When people refer to a strobe effect in Video it can mean any of a number of things, the usual being a stuttering motion effect (like film running at a slow frame rate, movement becomes jerky like in old silent films), but it can also refer to a flashing of the videos luminance (like a strobe light), or even to a digitrail effect (see separate tutorial on this effect). Below are a few techniques for producing strobes (the first 2 deal with the staggered motion, the last deals with flashing the images luminance up and down).
Technique One (motion strobe)
- Edit your clip to the sequencer
- apply 25% speed to it and render it.
- Edit this program clip into the sequencer
- apply 400% speed, render and you have your clip strobed.
Change the percentages as you like. Do the 400% part first. That way EditDV/CineStream throws away frames. When you slow it down to regular speed, there will be a jump each time EDV encounters a missing frame & has to duplicate one to fill in.
- Ed Jones
Technique Two (motion strobe)
- Capture using the Moto DV application, and set it to capture 1 frame every 4 frames
- Import in Cinestream. It will come into Cinestream at an increased speed 4x faster
- Slow it down 25% and you will have a very accurate strobe effect with full focus. You'll have to bring in the sound separately, but you can sync it up perfectly.
- Michael Brown
Technique Three (brightness strobe)
- Put you clip on V1
- Put a Color Adjust FX on FX1, only about three frames in length
- double click the first marker and change the level for contrast to a very hard contrast, brightness up until you can even see some of the shadows.
- move the time line cursor to the end of the FX and change back the levels to normal settings.
This gives one single flash (I used it to achieve the effect of real flash lites). However, for a flashlite you would have to add several copies of the single filter you just created and you also have to try different lengths to get the effect you like.
