How to Edit a Cinemagraph

What's up guys, welcome to Formative Film School, I'm Ted with The A-Team. Today I'm here with Valentina V. Valentina V is a Los Angeles filmmaker who has worked on the Michelle Phan channel, which has over 9 million subscriptions on it. Last week we went over how to shoot a cinemagraph. This week we're going to go over how to edit a cinemagraph. So V, how do we edit a cinemagraph? Well there's two ways to edit a cinemagraph. Do you want to know the easy way or the hard way? Let's go easy way, and a hard week. So the easy way to edit a cinemagraph is just using Flixel's Cinemagraph Pro app, and it's very simple. You just select the area of the video that you want to keep still, and it freezes it for you, and it loops the rest of the video. You can do a loop, you can do like a boomerang back and forth, you can apply filters to it. That's the easy way. Yeah. Now let's go for the hard way. Let's say I'm a miser, I don't want to pay for the app but I already have my Creative Cloud subscription, how can I do it through Premiere? So the first thing that you have to do is go into Premiere and grab your video clip and pick a section in there where the beginning matches the end. In our case it was the hair, so the hair is flying up, and at that moment is when I cut the beginning and the end, so that it's flying up at both the beginning and the end. Sometimes you have to use a morph cut in order to make sure that it's a seamless transition. So another thing you can do to make sure that that border in between the two isn't visible is just feather that image. So basically by feathering the still part of the image, that part that blends into the moving part of the image won't be as noticeable. Exactly. And you want to make sure that the duration of that clip isn't too long. So that's why we recorded for about 15 seconds on each pose, so that somewhere in those 15 seconds hopefully we can find two or three seconds where the hair goes back to the position it was at before. So now that we've got the part of the image moving that we want looping, how do we make sure that the rest of the image stays still? Well you take your favorite still from that looping video. So it's the part in that video where your model has the best look, the best face, it's probably not going to change frame by frame but just pick the clearest frame. And you take that frame and you lasso select or you mask out the area that you want it to be still. In our image it is literally everything but the hair. And that's kind of great because we can manipulate the skin, we can do some beauty editing on it, we can fix the lighting in the back, we can do... Basically everything you can do in Photoshop that you couldn't do normally in moving images. So to match that up perfectly there's the ghosting where you can kind of stack those frames together but what else is there? To match them up perfectly you have to stack the still image on top of the moving image and I like to do that in After Effects. So I take my Photoshop file, it could be a Photoshop file, it could be a PNG with an alpha channel transparency and you stack that directly on top of your already looped video that you take out of Premiere. Here's where it gets difficult. Sometimes the model, like you said, does move in and out of where she's standing which means that in the video you'll see her moving out and in from underneath her still image. So you almost have to use, in Photoshop it's called liquify, in After Effects it's called warp. You have to warp the video inwards towards her behind her still image just to make sure that none of her actual video self is peeking out of there. So there's the episode on how to edit a cinemagraph with Valentina V. Now if you want to know how to shoot a cinemagraph make sure to check out our last week's episode where we teach you guys how to do that. And be sure to leave a comment on this video right here letting us know how you would use a cinemagraph in your daily life or in your business. The best comment is going to win a 3 set of mini 20 lights. For instance like Thinkbox Media won one with this comment right here. So there's the episode and we'll catch you guys next time.