your work! Resist the
urge to overwrite disks and tapes. File them away. The day may
come (it did for me) when someone sees your work and tells you,
"That's exactly what I want! That graph, but blue instead of
green." If you have it safely stored away, all you need to do
is change the colors and some of the words. If not, you have to
create the work from scratch.
The Amiga can produce some knock-out graphics! It's no Aurora,
which they use for broadcast television, but it's only 1/10th the
cost. Learn what it can do, and what it cannot. Work within its
limitations, recognizing that you will sometimes have to
sacrifice saturated reds and golds for crisp pastels. When you
go to tape, be fussy with yourself. You will find it worth the
extra effort.
