My name is Taylor and I’m the newest member of the Vyond Team, with the role of Video Producer. I’ve been creating videos for over half of my life and working professionally for just over 8 years now. Here’s the first video I made with Vyond, I hope you enjoy!
Great Audio and Sound Effects
The very first thing my favorite instructor in film school taught me was “a good video with bad audio, is a bad video.” He couldn’t have given me any better advice to immediately impact the quality of the videos I created. Bad sound will pull you right out of a video, maybe even make you stop watching it. Aside from music, the use of sound effects and sound design can dramatically enhance the impact of your videos. Whether it’s to bring a viewer into the scenes and environments by adding ambient background audio, or to draw attention to certain actions with sound effects, having good audio will draw your viewer in and engage them even more.
For this video, I used a combination of sound effects from Vyond and a sound library I purchased some time ago, but there are also thousands of great (and free) sound effects on the internet if you just take the time to search. Vyond allows up to 3 audio tracks at once, which I primarily used to create the atmosphere and background noise of the scenes. I used Premiere Pro to layer the remaining sound effects so I could be extremely precise in the timing of them, down to the very frame. If that’s not as important to you, you can upload your own sound effects straight into Vyond. I matched up sound effects to the actions that I really wanted people to notice.
Motion Blur in Adobe After Effects
Objects that have motion blur is how our eyes actually see in the real world. The faster something moves, the more blurry it appears as it passes in front of our eyes. I wanted to add motion blur to the cars in my video to simulate the speed at which they actually pass and give the viewer the same feeling. This effect can be achieved by more experienced video creators that are familiar with Adobe Photoshop and After Effects.
- Finish your Vyond video (without the props you want to motion blur) and export an HD version.
- Screenshot any Vyond prop on a solid color background to which you want to add motion blur.
- Import the screenshot into Photoshop and remove the background so the prop is now on a transparent layer.
- Save as .psd (or .png with transparencies enabled)
- Import the transparent layered file and your Vyond video file into After Effects, and add both to a new composition.
- Give the prop a motion path by keyframing in position, enable motion blur for the prop’s layer, then enable motion blur for the composition.
If you’re not quite sure how to do all that, but would like to give it a try, check out these tutorial links from YouTube.
Creating Transparent Backgrounds in Photoshop
Creating Motion Paths in After Effects
Creating Motion Blur in After Effects
Adding motion blur to certain movements can add new layers of excitement to the motion in your videos.
Advanced Camera Techniques
One of the first features I fell in love with inside Vyond is the Camera Movement tool. I wanted to zoom out to reveal the setting in which my character existed while matching the framing of my character from the previous scene. I figured out a way to do this, by making my character very, very small in the scene of the lake, then started with the camera WAY zoomed in to match the frame size and position of my character in the previous scene. This way, I was able to make a match-cut between scenes and then zoom out to reveal where my character had moved to. Here are some screenshots to help clarify.
Character framing at end of first scene…
…matches character framing at beginning of the following scene
Beginning of scene camera placement
Zoom out the camera tool to reveal a larger scene
