"night vision" effect?

[Lorinda Norton]

I hope there aren't several threads about this--several searches for me came up zero:

Tomorrow I'm taking a six-hour drive north and trying my hand at shooting "day for night." In editing I need to create a "night vision" effect on portions of the footage--like the viewer is looking through a night vision scope on a rifle.

As much as I'd love to play around looking for a solution, I don't have the time. Does anyone know the best way to achieve this?

[John McManimie]

There are filters for this, at least for Adobe Premiere and After Effects --- I don't know about Vegas. To do it manually, perhaps you can try:

1. Create a "scope" mask / blur the edges (vignette) a bit

2. Add a bit of noise / lower the resolution

3. Blow the highlights a bit

4. Give the image a green tint (the night vision look)

5. Add crosshairs to center of mask

Or, perhaps you could add a fake scope mask/crosshairs (clear plastic with crosshairs printed on it) over the lens during the scope scene and then adjust the colors and highlights in post?

[Glenn Chan]

Vignette: You can use the cookie cutter. If you want a fancier vignette:
Create two new layers underneath the current one. Put the video on the bottommost layer.
Use a circular gradient on an upper layer. The middle/neutral color should be 128 128 128 grey (this color means no effect).
Set the compositing mode to overlay or hard light.
OPTIONAL: Set the parent/child relationship so the bottommost layer inherits from the upper layer. This is so the composite mode does not affect layers below the two you just added.

There are other variations, which shouldn't be that important.

Blow highlights: Use color curves filter, create a knee/slope/flattish curve at the top. If this is for broadcast, this will create illegal colors. You'll need to bring the white point down to 235 235 235. You'll need the histogram to help you.

Noise: Use the film grain filter, turn chromacity off. Or use the video noise filter.

Lower resolution: Quick blur @ 100% or whatever, convolution kernel blur preset, or gaussian blur.

Green tint: Use a filter before to de-saturate. Channel blend on the red channel will brighten up skin tones in the B&W image. Add green tint with the color corrector (drag the wheels to shades of green), or the gradient map filter. Highlights should be de-saturated maybe. In the gradient map filter, choose the overexposed preset and change the blue color to green. Hopefully that'll give you ideas.

2- Alternate method:
Use a consumer camera and use the nightshot/infrared shooting mode on it. The camera emits an IR beam from the thingies on the front. Objects faraway will not be hit by that IR light and will not pickup the effect well.

3- Depending on the effect you want to achieve, you may need to light your footage a particular way. To make things look like nighttime, there is just one hard light source in the scene (moon light). There is very very little fill light (don't use a fill light, but there should be fill/ambient light from that one hard light source). This may be difficult to do in the daytime outside where you are fighting with the sun (which is really bright, and lights up the sky which gives fill light).

If you want the infrared/night vision thing, then the light source comes from objects themselves. The sky does not provide any infrared as far as I know- it should be black. Human beings emit IR, they should be brighter than everything else.


(no idea if the following works...)
One possible way to achieve that effect is to use secondary color correction. You can change brightness and contrast based on colors... get people to dress in red/orange tones so the secondary will pick them up along with flesh tones. Use a polarizer to bring down skies and make them blue-er so you can get a good seperation on it and knock out the brightness of the sky.

Objects that should be bright should have high luminance values. If you need to tweak something, make sure it has its own distinct color (highly saturated is good).

[Peter Jefferson]

wow Glen, some really good tips there..

I had to do this for a corporate and what glen has mentined is on the nail, however there are afew ways u can make this scene work a little better..

when shooting, start at full wide and zoom in as fast as u can moving left and right slightly and showing irregualr stabilisation.. basically to make it look like its unstable due to the long telephoto reach... fluctuate the gausian blur to make it look like ur seeking focus... depending on the camera, a telephoto lens adapter may be helpful..

theres a filter in Vegas called "gradient map"
The night vision template is awesome as it retains the blacks and whites while everything else is washed in green.
A bit of grain can help, and if u want to be techy with it, throw in the TV simulator with zoomed detail and some scanlines in the image (for that star wars, night vision distance metre thingy...

