I got a different kind of video for you today.
Sort of a story time mixed with a tutorial.
So, it's my birthday soon in a couple days, early December,
and I got this as a present from my significant other, Lindsey.
It's a video waveform.
Obviously, all my fellow video nerds out there
have seen these before,
but turning it into a print art thing
was Lindsey's idea and I think it turned out awesome.
So, couple benefits here. Let me set this down.
So, obviously the idea here
is a little bit more than just frame a waveform
and we'll get into that in a minute.
But not only does it work as kind of that abstract art,
but also, it will keep your waveform reading skills tiptop
whenever you walk by and see it.
But it can also be this fun little secret
where, to a stranger, this looks like colorful lines,
but to you, you can see an image inside of it
like in The Matrix , when they get really good
at deciphering the green code
and they can start to see reality in that.
Kinda like that.
But there's way too much information
to decode the matrix.
But first, let's start with a sample clip
so I can give you a refresher on waveforms
in case you're not really good
at seeing the matrix in this yet. And to get that clip,
let's download something from Storyblocks.
which also happens to be the sponsor of today's video.
All right, so I've got a clip here
that I downloaded from Storyblocks.
I've loaded it into Resolve,
which is what I'm going to be using for this demonstration,
but theoretically, you could use any NLE or whatever
that had a video waveform that you liked.
I just happen to like the tools in Resolve
and I think they make for a better result
and I'll show you how, and I'm sure you could probably do this
in the free version of Resolve too.
This whole thing should be free,
unless you want to get it printed,
so it's kind of a cool gift
because it's free all the way through
as long as you keep it digital, so why not, right?
Okay, so we got a little waterfall here.
Looks like, let's just play back a second.
Slow motion water falling down.
So, what we're going to do, we're going to jump over
to the Color panel in Resolve,
which is where we have the waveform hidden
and it's in the bottom right-hand corner,
but I'm going to pop it out to make it bigger
and easier to see, which is what that little square does there.
And you can resize this now if you want,
which is one of the main reasons why I like Resolve
is because we're going to take a screen capture of this after,
so we're gonna wanna make the waveform as big as possible.
So, this is a 10-bit waveform,
which is why it goes 0 all the way to 1023.
If it was an 8-bit, it would be 0 to 255.
Pure white will be at the very top
and black will be at the very bottom.
And you read the waveform from left to right.
Imagine that your image is being scanned vertically
from left to right, vertical lines
and each line is going to assess the color
and the brightness in there and then draw that on the waveform.
And we'll be able to see this with motion,
which is what makes waveform easy to understand,
but also, the coolest
that you can actually see motion in the waveform.
So, I'm gonna press play
and we're gonna see the waterfall move
in the waveform here.
So, you see how these white and light blue lines
are kind of moving up and down? That's the waterfall.
And as we move across here,
now this is a particular type of waveform
and I'm going to show you that setting right now
because it's my favorite for this purpose.
We hit the "Settings" here.
We're on the "Y",
which generally refers to the luma, the brightness.
There's also "CbCr", which looks like this,
and then RGB. RGB might be the default in many cases
and you can turn certain channels off and on
and maybe that creates an interesting look
that you really like.
Maybe you like this sort of magenta style one here.
But, if we switch the "Y", the luma,
normally looks like this in an NLE
and that's basically just showing you
where the exposure is on the waveform.
So, you know, on the left, we're darker
because that's where the rocks and the dark foliage is
and then up here with the bright water, it's over here.
But if we check off "Colorize",
which is a cool feature in Resolve,
then now we get to see the color in those images as well.
So over here, where that foliage is,
we get to see its green. It's dark and its green,
so this is how we can start to sort of read into the matrix
kind of thing I was talking about
where we know that this is a dark green area
on the left side of the frame and then we know
that there's some white and blue stuff here
and again, if we had motion,
we could tell that it was also moving,
working in kind of loops and we could determine
maybe that's a waterfall or something,
or maybe you think it's a fountain.
Now, we also have the options here
for the two different brightnesses of the display.
We turn that all the way down,
then we don't see those lines anymore.
Probably a good idea
if you're gonna turn this into artwork.
You could also make it really intense.
Normally, it's in the middle.
And then, the waveform brightness itself.
You could make it really dark or really bright.
Again, the brightness of this,
you could adjust based on taste for your print
that we're making, but for the actual tool,
I think normally the 50/50 versions on Resolve
work very well for using in the app
to actually use it as a waveform.
