hiding jump cuts with morphing??

[Denez McAdoo]

Does any one have any experience in successfully hiding minor jump cuts with some kind of morphing plug-ins?

I know that both AE native Frame Blending Pixel Motion and third party Twixter plug-in can interpolate frames between frames for slo-mo footage, so maybe this technique can be used to create a frame between jump cuts as well.

I heard Avid has a Fluid Morph effect that can do this, maybe also Re:Vision's Re:Flex can be used in the same way, but perhaps there are other morphing programs that can be used as well?

Any one with tips or experience with this?

[Andy Wilkinson]

Good question! I would be interested in any suggestions too.

[Bo Skelmose]

Hey
Yoy could try using twixtor. Slow down to 50% - let twixtor do the morph and speed up to 200% afterwards.
Just an idear - never tried it. I have used mercalli to reduce bumps but you always get other artifacts like motion blur.
Both programs can be dowloaded as a trial, to test it-

[Noa Put]

Maybe with this one?
Abrosoft FantaMorph - Photo Morphing Software for Creating Morphing Photos and Animations
It's normally designed to morph 2 different stills but you could apply the same effect on 2 frames and speed up the transition.

[Sareesh Sudhakaran]

Originally Posted by Denez McAdoo

Does any one have any experience in successfully hiding minor jump cuts with some kind of morphing plug-ins?
...Any one with tips or experience with this?

I don't know about morphing, but I've added small transitions (dissolves) between cuts many times. I learnt that trick from a book somewhere (or was it DVInfo?).

[Ann Bens]

Or a dip to black.
I recently saw an interview where they used the bars and tone for a split second.

[Zoran Vincic]

I prefer "hiding" jump cuts with dip to white rather than dip to black.

[Tim Kolb]

Morphing could work within a limited range of movement...if the head movement is substantial, you'll draw more attention to the morph than a jump cut as the morph will be on screen longer, even if it's 3-4 frames.

I edit interviews shot 1920x1080 on 1280x720 sequences for several clients (for whom a 1280x720 or smaller deliverable is appropriate), which allows me to use a shot as composed at about 67% scale, and then do a cut or even a tasteful subtle transition to the next cut which is at 100% scale and is now a close-up.

It's hackery, sure...but I have to stick with my strengths. :-)

[Bruce Watson]

Originally Posted by Denez McAdoo

Does any one have any experience in successfully hiding minor jump cuts with some kind of morphing plug-ins?

The "time honored way" is to cut to b-roll, then cut back. Or cut between camera angles on the same continuous scene. Alternatively, if you are just cutting out some of a continuous scene, you acknowledge the resulting continuity error by using an effect like a film dissolve (PPro has a good one). The bigger the continuity problem, the more pronounced the effect. So something like a film dissolve for small cuts, and a dip to white for bigger cuts and a dip to black for the biggest cuts. Whatever you do, just do it consistently or it can confuse the viewer make them think about what just happened at that last cut instead of watching and thinking about the content.

The problem I have with morphing is that it often calls attention to itself, which is usually something I'm trying to avoid. The reason to use dissolves is to get them to "slide by" the viewer and not pull the viewers' attention out of the film to look at the effect. IOW, I would think that in most cases using a morph will do the opposite of hiding your cut -- it will in fact call attention to it. Usually. And I'm not saying that's a bad thing, if that's what you want.

But there are no hard and fast rules. Do what works for you and your material.

[Andy Wilkinson]

OK, so it seems all the usual techniques we all use routinely are still the way.

I guess was wondering (I suspect like the OP) if there had been any recent software/plug-in developments which might have been good to have in the tool kit - for the few times when you might need them for minor cuts with talking heads many of us need. I guess not - no problem, I'll just carry on as normal in how I edit these. Thanks guys!

[Jack Zhang]

Had to do this recently, a glow flash similar to film slowdown was what I had to do. I didn't change time parameters, but the glow hid the majority of jump cuts between different versions of the same take relatively well.

[Denez McAdoo]

I'm going to try some of the morphing suggestions stated above. I've also got a suggestion for using timewarp in AE, set to 100% speed, and then key frame the motion blur over the cut. This seems to be a possible better option then cross dissolve, as motion blur is natural and a double ghosting image is not.

By the way, in my particular case, I am given no cutaways. This isn't my decision, if it was, I'd use them. So it is just a talking head describing a class she will be teaching. Between her talking points, I am in fact using dip to white dissolves - a good, soft, gentle way of transitioning. All good.

However in this video, and in many other editing situations, the speaker will mar an other wise good take, with a stutter, or a too long pause, or a slightly jarring "um" or "er." This particular speaker has a speech impediment, but that is beside the point.

The problem that I'm looking to solve is removing less then a second of video. The jump is so minor that sometimes I can get away just leaving it as is. However there is often a slight bump in the video. I would like to use a morphing plug-in to create 1, maybe 2, extra frames that are in-between the minor jump to soften it.

[Denez McAdoo]

by the way, a trick that I have used many time, and has maybe a success rate of 1/4 of the time, is to delete the audio during the "um", "er", or stutter. Speed up the video during the gap (I start with double speed, and then try quadruple speed.), and then fill the remaining gap with room tone - or sometimes I might even stitch together audio fragments from a different take.

This only works if there are no eye blinks, no sudden head movement, and minimal mouth movement.

[Denez McAdoo]

here is a demo from Adobe working on exactly what I'm talking about:

Creative Technologies Lab: Seamless Edits | Prototype | Adobe TV

... this isn't available yet in Premiere Pro by the way. But perhaps can be approximated in AE with plug-ins.