Using Xara Masks to animate video text

[lau3]

This post focuses on Xara's great transparency properties and high quality PNG's to create production quality masks for video.

In my seventh home movie, I decided to have a theme based on the number 7. This was hard at first, however I found my muse while visiting Israel. While I visited the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem last spring. Therein, I was amazed by a looping video that had an animated background of Hebraic characters with English captions describing some Holocaust statistics. The design was so amazing, I sat there and jsut stared at the detail and precision. I decided to create a wall of Hebrew text with all the "seven-related things I found interesting" and then replicate the Yad Vashem piece and knew Xara would be the tool to use . Of course, I decided to embellish it by adding some 3D layer motions and some camera blurs. The end result are images 1 and 2

The coolest Xara trick (IMHO) was creating the "fades" at the top and bottom of the video. I wanted a vignette style at the top and bottom for the video. I created a transparent gradient which I then exported as a transparent PNG and placed over all the video. Image 3 shows the Xara masks.

The text was translated by a friend in Israel from English. The English and Hebrew versions were handled in Word....getting it to show up "right" in Xara was another story. Back in May of last year I figured out how to solve this little problem in this forum. John Rayner (who appers to be banned) provided me with the right way to go about it. His suggestion says to export the Word doc to HTML.
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showpost...2&postcount=10. I then found a web site that would reverse the text to right-to-left since this nuance is handled inside the HTM file by a metatag which is ignored by Xara upon pasting the text. Once the text was in Xara, I could copy and paste without worry in After Effects.
http://www.talkgraphics.com/showpost...5&postcount=22

I then created 2 mask from the fonts (one for the general text, 1 for the glowing sevens) and 1 oversized background (which is what you see as the text). and the rest is what you see. I chose to use masks (rather than AE text) because the masks gave me precise control over the elements' positions, given that the layers were being handled as a whole, it worked. Not to mention, it renders a lot faster.

The signature at the beginning is exactly like to love postcard which I posted earlier. (http://www.talkgraphics.com/showthread.php?t=20901) Image 4.

Hope this helps others who are palying with video and have Xara in their toolbox.

milt

[jamesmc]

Very cool, nice work.

Yeah masks are indeed a handy tool. One can have a lot of creative leeway in art in either the paper, computer or motion picture form.

[wW]

Where there's a will there's a way... Xara is so usefull isn't it?

Nice job!

[Dominique]

I am subjugated. Cheer! Which marvellous work