Hi Terry,

Amongst the 155 templates in Adorage, there is a full beer glass. I can get it to fly in to someone's hand, or almost. Of course, I could do this just by using MEP animation, but it was interesting to play with the parameters in Adorage. The only problem is you have to go back to Adorage to make adjustments to the effect.

I may take a closer look at the other effects that can be purchased and download the trial version of some of the Pixelan effects.

I also have Pinnacle Studio 17 with Red Giant effects, just to add things to my toolbox. I haven't mastered these yet. I'm trying to add a kind of quick and dirty "beam me up" effect to a video. I should have thought about that when I filmed the scene, as it would have been better to have had the camera on a tripod, and also have filmed the same scene without the people who I want to magically disappear. Oh well, but through the magic of Xara, I can remove them from a still shot (from the video) at just the right moment. The image becomes a photo and the slight camera shake is obviously gone.

Thanks,

Hi Terry,

Since you mentioned Heroglyph, I came across this tutorial on the déclic site that you may be interested in.

http://declic-video-fx.com/Tutorials/ID/1473/Heroglyph-V4-PRO-basic-tutorial.aspx

Thanks John, those look useful, assuming I can get Heroglyph working properly here!

And both cover my main intended use, the Route feature.

What a shame that the second is such poor resolution.

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Trying your Adorage beer glass effect is till on my To Do list!

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While I think of it, I've made a couple of JibJab videos recently. They included logo removal, so let me know if you get into that if you haven't already done so and need any tips.

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Hi Terry,

I wish I had gotten the Premium version of MEP. Heroglyph in the Pinnacle forums looks good. They have many more tutorials than we do with Magix.

For the beer glass, I just took the image and had it fly into the photo using the normal movement effects and kf's.

I downloaded and started looking at the Pixelan 3D effects. Interesting.

I just tried the logo removal in JibJab. Needs a bit of playing around. I don't understand everything in this tool yet. Here are my settings - I first made a box to cover the logo just to find the location and size.

I played around with the X-Y weight and Blur power. I noticed that changing these worked better in some images than others. Where there is not much definition in the image, or almost unicolour, you can barely see the logo removal effect. Where there is a lot of definition, I had to play with the above sliders to get a better effect. To do the job properly, one would have to split the video wherever the effect needed improving. It would be good to have a better transition so that the edges of the box are feather-edged and not so visible. Maybe there is a way; needs more investigation. Here are some examples with and without the logo:

Regards,

Hi John,

Looks like we're both at about the same stage with LogoAway. Here's the configuration I've been using:

I get no removal using Luminance, Shape XY or Shape UGLARM. Nor does the Preview button appear to work. I would expect it to toggle the removal On/Off?

For cartoons like this I doubt if anyone will notice it anyway, so I'm happy enough to leave it at that!

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Terry, East Grinstead, UK

Terry,

I found this info about logoaway. I am looking for an updated manual, but this explains a lot and shows how to improve on the default stuff by adding an alpha mask, including how to make it.

http://voidon.republika.pl/virtualdub/ladocs301/logoaway.html