Presenter's voice: "Ladies and gentlemen,
Welcome to Copy Cat Friday,
the most unoriginal show on the Internet, as everything we do is copied.
Can we have a big applause for editing magician Jordy Vandeput!"
[Clapping sounds]
[Coughing sounds]
[Dramatic music fades in]
-Boo! Boo!
[Cinecom's Intro music]
Well, hello there!
My name is Jordy for cinecom.net and welcome to Copy Cat Friday,
this is a series where we recreate a pretty cool effect...
...from a creator, a film or a music video.
And today I am a magician because we are doing some editing magic.
We were inspired by Kevin Parry, who recently did this amazing video...
...where he picked up a bigger ball from actually holding a small ping-pong ball.
Now, he spent almost a week pulling off this effect,
and you can also see that his result it really looks amazing.
It's really hard to see a cut,
well, we actually can't see the cut at all.
Kevin Parry you got our big respect, dude.
That was pretty amazing.
So, instead of spending days of work in that effect,
with 50 layers with tons of masks and everything,
we came up with a solution that is more simplified,
we're also going to explain you guys how we pulled it off.
But we have to be honest, the effect doesn't come as close as the real one.
So, Kevin: good job!
Now, let's swing into it, guys!
Now, the setup is fairly simple, but before we start...
first a big shout out to our sponsor Rocketstock,
who has launched another amazing video pack called Lucent Warm.
It's a collection of 140 subtle lens flares
that where all shot using high-end Cooke prime lenses.
You can blend these flares with any video editor
to give your projects a premium cinematic style.
You can click the first link in the description below to learn more.
So, guys, we have two shots, one of the theater where Lorenzo was sitting in,
and then a second shot of me on the stage,
where all the magic happens.
Let me guys explain to you what we did over there.
We're going to need two balls, one small one -a ping-pong ball-
and a bigger one.
Let's start off with this one right here.
We're going to attach it to something,
we are using a light stand,
and I've got attached this wire on top of it,
and that way, when I'm going to secure the ball into that wire,
I can kinda bounce it here, on this wire,
this is a great tip that we got from Kevin.
And that way it kind of feels more natural...
...once we're going to pick up that ball.
And over here we've got the camera.
And I'm just going to turn the display like that, because I wanna see what I'm doing.
Because I wanna try to cover up the big ball with the smaller ball,
by just holding it in front of the lens, something like this.
Now, you'll notice that is going to be pretty hard to keep your hand still.
so what I'm going to do here is just bring in a second light stand,
or anything else that you can find,
And here I can kind of rest my hand, like this.
and keep it really steady.
Now, it's going to be also pretty hard to kind of...
...make sure that you are on that perfect spot...
...here on your display. So we came up with a second solution for that.
And I'm just going to use, -oh, just right here-...
some tape.
What I'm gonna do here is just wrap off a piece of tape, like this,
and paste it onto my display, and I'm going to mark around...
...the big ball in the back.
Something like this.
And that way I know where I need to position the smaller ball.
And now I can do this kind of magic movement over here,
and I only need to pay attention to where I'm going to position...
...the small ball, here,
within the markers that I've just put on my display,
without having to pay any attention to the bigger ball in the back.
So, I am in position right now,
and now I can just grab the ball behind me,
and just right before that I'm going to grab this ball,
I'm going to drop the small ball, like that.
Now I can grab it and I can kind of push on it like that,
you can see it kind of bounce there and then just pull it up.
But, of course, take the entire part and not half of it.
but you guys get the idea.
Once you got that shot we can go to the editing.
So, loading your footage into Adobe Premiere Pro,
the first thing you already wanna do is place your shot in the timeline on track number 2.
We also made an empty shot without any prop in the frame,
and this we'll put on the bottom.
The first part is going to be time consuming.
With the upper layer selected you go to Opacity and click on the Pen tool.
You basically wanna mask out everything that is in the background.
And this is the light-stand, the bigger ball
and the wire on which the ball sits.
You can create multiple masks on the same layer,
but not when you're inverting them.
So, in this case we'll need to create one mask,
invert it, nest the clip into a new sequence,
create our next mask and so on.
If you're a little familiar with After Effects, I would actually suggest doing it in there.
It comes down to the exact same thing,
only the masking tool in After Effects is a lot more convenient to work with.
We actually tried doing this with a green-screen at first,
but since the bigger ball cannot be visible in the beginning,
you kinda have to work with two green-screens.
As you take the ball you need to remove one green-screen,
but that will leave you with an edge,
which you eventually need to mask out anyways.
Kevin actually mentioned it's nearly impossible...
...to get any benefit from a green screen, and he was right.
By masking everything out, you'll end up with several black holes.
But because we have that empty shot in the bottom,
it will fill in those gaps.
And now we can start with the real stuff,
the transition from the ping-pong ball to the bigger one.
Add your clip another time to the timeline on top of the rest.
On the point where you're just about to grab the ping-pong ball,
which is before you actually drop it,
you draw a mask around it.
Then you trim the clip until that point,
right-click on that clip and choose Hold Frame.
And now we wanna animate the position and the scale of that freeze frame
so that it keeps following your movement.
If your perspective size did not match 100%,
you can also animate the scale of that layer,
slowly to the same size as the bigger ball in the back.
On the point that you have taken the bigger ball,
you may trim the last part to that point of the freeze clip.
And at this point you should have already dropped the ball,
which you masked out in the beginning.
Now in order to make a proper transition from one ball to the other,
you may also animate the opacity of that freeze frame so that it fades out.
And that's it for the ball!
The only thing left to do now is your hand,
so drag that same clip again to the timeline on top of everything.
Draw a mask around your fingers and animate that,
so that it seems like your hand wraps around the ping-pong ball.
Again, trim this to the same size as the freeze frame ping-pong ball clip.
The transition is definitely not easy.
Your lighting have to be the same, your hands have to sit really still,
which is why I rested mine on a light stand,
and there's also so much more things that could go wrong.
So keep in mind that you will need to re-shoot this many times.
And if you still have trouble to get that transition right,
you could speed up the part where you grab that bigger ball.
By making the movement faster, you kinda hide the mistakes.
Or you can also add some fake camera motion to it,
like we also did.
Because of the moving frame and the extra motion blur,
the transition will also be less visible.
And by the way, you can download this fake camera motion from our website,
cinecom.net.
So that was it! Thank you guys so much for watching,
thank you Rocketstock for sponsoring us today,
and, like always,
stay creative!
[Cinecom's music]