Comments on: If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a cheap music video

By: gotilk

gotilk — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 07:13:49 +0000

PERFECTLY! Thanks. Just managed (after days of drawing.. whew) to make my first rotoscoped animated sequence. It’s 8 seconds long, looks like junk but it worked! Thanks for your article and for the clarification. It turns out there’s no special commands or anything. You just make sure the files are numbered sequentially (00001 to 01000 in the case of a few seconds of 30fps video.. whew again) and open file number 00001.. virtualdub just does it. Choose “save as avi” and it just works. I guess I’m not used to things just working. I didn’t expect it to be so easy. Turning the original video into frames was just as easy, just make sure you set the frame rate correctly first.

When I have something worth showing, I’ll send a link to you. Thanks again for the inspiration and great job with your video.

By: Jeff Boller

Jeff Boller — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 07:12:38 +0000

Hi Gotilk –

Thanks for the kind words about the song and video. As far as animating over top of an existing video — you could do that with any professional video editing application… which means none of the tools I used can do that!

Actually, maybe there’s some way to do it in VirtualDub — but I don’t know. I’ve only utilized a small fraction of what VirtualDub can do.

What I meant by “VirtualDub to stitch all the image files into AVI movie files” was this: For each shot, I had hundreds (sometimes thousands) of bitmap images I’d created in Paint Shop Pro. Each bitmap file was like a page in a children’s flip book. VirtualDub simply took all of those bitmap images from a directory (I had a different directory for each shot) and turned them into a single AVI file.

So I then had a bunch of AVI files, one for each shot of the video. Those AVI files were imported into ABC Video Roll, where I put them in the proper order and worked on the “rhythm” of the shots.

Hope that clarifies things…!

By: gotilk

gotilk — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 05:41:59 +0000

Thanks so much for the making of article. There’s a part that I’d love to get a little more detail on as I’ve looked for the ability to do this for a while using the same program… in both directions… in other words… frames from an existing video so I can animate over them… AND then stitch the frames back together for a final avi after I’ve *ahem*… altered them (in other words really made myself look like a goofball in the most loving yet still humiliating of ways). So if you ever get the chance to give more detail on this part:

“VirtualDub to stitch all of the image files into AVI movie files”

I would be so very happy, and I’m sure others who would attempt similar things would love you for it as well. I’ve been googiling since before it was a verb and I have never been stumped before THIS very problem. I’m either not looking for the right terms or noone has written any kind of TRUE rotoscoping with virtualdub article/tutorial.

Thanks in advance if you can help. If not, thanks for making one of the most enjoyable music videos I’ve ever watched. Great song, too. Can’t wait to hear more of your stuff.

By: admin

admin — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:23:31 +0000

Thanks, Rolf!

By: Rolf Hansen

Rolf Hansen — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 00:14:01 +0000

Very amusing article! I admire your patience and creativity: the music and lyrics are simply fantastic and the video is cool and funny. You must be proud - I would have been

Rolf

By: Adriano

Adriano — Sun, 04 May 2008 10:41:50 +0000

But seriously, can you make a video for my band? haha
Maybe I should have told you earlier, but I can draw really really well.

By: Really Really Weird - Video Editing Forums: Digital Director

Really Really Weird - Video Editing Forums: Digital Director — Sun, 04 May 2008 04:48:34 +0000

[...] see all of the wrong ways I went about making this video on an article I just wrote on my blog: Songs and Sonics