(Oops. Accidentally posted this in the wrong place the first time around, I think. Though it’s not showing up, so who the hell knows.)
I’m currently trying to use Blender as a free alternative to After Effects or something like that. I don’t actually know entirely what After Effects does, but I know I want something free.
Ultimately, I’d like to emulate (with my own touch) a lot of the (I’m sure very simple) effects seen in the first sixteen seconds of this video. I have footage similar to what’s running in the background there, but I haven’t even gotten as far as cutting that down and working on it OR working on any of those effects.
I’m still stuck/stumped with Blender and a simple visual effect I’d like to add to my very first video.
My very first video has a significant amount of time (20+ minutes) that I’d like to cut out, but I’d like it to be really obvious how much time I’m cutting out. (I’d also like to add a ‘corrupt video file’ effect to each time cut, but that’ll come last I think.)
So, I thought I’d add a vertical line along the top with marks along it similar to a ruler, with a pointer running along that line from left to right over the course of the whole video. The idea being that for the chunks I cut out, the pointer ‘jumps forward’ along the line, indicating about how much time has been skipped over.
My assumption is that I’d want to render out 300 frames or so (at 30fps) of PNGs of the time-bar, and then later overlay that on top of the video, stretch out the entire animation over that video, then cut out chunks that need to be cut out, thus (I’m assuming) creating the effect of a time-bar showing the progression (and loss) of time.
So far I’ve managed to create two planes, one for the bar, one for the pointer.
I’ve managed to figure out how to do the (very simple, I’m sure) animation of the smaller plane sliding along the larger one.
I’ve figured out how to make the planes Shadeless and apply textures to them (which I struggled to make in Inkscape, eventually resorting to a script to generate the ‘Scale’, as 70+ individual lines drawn and positioned by hand was not something I wanted to do, though the simple triangle was easy).
The problem is that the textures are blurry as hell. The things I’ve managed to find about possible reasons for this suggest that either I’m creating the file in the wrong dimensions and stretching it weirdly over the plane (I doubt this, as I intentionally created both at the same aspect ratios) OR that the lines in Inkscape aren’t lined up with the grid, so parts of the strokes of the lines don’t line up perfectly with pixels, hence I’m getting dithering (or whatever the phrase is).
I can’t honestly tell which is the actual problem or if it’s something else.
So instead I tried importing the SVG file directly into Blender, which resulted in something that looked mostly right, except the lines themselves are so thin that I’m not sure they’d even render. Plus I can’t think of how to color them without making a 1-pixel texture to apply to them, not that I’m sure that’d work since they’re not planes, they’re ‘curves’, whatever that means.
So I’m looking for any suggestions, ideas, etc. Am I going about this all wrong? Is there a better/easier way to do what I’m trying to do? I’ve tried sitting through about an hour or so of tutorials, but they’re all focused on 3D modelling which isn’t what I’m trying to do, or video editing itself, which I haven’t gotten to yet.
Here’s a shot of what I’ve accomplished, sort’ve. The grey/red background is just a screenshot I’m using as a reference guide, the bit I’m working on is the white/black lines at the top left.