This worls a treat and theres also a template in there called "overexposed" which is good if u want to mess with the exposure (eg, as the scope is hunting its target and it comes across a spotlight or someone turns on the lights u can add flash transition and switch it to "overexposed" from infrared (ala Metal Gear Solid and Resident Evil 4) u can blow it out.. and make it look really good by cuttin the scene to black while theres gunfire happening, all u see is muzzle flashes only (but then im lookin a lil too far ahead and i dont know ur project)

have fun :)

[Peter Jefferson]

forgot to mention

for the crosshair, i used Powerpoint and created a new presentation using the autoshapes.. i then exported as a png

the trik with this is to have a black background and a red crosshair..
once u have ur image, thow it on a track above your footage.. now in the compositing mode, make sure the X/hair track is set to "add"... and the clip itself is set to premultiply its transparency.
The main video clip where ur footage is should be set to source alpha

While ur there, change ur aspect of ur Xhair as well as it will be square pixel...

this lil trick will give u a transparency wherever black is, and where ur X/hair is, u not only will see it clearly, but youll also see THROUGH it..

try it :)

[Lorinda Norton]

Oh, man, this stuff is GREAT!!! YOU guys are great!!!

I'm gonna print it all and fly--study it more when I reach my destination. Will let you fellas know how your tips worked out.

Thank you so very, very much!!!!

[Greg Boston]

Lorinda,

For the night vision effect, if you want to part with a couple hundred bucks, there is a new night vision device produced by Weaver (the same folks who make scopes for rifles). I found this gem at my local outdoors theme store. It's not a photomultiplier tube like the old ones and can be used in full light without destroying it. Basically, it's a b/w video imager with an LED array attached. But, here is where it gets useful for you...it has composite video output to any recording device. So, you could take its output and feed the input of your dv camera in vcr mode and 'Voila!", night vision effect. It also has a standard 3/8 threaded tripod mount.

Good luck,

-gb-

[Peter Jefferson]

ive just made some chages to my posts with a lil more detail than previously..

[Charles Papert]

Here's a thread that discusses some other nightvision options.

[Lorinda Norton]

The drive went more quickly than I thought (love my Mustang!) so I had time to check back here before the shoot. If I had the extra $$ and access I would buy that device you mentioned, Greg. Darn it--that sounds like a fast solution!

We're dealing with college kids who have to be in class Monday, so I don't think they'll be shooting at dusk and then dawn, Charles, but that does sound like the best way to do it. I'll ask them. Thank you for finding that other thread.

And thank you--all of you--for the great help. We'll see how it goes...

[Peter Wright]

For an alternative way of superimposing a rifle scope, there's a couple in the Wingdings font - can be put in as text, then colured and sized as you want.

[Brian Mitchell Warshawsky]

You can find a Day for Night filter here:

http://www.jetdv.com/vegas/forum/vie...3aa62819f907f5

You will need the Sony Preset Manager, available as a free download on the Sony site. A link to the Preset Manager is also provided in the JetDV thread.

Once you have the Night Vision look you like, please consider sharing it at the Jetdv site listed above.

Brian

[Ian Stark]

Unless I'm mistaken, isn't there a night vision setting in Pixelan's Chromawarp plug-in? I can't vouch for it's quality as I haven't used it, but I thought that for the sake of completeness it should at least be mentioned in this thread!

Ian . . .

[Peter Jefferson]

I'll have a look..
gimme a sec...


umm..


Nup.. it just has tints and negative and trippy colour filters..

[Ian Stark]

I'll shut up then!!

I am certain I have seen a night vision preset in some plugin or other. When I get home tonight I'll have a trawl through. Probably find it was in Sound Forge. No, hang on . . .