Tutorial: NewBlueFX Video Essentials VI

Cutaway

The Cutaway tool lets you very quickly setup a picture-in-picture (zoomed) to emphasize a particular element in your video. Think of a pitchman demonstrating the latest must-have kitchen gadget. If you shot that demo with a single camera, this plug-in would let you zoom on the hands and display it anywhere in the frame you like. In the image below, the horse from the wine bottle is being zoomed in on and displayed in a circle to the right of the wine bottle.Size, placement, and styles are all quickly adjusted and keyframeable (Figure 3, below). Remember, though, that high resolution at deep zooms is only available on TV's CSI. That said, I can see using this quite often in training videos.

Figure 3. The Cutaway tool

Picture In Shape

Picture-In-Shape is similar to Cutaway, but instead of emphasizing a portion of the one video clip or track, you can use a completely different event, as in a traditional PIP (Figure 4, below). The only thing I could not see being able to control from within the effect is a zoom in or out of the PIP, but since it works as its own event in Vegas (using Pan/Crop or Track Motion), I find that easy to accomplish, and I imagine it would work similarly in other NLEs as well.

Figure 4. Adding a little feathering will reduce the outline of the trapezoidal shape.

Tile

Tile lets you choose any video event or track and multiply it in a tiled grid on the screen. You can choose all the usual parameter suspects such as placement and number of tiles. Note that the purpose of this plug-in is to tile a single event multiple times on the screen, not to tile multiple events on the screen. You can create a "Brady Bunch"-style grid very quickly, but you'd only have Alice on the screen. Still, with all the presets and color variations built-in, you can quickly create a trippy Andy Warhol-type image as seen in Figures 5 and 6 below.

Figure 5. Before Tile

Figure 6. After Tile