Film fade?

[Ben Winter]

I've notived on earlier films that fading transitions between scenes look different than just a digital fade. It's something I can't quite put my finger on--some colors fade before others, or something...it would be nice to have some input on this.

[Graham Bernard]

Ben - I think I know exactly what you mean.

If you use Vegas, you will be fortunate to access a free plugin that works on the Luminance. It provides a far more film look than the standard transitions.

Here is what Scott says: "the luminance of the incoming & outgoing shots (which simulate a film-like optical dissolve - similar to Magic Bullet)."

If you do have Vegas use the plugin and do loop repeat on the section doing UNDO and REDO comparing the standard Vegas tranni and SCOTT's - you WILL be amazed!

. . and here is SCOTT's website:

http://www.endor.demon.co.uk/

There are other neat Scott freebies there too!

You do say,"some colors fade before others, or something" - Vegas can allow for transition on a selected colour - is that it? Try the Scott thing anyway.


Grazie

[Jamie Niebuhr]

you're talking about fading to black right?... i've noticed that too, and now i do my fades in after effects. you put a black solid layer on top of your video and fade it in by changing opasity from 0 to 100, but during the solid's fade you increase the black levels of the footage as well, this makes the darker spots disappear before the brighter ones during a fade... anyways, hope that makes sense.

[Jean-Francois Robichaud]

There was a great article about this in DV magazine in March 2005 (A Different Light):

http://www.dv.com/columns/columns_it...leId=159900513
(I think you must be a suscriber to access it)

Basically, it has to do with gamma correction. Computer software assumes a 50% luminance value to be 50% gray. In reality, our eyes see an 18% gray as "middle" gray, because our eyes are more sensitive to low light levels. Things appear correctly on the computer monitor because a ~2.2 gamma correction is applied tho fix the discrepency.

But things get screwed up in image processing, because transparency/blending is usually processed before the gamma correction. In a real-world optical dissolve, the lighter areas of the 1st image linger longer, and the lighter areas of the 2nd image appear first. In a standard computer dissolve, both dark and light areas disappear/appear at the same time. The computer transition looks less natural and is arguably less pleasing to the eye (it looks "dull" to me).

The article above had a way to get a "natural" dissolve in After Effect.

1) Create a cross-fade between 2 clips
2) Change the gamma of the 2 clips to 0.4545 (1/2.2). You can use the Level effect to do this.
3) Insert this comp into another comp and change the gamma of the initial comp to 2.2, which returns the overall gamma level to 1, after the transition has been processed
The result: the transition now looks more like a real optical dissolve, because it was processed in a corrected domain.

I assume that the Vegas transition that Graham mentions performs the same kind of effect, except that it does it automatically. I wonder if the same kind of transition exists for Premiere of FCP. It's a very simple effect computation after all.

[Don Donatello]

in FILM a fade/dissolves are different depending on if you shot on positive ( reversal ) or negative film stock ..
i believe most NLE's fades/dissolves are eqaul to a film positive fade ...

basically on one the highlights fade 1st and the blacks are last to go out 1st ...while on the other the blacks fade 1st and brights are last to go ...

same on dissolves .. on one you see the 2nd image coming thru the bright areas of the current image 1st and on other you see 2nd image coming thru the blacks areas of current image 1st ...

[Ben Winter]

hmm...thanks. I'll try some of these ideas. Since I'm not a Vegas user I can't try Scott's plugin. But I am an AE user...