Custom Video Transitions

Summer is packed with weddings. Wedding bells ring across the country and this is where we draw the inspiration for our next tutorial. Wedding videos are always in need of nice smooth transitions that lead the viewer from one scene to the next. And there is no better tool for custom transitions than Boris RED or Boris FX plugins inside your favorite editor program.

Click here to download the presets for this tutorial

Both products provide a full palette of spline drawing tools. We are going to exploit these tools to draw and animate bell shapes that frame and reveal our wedding images.

We’ll start by drawing a simple Bezier shape with a Pen tool. We can approximate the entire shape with just 4 knots by hand or use the Mirror Mode from the Tools menu. Either way the bell shape is relatively easy to create.

To make the bell more convincing add a little ellipse as a second spline object at the top to simulate a ring or holder. The idea of this effect is to swing a pair of bells to reveal the incoming image in one of them. The bells must hinge at the top.

To animate the bell shapes we need to select the bell shape track. The first step is to unlock the anchor point and position it near the top of the bell.

Then we’ll move to the Position tab and use the “Swing” interpolation on the Rotate Z parameter. This special interpolation method will do most of the work for us providing an automated ease-in-ease-out swing motion to the bell.

To complete the effect, we duplicate the Bell track, reverse the swing in the second copy, place one bell in the mask track of the incoming video clip, fade it in with the opacity control - we recommend that you Accelerate the opacity from 0% to 100% - and finally, zoom out the bell shape to reveal the entire image. Add a few keyframes to taste and you are done. Time to show it to your newlyweds!

• Watch the finished product
• Download the presets for this tutorial

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