How To Make a Tilt Shift Miniature Video in Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus

Tilt Shift Miniature Picture
If a tilt shift lens is way out of your league, you can still do miniature videos with your video editing software.

In this tutorial, you're gonna learn how to transform your videos into toy-like world scenes using the tilt shift effect in Magix Movie Edit Pro Plus.



How to shoot the right scenes

Of course, shooting is the first step to making a good video. In this case you have to do a few things:
  • Shoot your subject from somewhere above. A high perspective contributes to the miniature feel of the video.
  • Make sure the sky doesn't appear in the shot. 
  • Capture movement + brightly colored stuff (cars, people, green grass, etc.).
Tilt Shift Photography - Btasov

How to create the miniature effect

To do this you have to create a duplicate of each clip and overlay the sharp one onto the blurred clip, leaving a free track between them.

Import an image mask on the track between the clips and apply the Chroma Key Alpha effect to it. In Magix you can find this under Effects/Video Effects/Chroma Key. The lens blur effect is called Artistic Blur in this particular editing program.

Tilt Shift Video Tutorial in Magix

The toy-like scene appearance of the video is built with 5 factors:
  1. Shot taken from above (as you would normally look to a real miniature city).
  2. Colors are ultra saturated - subjects look like lively colored plastic toys.
  3. Exported in 15 fps - thus the movement isn't smooth. Just as a robot toy would move.
  4. Playback speed factor from 2 to 3. I used 2.5 and 3. (I forgot to mention this step in the screencast recording.)
  5. Only a certain area in the image is in focus. The rest is blurred. This makes you believe you're watching everything through a magnifying glass.

The image mask trick works in a similar way as when you add soft artistic margins to your video. You can create multiple images and define the spot to be in focus (white) wile the rest of the image (black) will define the blurred area.

Tilt Shift Alpha Chroma Key Mask
Download this image for your tilt shift project here.

Use any basic vector graphic software to create the mask images. I use Inkscape and Visio.

If you capture a still picture every 2-3 seconds for your timelapse, then you can export your clip in standard fps coz the jumpiness of the video will be granted by the actual action delay between each frame (that is each picture that you took).

Conclusion

Next time when you wanna shoot a timelapse video, this might be a nice cool effect to apply to your clip. It'll definitely make your friends ask you why are those people so tiny? :-)

Have fun shooting and get Magix here so you can do it too. Cheers!


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2 comments :

  1. Great post. I am going to try this with some video I have. What is the music you used?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Cheers! The song is Dormouse from MelodyLoops.com

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