{"id":174,"date":"2010-03-13T10:04:10","date_gmt":"2010-03-13T09:04:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/?p=174"},"modified":"2025-02-22T18:48:04","modified_gmt":"2025-02-22T17:48:04","slug":"the-parallax-experiment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/?p=174","title":{"rendered":"The Parallax Experiment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>Given that the current hot topic in home videography is &#8220;home 3-D movies&#8221; (both camcorders and screens to view them) I thought it would be appropriate to attempt making some 3-D on the &#8220;cheap.&#8221;&nbsp; <em>Really<\/em> cheap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I got the idea from Ashton Kutcher &#8211; actually, a video <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nikonfestival.com\/blog\/2009\/11\/06\/ashton%E2%80%99s-video-2\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">he posted in the Nikon Festival contest<\/a>.&nbsp; If you look closely at the stills in his video, you&#8217;ll see what&#8217;s known as the &#8220;parallax effect.&#8221;&nbsp; In other words, an object in the foreground moves in relation to the background &#8211; simulating the changing position of the viewer \/ camera, and adding a bit of a 3-D effect.&nbsp; The idea is that if you move your vantage point from right to left, objects nearer to you will shift to the right more quickly than distant objects.&nbsp; Apparently it&#8217;s useful in astronomy, as in when you&#8217;re measuring distances between stars and galaxies.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I wanted to take a collection of stills I had turned into a slideshow some time ago and see if I could create a parallax effect without having the equipment &#8211; and staff &#8211; Ashton Kutcher likely has available to him.&nbsp; And here is what I ended up with:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video is-provider-vimeo wp-block-embed-vimeo wp-embed-aspect-16-9 wp-has-aspect-ratio\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"while you were sleeping...\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/9954796?dnt=1&amp;app_id=122963\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"autoplay; fullscreen; picture-in-picture; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\"><\/iframe>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p><input id=\"gwProxy\" type=\"hidden\"><\/input><input id=\"jsProxy\" type=\"hidden\"><\/input><a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/9954796\">while you were sleeping&#8230;<\/a> from <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\/tazmpictures\">Tom<\/a> on <a href=\"http:\/\/vimeo.com\">Vimeo<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>As you can see I did not apply the effect to every still.&nbsp; Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn&#8217;t.&nbsp; And sometimes it seems like it should work, but due to operator error (failure to accurately imagine how moving a virtual camera will affect the scene) makes the whole effect kind of cheesy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>But here&#8217;s the basic idea.&nbsp; You take a photo that has clearly defined foreground objects, maybe also some mid-range objects, and some far-off background.&nbsp; If it&#8217;s difficult to cut out, like bare tree branches, skip it.&nbsp; Ditto if there is a sunburst effect that overlaps your foreground objects &#8211; it&#8217;s too hard to separate.&nbsp; These silhouettes in the video I did seem to work pretty well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Using photoshop or photoshop elements, use your magic lasso to &#8220;cut out&#8221; the foreground objects.&nbsp; Create a new layer from your clipboard, and save it as a GIF file.&nbsp; You&#8217;ll lose some color detail by doing this, but as far as I know it&#8217;s the only way to allow transparency &#8211; which you&#8217;ll need in order to see the background.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now go back to the background and delete what you just cut out.&nbsp; You&#8217;ll notice you have some dips and jags where there is white space.&nbsp; You&#8217;ll need to fill these in somewhat, because when you move your perfectly fitting foreground in relation to the background, these gaps will show up.&nbsp; So use the clone stamp tool &#8211; again, using a sky background makes this easier &#8211; and use similarly colored sky areas to gradually close up your gaps as well as you can.&nbsp; Basically you&#8217;re looking for an overlap between your foreground and background so you can move things around without opening up white space.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now you go to your video editor.&nbsp; The background photo will be your first timeline.&nbsp; Now import your foreground photo(s) and put them in the second, third timeline(s) as appropriate.&nbsp; The first thing you&#8217;ll need to do is adjust sizes so that the original photo has been recreated.&nbsp; You may want to fudge a little and make your foreground a little bigger &#8211; say 105% &#8211; to give you more wiggle room.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Now you need to animate the clips.&nbsp; You have to decide how your camera is going to move.&nbsp; Left to right?&nbsp; Simultaneously zooming?&nbsp; You may want to focus on a particular feature of your photo, as if the camera is moving forward alongside that object.&nbsp; And you may want to draw a diagram for yourself.&nbsp; But as a simple example, if you move your camera from right to left, everything in your scene will move left to right.&nbsp; So you&#8217;ll want to give yourself room to do that by increasing the size of your photos and letting a little hang out the left side of the frame.&nbsp; If using premiere or premiere elements, you then adjust your &#8220;x&#8221; coordinate at the beginning and end of the clip (using edit effects and clicking on the little clock icon on the appropriate effect).&nbsp; You want objects close to you to move more than objects farther back.&nbsp; So a bush may move 25 pixels left to right, and the sky in the background may only move 5 pixels.&nbsp; Then you have to check and recheck to make sure (a) it looks natural and (b) there are no gaps created during the movement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>To get the hang of this, you&#8217;ll need to experiment.&nbsp; The clip above was my first attempt, and let&#8217;s just say it took WAY too much time to create what you see.&nbsp; Try adding zooms along with your pans and the issue becomes much more complicated.&nbsp; But I think it&#8217;s a cool effect, and well worth learning, if only it helps you understand how parallax works in order to assist you in framing future shots and projects.&nbsp; Good luck!<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Given that the current hot topic in home videography is &#8220;home 3-D movies&#8221; (both camcorders and screens to view them) I thought it would be appropriate to attempt making some 3-D on the &#8220;cheap.&#8221;&nbsp; Really cheap. I got the idea from Ashton Kutcher &#8211; actually, a video he posted in the Nikon Festival contest.&nbsp; If [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,39],"tags":[63,62,38,64,61],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-home-editing","category-video-effects","tag-3-d","tag-3d","tag-effect","tag-motion","tag-parallax"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5662,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/5662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tazmpictures.com\/site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}