Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Hey there everybody, Simon Walker here. I've got another QuickTip and this time it's for
Red Giant Psunami. Now Psunami is a plugin which simulates water
surfaces. It simulates photo realistic oceans and skies. And it does this by creating 3D
geometry of a surface and then it ray traces that to make it look realistic to make it
look like a real water. And it works with Final Cut and with After
Effects and it's got lots of adjustments and settings and so you can really customize lots
of elements: the speed of the water you can change how the wind affects the waves and
the surface of the water, you can change the time of day and say how the light interacts.
You can fly a virtual camera of the water and create an animation. Displace the surface
and even add an object that floats on the surface as well.
So all these features are great, but this is a QuickTip, and what I want to show you
is how to use this plugin to create a water scene quickly in Final Cut.
I can add Psunami to the timeline by creating a slug, and then choosing effects, video filters,
Red Giant Psunami. And here's the scene at the default settings. And if I go up into
the filters tab for this slug, these are all the settings for the plug-in.
And yes there is a fair amount of stuff that you can do with this plug-in. And while this
is great, you might be thinking to yourself "which slider do I use first?", "which one
of these categories do I start off with?", what's the
most important control to get the most impact in the fastest time?"
Well I found that the first thing to do is to close up these disclosure triangles, so
that I have a good idea of which particular section I am dealing with, and then I can
concentrate on one thing at a time. For example in the camera section, if I increase
the field of view, that can dramatically change the vista and the width of the shot. And if
I combine that with the elevation slider, just in a couple of clicks I've got a dramatically
different type of shot which is telling a different type of story.
But whilst these are quick ways to dramatically adjust the look of your scene, there's a much
faster way of getting quick results out of Psunami, and that's by using the presets that
ship with it. Psunami ships with a Final Cut pro file full
of these presets for different times a day, different looks, different styles and different
weather conditions. And the thing is, I know the scenario... you've
finished your edit and it's all ready to go, except you'd like to add in a title plate.
And the whole content of the job suggests a water theme.
And so what motivates me in situations like this, is all I've got to do is to add the
title at the beginning of the timeline. And I can do this with the standard Final Cut
Pro text, but I want to add an interesting background to it. But I think the standard
white text on a black background you get in Final Cut, the sort of thing you're tempted
to do when you're rushing at the end of the job, this standard text is a little too plain,
so I like to put it over a background. So I'd like to jazz up the text somehow, but
I have to stay in Final Cut because I haven't got much time left, and whilst I could trawl
through the online stock video sites and buy some background footage, I might not find
exactly what I'm after, and the clock is ticking. And this is when the presets in Psunami come
in handy. And the advantage is that I can then choose from a series of these presets,
a particular scene which I can then choose to adjust slightly and add behind my title
text. And that's just what I've done over the next
couple of slugs. I'm going to turn on the overlays, and this then shows the marker text
on each of these clips, so you can see which preset I'm talking about.
So on this second clip, I've just added the Up On High preset, which is nice by itself
but the background I wanted was some standard gentle rippling water. So of course this scene
is way too high, but by just tweaking those two sliders, the field of view and the elevation
slider I mentioned earlier, I'm able to change the position of the camera to be much closer
to the water. And that's what I've done on this next clip
And all I've done is just change two sliders, the field of view and the elevation slider,
and now I've got my water background. And the nice thing is that Psunami automatically
animates the water for me. It's got a prebuilt oscillation of the waves so I haven't had
to setup any key frames, all I've done is applied a preset, moved the camera and I've
got my water background. Another preset I really like is Caribbean,
and that's in the in the Underwater section. I like the fact that this has given me an
instant underwater look without having to set up the camera and manipulate that and
position it under the surface of the water and all the work's done for me.
And whilst we're on this filter, it's worth pointing out that you can change the render
settings which in turn can have an impact on your render times.
This preset defaults to rendering at realistic. But if I set this to wireframe, I get a wireframe
depiction of the surface, but the wireframe takes a less processing power than the realistic
setting. And that means on the elevation slider I can get pretty much real time feedback on
the height of the camera, and also on the field of view.
And depending on the render speed of your computer this is a faster way of working,
I can setup the scene and then when I'm happy, I can change the render mode to realistic.
And this is my final title plate with the text layered over the background water. And
actually, what I've done here, is that I've added a little wave onto the text. Let me
just show you... I've added one of the in-built Final Cut filters, Wave, with two key frames
on it, just slightly animating the offset. So you got this nice undulating effect on
the text here and also on this text I've changed the composite mode to Overlay and that's why
you can see some of the wave details through the text.
The point is, this is made with a preset, a few adjustments to the in-built text tools
in Final Cut and that's it! I haven't had to leave the timeline to go to an external
graphics program. And this isn't because I don't like
external graphics programs... I love Motion, I love After Effects, but I don't always have
the time to use them, and so quick little fixes like this which can bring up the production
values of a fast edit, I think are aways really handy.
And talking of quick fixes you can increase the depth if you like of your water, by combining
Psunami with other Red Giant filters. Here's the Carribean preset combined with
the Shine plugin. And interestingly here, there are no keyframes on this shot, the water
is animating the light rays and on this next clip I've got Radium Glow Edge, just picking
out a nice sparkly highlight on the edges of the waves.
And then I've got Trapcode Starglow on this next clip which is adding a nice little sunlight
reflection, again without any keyframes. And here's what this clip looks like in the
viewer... I've got the the Up On High preset with an adjusted elevation height, and I've
added the Starglow filter, pretty much at the default settings... I've just gone into
the color maps and set them to one color each, and then changed the colors to be a combination
of light yellow and orange to give this sunlight effect on the highlights on the waves.
But you can have a look at this in more detail because I've uploaded this timeline to Red
Giant People, so you can download the Final Cut Pro file and have a play with some of
these settings. So just go to RedGiantPeople.com and search
for Psunami and FCP as the keywords, or search for me, Simon Walker, and it'll come up as
one of my presets. Psunami works with After Effects as well,
and if you've got the CS5 version of After Effects, you can take advantage of the 64bit
acceleration that CS5 provides, and Psunami has been configured to work in CS5 in 64bit.
And it's also got all the same presets. So I can load up, say, Underwater, Carribean
and it's the same presets that I had in Final Cut.
And what was the other preset I had? It was Up On High, in the bright day section, and
it's also got the same controls. So if you know Psunami in Final Cut, you can then go
into After Effects in you want to and then tweak it there.
And so I can do the same procedure of slightly tweaking the elevation and the field of view
settings to quickly customize my look. And that's the name of the game, doing things
quickly. So here I've been able to use the in-built tools in the plugin, in this case
the presets, make a couple of tweaks and get my own look, or my own results very quickly.
So I hope you've enjoyed this tip and until the next time good luck and have fun!