Advanced WAX 2.0 Tutorial
So, right now probably my biggest requests for tutorials have been for WAX 2.0 tutorial which is a free video editing software for Windows. So as a response to their requests I’ve decided to create a forum specifically for a WAX 2.0.
The tutorials I created some of the tips you guys can offer. And in this video I’m going to go over some other special effects you can do with WAX 2.0 specifically particles effects which has snow or things that you can use for title and warping effects. Warping and morphing, to morph from one picture to another and to warp specific pictures or videos.
First thing, I’m going to show you how to do is how to create particles within WAX and you can use particles for snow or stars, fire or different things like that. First thing you want to do is convert all of your video files to AVI and all your audio files to WAB and you can do this using format factoring. It converts to almost anything and once you got everything converted to the right format then just drag them all to the same folder and kind of start a project folder.
I’ve uploaded this project folder to the tinkernut.com from link that I showed you earlier if you want to follow along. So I just opened up WAX and I right clicked under media bends to add media files and I’m just going to start adding the different media files for this project.
And another thing you want to do is right click on one of your video files and go to properties and then click on the summary tab and get the height and width of that video file. So now go to project and settings and adjust the project settings to fit that, so mine is tolerated by 720 and I’m going to change the frame right to 30. That’s the general frame rate for most video cameras.
So now I’m just going to drag a clip to the time line and this is what the clip looks like, it’s just zooming in on the snowman nothing too fancy and it’s a little bit long so I’m going to crop it down dragging the tail end of the video clip inward. And now I’m going to click on the video plug in tab. And drag this little side bar, all the way back to the beginning of the video clip and then I’m going to drag the video clip down one to slot number two. And then I’m going to drag particles plugged in to slot number one and this is what the particles effect looks like, it’s kind of fire.
If you toggle down the particle effect you can adjust the blend and the colors. I just un-checked blend and check colors and then toggle down the creation. This allows you to adjust how many particles you want created. I adjusted the maximum amount to a thousand and how many particles to create a second. I’m adjusting that to a thousand as well.
And that kind of lessens the amount of particles that are there. And now I’m going to change the color to white because I’m going to be creating snow. And white is the color of snow and you can also adjust the size of the particles. These are a little bit too large as they are so I’m just adjust them to minimum size to one and the maximum size to five and this kind of a let’s them vary.
Now I'm going to toggle down the destroy option and all I’m going to do under this is just change the color to white. And this will make all the particles white. Now I’m going to toggle down the meter options and this allows you to adjust to where the particles come from and you can adjust the X and Y positions. I'm not going to mess with those though. I'm just showing you what they do.
But what you want to mess with is the radius option. The radius X will let it spread it out from left to right across the video clip. The radius Y does up and down and this lets it cover the entire video clip. If you do radius Z, this gives it a depth. It goes forward to back. And then you also wanted to adjust the direction of where the snow is coming from. Right now it’s set to go upwards we want it to go down. So I’m going to adjust the direction Y to a negative amount.
If you want it to look like it’s being whisk by the wind, you can also adjust the X direction as well. And then you can just mess around with that change the velocity, different things like that if you want but those are just the basics. You can fit it to suit your needs.
Now I’m just going to drag the slider bar around. You’ll notice that at the beginning of the video clip there aren’t any particles so what I did is I just adjusted the work zone out of the video clip to where the particles start forming. And now last but not least, I’m just going to drag a wind sound effect to the timeline and adjust it to fit the video clip. And just the beginning here to fit the work area and that’s pretty much it.
And I’m going to click project setting as again change that file name to snow fall and save it in the video clips folder and then I’m going to click options. Most people use DivX, I’m going to choose Xvid, the Xvid option for the encoding option. So I’m just going to click OK for both of those and then click the green render button and that’s going to start making the video.
Alright so now, the next thing that I'm going to show you how to do is how to warp video. You can use this for ripples or morphing from one clip to another clip. So I just created a new project and I'm adjusting the project size to fit the video size which for me is 1289x720 with the frame rate of 30 and I’m going to change the file name to warp.avi and save it to my video clips folder.
And I’m going to adjust the encoding options to Xvid and then just click OK to get out of about those. Now just click on media full tab and start adding media file. I’m going to add a beam video file and click O2 video file and a laser sound effect. So this is the clip O2 video file it’s just me getting close to the snowman and then back in a wave or flick. And so it’s a little bit long as well so I’m going to crop it down a little bit, drag it to the number two slot and I’m going to drag beam, the beam video file to the number one slot and this is what that looks like.
And you have noticed that it has a black background so to get rid of that just click on the video plug-ins and drag a Chroma key plug-in on top of the beam video file. And choose the color option, eye dropper to select to black background and then just drag the tolerance up until the background starts disappearing. And all you’re left with is the beam. And now I’m just going to crop it a little bit to make it a little bit more precise and then I’m going to drag it to the end of the video clip.
And the effect that we’re going for is that this is kind of a force field between me and the snowman. Right now, it’s on top of the snowman but the change where it’s located you can drag a quick 3D plug-in on top of the video file and this will let you adjust the location of it as well as the position and scale and rotation.
So now we’re going to start warping. To do this, drag a warp option on top of the video clip and if you don’t have Winmorph you can download it for free from the link below and this is the Winmorph application. You can see that it automatically imports the video clip and what you want to do first is click on the rectangle shape option and drag it around the video to kind of create a shape zone.
And what I’m going to do now is check the oval option and drag an oval around the video clip. This is where the warp is going to stop and I don’t want it to stop inside the video clips so I’m dragging it around outside. And now I’m going to drag another oval where I want the warp to start and then just click the associate shape button, select where you want the warp to start which is this oval and then drag a line to where you want it to stop which is this outside oval.
Now if I click the preview button at the top, I can drag the slider bar and it’s going to show me what the warp looks like. Now I’m going to adjust where it starts and stops, so I just double clicked on the shape set in the upper right. And that it creates a timeline in the lower right and if I drag the video clip to where I want it to start. I can adjust the warp in the timeline with this little slider bar. So I just drag the first dot to where I wanted it to start and now I’m going to drag the end dot to where I want it to end.
And then you can just kind of adjust it and the upper left is a slider bar that I’m using to scrimp through the video footage and I’m just adjusting it a little bit more to where I want it to start and stop. And you can also preview what it looks like because there is always the preview box just at the top.
Now when you’re through just close out of it and it automatically imports the warp into your video footage and this is what it looks like. And then I also went ahead and added a warp to the beam as well to kind of give it a spherical look and now I’m just going to make the beam fading in and out. I selected the beginning of the beam video footage and I toggle down the Chroma key and I just change the stop watch. I clicked on the stop watch and changed it to linear and I move the tolerance all the way up so that the beam disappeared.
Now I’m just moving forward a few frames and I’m dragging the tolerance back down so that it appears and I’m going forward a few more frames and I’m adjusting the tolerance just a little bit. And you can see that every time I adjust the tolerance, it puts a little dot on the timeline.
So now I’m going to move all the way to the end of the clip and move to tolerance all the way back up so that it completely disappears and that’s what it looks like. Alright now, all you have to do is click Render and that’s it. Alright, that’s it for this tutorial, for more go tinkernut.com.
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