And then, reference levels are where we set
our low and our high point.
So, if we wanted to change our low point up a little bit
because maybe we didn't want to exceed a certain darkness
and maybe we didn't wanna exceed a certain brightness,
we could set levels there and work within that.
Again, this is not for making abstract art out of it.
This is actually for using it,
but I thought I would explain it anyway.
We'll turn those off and I'll brighten up the waveform
a little bit and I'll leave it on "Colorize"
and this is the mode
that we're going to be making our artwork out of.
If we put it underneath the video clip here,
we can see exactly how I said, it's like vertical strips.
On the right-hand side, we're getting some warm sunlight in
and it's making the rocks a little bit brighter.
So, the rocks on the right are now more of a yellowy-green
and they go higher than the rocks over here on the left
that have darker moss and leaves on them.
And then the black areas are basically
where there's no information
and this is the part, I think, that throws people off.
Like I said, imagine if you scan a vertical line
and if in that line you decide there's some green stuff
and the green stuff is this bright down here.
Well, it puts black above it,
not because there's nothing in that line
or not because up here in the frame, it's pure black,
it just means that there's nothing in the frame there
that registers in this brightness area.
It only registers in this luminance value,
is probably the correct term.
So, there's nothing in that sliver
that is this bright or this bright.
It's only this bright and it's only this color.
So, black doesn't mean...
Black doesn't indicate anything about the frame.
It indicates that there's nothing going on
in that register on the waveform.
I hope that makes sense.
Anyway, that's just sort of a crash course
on how to read a waveform.
Now, I'm gonna show you how to take this waveform
and get it ready to print and put some final touches on it
to turn it into graphic art, but before we do that,
let me show you a few more stock footage examples
converted into waveforms to sort of help you get faster
and better at reading waveforms for what they are,
by giving you examples
and I'll use those from Storyblocks as well
while I tell you about them, the sponsor of today's video.
So sometimes, you don't have the shot you need
and there's no way you'll be able to go out and get it
before you run out of time, run out of money
or run out of patience
by completely derailing your creative momentum.
That's where Storyblocks comes in.
They've got a subscription for every budget.
They give you access to a vast, royalty-free library
with unlimited downloads, allowing you to use the footage
worry free for both personal and commercial projects.
They're also focused on enriching their catalogue
with diverse and inclusive content
to provide useful assets to creatives
of varying needs and audiences.
And this is all easily accessed
using their intuitive interface with filters for 4K video
at multiple frame rates,
along with backgrounds and After Effects templates.
And if you've ever browsed Storyblocks before,
I think you'll be truly impressed
by just how exhaustive their library is
and I encourage you to learn more about them
by using the link in the description below.
Okay, so let's go through
the turning this into an image aspect.
So, the reason I like Resolve is like I said,
you could actually make the waveform aspect quite large.
Now, something I should mention actually
before we export this to Photoshop
is that you can adjust your highlights, your shadows
and your contrast just a bit
if you want to sort of finesse the way the waveform falls
into the gap and this does make the image
a little bit of a lie and kind of obscures that whole
being able to read it like the matrix thing,
but if you have an image that isn't very contrast-y,
this might help make it pop a little bit.
So, for that, you could do a number of things.
You could jump into your "Curves"
and increase the highlights and shadows this way.
Try to make it spread over the image a bit more.
Like I said, you could jump into "Contrast"
and turn that up. Adjust the pivot on it.
And maybe you liked it more like this
where sort of ramped up. Whatever.
Obviously, the real image, as you can see now, is clipping.
But it does fill the waveform better.
So, as long as you know what it's supposed to represent
and you're okay with doing this, fine.
Otherwise, I'm going to reset it and leave it
as it was normally. Depends on your image.
And so, we'll go back to full screen.
Like I said, we'll take a print screen of it
and then we'll come over to Photoshop
and we'll paste it in here.
And now, we basically just need to crop away
the rest of the nonsense, which is easy to do.
Again, you could use whatever photo-editing app you want.
I'm not gonna give you a Photoshop tutorial here,
but in this case, I'm just scaling up the--
To get rid of the text and everything else
and then we'll apply that, and then in here,
if you want, you could adjust some contrast
and some brightness and stuff.
You could increase the saturation,
whatever you wanna do to make the photo pop.
Let me give you-- I'll do a couple quick things.
I'll increase the saturation.
Let's increase the saturation a little bit
to make those colors that are in the image
pop a little better.
