THIS IS A BASIC TUTORIAL on using Image Processor scripts. Here you will learn how to set up a simple project and adjust parameters in the script. This information can also be used generically with any of MainVision's normal plugins.

FIRST SET UP A SIMPLE PROJECT with 2 tracks sized to what your source material is. The first track will be for your source (most likely video) and the second track is for your Image Processor script. Things should look pretty much as they do in the first image below. At this point click on the SOURCE icon to bring your clip into the project.

Image 1

NOW CLICK ON THE I PROC ICON to bring up the default Image Processor window. In the upper right area is a button marked Load... which you click on to bring in the script you want to use. For this example I'm using Mover1.cf and the example below shows what it looks like when you first bring it up.

Image 2

THE IMAGE BELOW SHOWS THE LEFT SIDE of the Image Processor window and is the part we'll be concerned with in this tutorial. Its divided into two sections with the top having text + sliders and the bottom having colored lines. Taking a look at the top section we see Mover1.cf is the first piece of information and it simply tells you which Image Processor script is being used. Next is Input1 which has a box beside it labled <Not assigned> and you would click on this to bring up a dialogue box to select your input track (more on this in the next section) The next two are labled X Shift and Y Shift and are used to postion the source of Input 1. The last three, Red, Green, Blue, are used to control the background color. The section at the bottom has some colored lines and represents a graphical view of the adjustments on a timeline. The timeline runs the length of the segment as its represented on a track and a green horizontal line shows the current frame/time.

Image 3

HERE IS A VIEW OF THE DIALOGUE BOX that is brought up when you click the box beside Input 1. It has a couple of buttons and a window that lists all the prior tracks. There could be any number of tracks listed depending on how extensive your project is but in our case there is only one to choose from. Clicking on the track name will select it and make its output the input for the script and the window automatically closes. You could also click the button Previous to select the track immediately preceeding.

Image 4

YOUR PROJECT SHOulD NOW LOOK SIMILAR to what you see below. Track 1 now contains a video clip and Track 2 has the Mover1.cf script loaded with an input track assigned.

Image 5

NOW WE'LL ADJUST SOME PARAMETERS using the sliders (brown/red tabs) beside the text in the top section. As you can see adjusting the top sliders also causes the colored lines in the section below to move. If you grab the little squares (handles) on the colored lines you can move the sliders above. Works both ways. At this point you may be wondering where some of the extra lines come from as you could only see Black, White and Blue when the script was initially opened. That's because the adjusters for the colored background were all at the same value and two were hidden behind the other. You'll also see there are colored squares with no lines at the very top of that section. You can use these to move the corrosponding line handle along the timeline.

Image 6

THIS IS THE RESulT OF THE ADJUSTMENTS we made above. Our input track is offset by the amount of X Shift and Y Shift. The background has the color we've assigned with Red, Green and Blue.

Image 7

IN ORDER TO ANIMATE THE INPUT we need to adjust the colored lines across the timeline. The graphic below shows the black and white lines crossing which will cause our input to move diagonally over the timeline. The first thing you'll want to do is to add handles to these lines. You do this by placing the cursor anywhere over a line and left-clicking your mouse while holding down Shift on your keyboard. You can now grab the new handle and move it anywhere you'd like. Notice as well the handle with the focus is outlined (in this case the upper right black). You will also notice that the diagonal lines aren't exactly the same. One is straight while the other has a curve, the following section will explain how to adjust that.

Image 8

ADJUSTING THE liNES IS SIMPLE all you need to do is right-click a hilighted handle and a new dialogue box will come up. There are a number of options and selecting one will perform that action on the handle. For this example I've made both the Black handles a Corner which give the straight diagonal line. The White handles have been given Smooth attributes which gives them a lazy diagonal S curve. Keep in mind that handles on the same line can have different attributes (one can be a Curve and the other Smooth).

Image 9

EXPERIMENT WITH THE PARAMETERS to get a feel for the types of adjustments you can make. You can add as many handles as you need/want and can always delete them if you make an error. If you'd like to fine tune the parameters you can expand the Image Processor window by grabbing a corner and dragging with your mouse. Or you can click on one of the boxes (between text and sliders) in the top section. That will bring up a dialogue box where you can numerically input values.

Benjammin