Documentary Special Effects
 

Filming a documentary and was wondering, what are some techniques for zooming in on documents, highlighting a few lines and panning along the sentence, following the narration. It seems to be a pretty standard special effect in Doc's.

The fewer you use the better I'd say. What kind of a documentary? I don't see any of that stuff in Attenborough's documentaries, for example.

Sometimes, you'll see the pan-and-zoom aka "Ken Burns" affect utilized. In that sense, the document is scanned as a jpg or tiff, then brought into the program. Most NLE's have some sort of pan-and-scan feature, or you can find third party plug-ins for it. If you want to 'highlight' a line, you can use a gaussian blur on the rest of the doccument with a cut-out mask for the line you want to highlight, or use a bit of secondary color correction if you like. Lots of ways to do it.

You see this technique more in news style expose' sort of programs. While Subject "A" is talking, you cut away to the memo that contradicts or re-inforces what he is saying - that sort of thing.

Thanks Richard. I guess I have to study up on the different ways to edit Blurs on FCP. I didn't know you could assign a certain area(like a box) not to be effected... Was wondering how people were editing out brand names or nudity with that little blur.

Thats exactly what I'm doing. Any advice on how to add some pizzazz to that effect would be much appreciated.

AhI know what you're talking about. Import as a JPEG or TIFF like Richard is saying, and then keyframe some movement into it--zooming in, panning across...be sure to make the keyframes Bezier lines so they slow down before stopping, and accelerate before moving...that, in my opinion, really adds the professional touch.

I use Imaginate by Canopus
(http://www.canopus.com/products/Imaginate/index.php):
works fine for me, and it's pretty easy to use.

An alternative could be DigiRostrum by Lumidium
(http://www.lumidium.com)

Vasco
www.donesmedia.net

and program that lets your do a ken burns effect or pan and zoom, most NLE let you do it and AE you can highlight etc.