And actually, it's actually looking pretty cool already,
to be honest. And then if you plan to send it to print,
you're gonna wanna crop it to the dimensions of the print.
I think this one was a 24x36 or the other way around, 36x24.
So, a 3:2, so if we go in, we set it to "3:2",
then we could crop it and you know,
set the crop where we want it. Maybe we want it like this.
And then now, we have a 36x24 crop and in Photoshop,
you can come in and set the dpi as well.
In this case, we're gonna upscale it
because we got it from print screen,
so we're gonna upscale it to a much higher resolution
to get us a 24x36 at 300 dpi, like that.
Another thing you could consider doing
if you didn't want it on a black background
is you could invert the black background from this waveform
into white, or you could invert the entire image,
which would also flip the colors.
Again, it'd just be your little secret,
but to give you an idea, if we invert the image,
now it's on a white background and it looks like that.
Other words, you go in and set it to just choose black.
So, you could finesse it a little bit,
but even just switching it to white is kinda cool as well.
So, there's some options and from there,
just save it out and send it to print.
I'd love to see some of your creations,
so even if you don't plan on printing one of these out,
I still want you to export a digital version
of one of your images, upload it to Twitter and Instagram
and use the hashtag #WaveformArtUndone.
You could either show it with the original image
or keep it secret and make people guess
what the original image was.
And on that note, let's test your deciphering skills
with this one, the print that Lindsey got me
and let's translate this waveform
into the original image.
This is hard to show without getting any reflections on it,
but okay, let's work out way across here.
So, like I said, it's vertical slices from left to right.
So, what do we see here?
We see some bright greeny, yellow patches
that cover quite a range of exposure values
and then some light blue, almost clipping color up here.
It's probably safe to assume
this is probably a bright, blue sky.
Bit of a teal-colored sky actually
and this could be anything from grass to a field.
We could determine from the colors that it's very green.
And then in here, this section right here,
I know myself really well to know that these rosy colors here
and where they fall are my skin tones.
I'm always very pink. This is pink Gerald right here.
And also, look what shirt I'm wearing right now.
We might be able to determine this blue area right here
might be a blue t-shirt. So, we got a blue t-shirt
with a sort of arcing pattern, then some rosy skin tones.
So, this would be maybe a face
and the top of a torso right there.
Then, this one is gonna be impossible to tell
unless you know what it is
because it's brighter than the grass
and it's kind of beige, but it's sitting up by my face,
so it's kind of confusing.
So, it's not physically up by my face in the shot,
but it's actually my pants, the way I was sitting.
I was sitting crisscross applesauce
and my knee was getting hit with sunlight,
so it brought the exposure of my khaki-colored pants
up to here. Then, moving across,
there's some more confusion in the frame
because where this blue, it gets kinda mixed in
with some teal and then that teal color covers
a massive range of exposure, and then again,
there's that similar over here of the light blue
coming in at the top. Now, what this is,
is this is Lindsey's sort of green,
greeny, blue-colored shirt.
It's kind of a teal-colored shirt
that she's reaching her arm out to hold the camera,
so the sun is hitting some of it and not hitting others
and it gets dark as it moves across her body,
so this is the range of her green shirt.
And then her skin tone is in here, just like mine,
but she's got some more highlights on it
and I think, it's hard to say for sure,
but I think that the whites over here in her skin
might actually be her teeth. Her really bright smile.
And then, the skin tones actually fade down and over
because she was wearing an open-neck shirt,
so you can actually see it goes darker
as it gets drawn into shadow into her neck.
And then, over here again, we have a mixture of stuff,
where we got some of that grass again
that's being included with shadow.
A little bit more of the shirt.
And then, what's dumbing down the color over here,
the saturation versus over here is Lindsey's hair
is actually kind of browning up the colors over here
until the very extreme where the greens come back in
and then we've got a little bit more sky peaking up
over in the corner.
So, when I look at this, because I know the original image
and the process of transforming a waveform,
I can see both of our faces here
with a little bit of bright, sunny day between us,
sitting down in an open field near water
and we're both smiling
and I can tell what shirts we're wearing as well.
And so, that's the idea.
All right.
Thank you to Lindsey for a great birthday present.
It's an awesome present for a video nerd like me.
I think it'd make for a great upcoming Christmas present
as well for the photo/video nerd in your circle.
Okay, I think that's enough talk about this.
Like I said, I'd love to see
some of your favorite waveform art,
so upload it and tag me on a social platform
and I'm gonna go find a place to hang this.
All right, I'm done.