- In this video, we're going to become familiar
with the flexibility and versatility of BCC+ Light,
and the hundreds of gobo presets available for you
to enhance your imagery.
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As a video or motion graphic artist,
you may be familiar with adding or enhancing light
in your scene and shots, layers, or through nodes.
Continuum has a wide range of effects
that can help us with this process,
but one effect adding an additional element
of support, often overlooked.
That's BCC light.
Let's become familiar with this effect
by looking at four examples,
and how we can use it to add symmetry to our imagery
with GPU acceleration.
BCC light provides several digital gobos
you can take advantage and modify.
I'll be demoing this effect
in Premiere Pro and After Effects,
but take your pick of applications that run Continuum,
and you'll find the process to be similar.
Okay, so I'm in Premiere,
and let's set this to the Effect workspace
by clicking on here at the top,
switch around my layout,
and under effects, I'll do a search for BCC+,
and all of the categories
that have these type of accelerated effects show up,
and what I'm interested is in scrolling down
in order to see the BCC Light effect.
I'll drag that onto the clip,
and right away, we can see
that this effect added a gobo over top of the image.
In order to manipulate this
and see what else is available,
I'm going to head into the effect editor
by clicking on the little badge inside of effect controls.
On the left-hand side, we can see all of the presets
that ship with BCC Light,
and if I scroll up, it just is amazing what we can add,
not to mention that you can import your own custom textures.
One way to quickly start to view each of these presets is
to first of all select them,
and to see the pattern a little bit clearer,
I'll head to the parameters area here on the right,
and under view, let's set this to gobo.
So that is the actual light modifier source,
and here in the presets, if I select the Abstract 50 again,
and then use the right arrow, and even my down arrow,
I can preview multiple types of gobos
that are available here inside of the effects editor.
Let's go back to the view and switch this to output.
Now, at the top of the BCC light effect are the parameters
that you're going to be able to use the most.
First of all, let's decide on a preset.
I'll head over here to the left again,
and instead of seeing all of the presets available,
I'll go to Windows Transom
and scroll down until I see Transom 35.
With that selected, I can see the onscreen control,
which I'll move to be more around the subject's face.
At the top of the light properties and parameters,
we have one of three blend modes that we can choose from,
including screen and subtract.
I'll choose screen.
Just under the brightness value,
which is self-explanatory, is displacement,
and this allows you to mimic light wrapping over objects
based on your source's luminance.
You can set this to a positive or negative number.
I'll set this to a negative 44,
followed by actually blurring the gobo
in order to provide a bit more realism in the scene.
Just under that is your ability to choose
from several different gel presets.
I'll scroll down until I get into the amber section
and choose the medium amber.
You can also click on the color swatch
in order to choose a different color
from what you've selected.
Now, in the effects editor,
it should be noted that you have options
to compare the before and after.
I'll click on the A-B icon
in order to do a side-by-side comparison,
and then we can also choose from a vertical split,
where we have an onscreen control
to slide across the image left and right,
or a horizontal split, where we can do this top to bottom.
Let's apply the effect.
Under effect controls is where we'll find all
of the parameters that we were adjusting
inside the effects editor,
and I'll just go past the light section, I'll close it out,
and take a look here at the gobo section.
Now, one great thing about gobo is
this is where we can change this
from the type of gobo to input.
This allows us to choose our own custom texture
that we can use as a gobo,
as long as it's on a track inside of our active sequence.
In this case, this is not what we want,
so I'll switch it back to gobo.
Now, if I scroll down a little bit,
we can also transform the gobo in a variety of ways,
including scaling it up on both the X and Y axis,
because it is ganged by default.
So if you de-select this,
you can scale it up on just one of these axes.
We have the ability to also rotate it,
I'll press command Z to undo,
as well as add some shearing to the gobo
to fit better into the scene, which I'll also undo.
In a second, we're going to see how we can also crop,
as well as use corner pin controls to position the gobo,
and for that, let's open up the next example.
So I'm now on a wall add sequence,
and the end goal here is
to have three gobos on the back wall
to act as projections,
and we just want to make sure
that it doesn't affect the pianist in this shot.
As I scrubbed through it,
also just note that there's some movement
of it panning back and forth.
Let's start off by going to the window menu
and just bringing up the effects tab
in the assembly workspace.
I'll do a search here for BCC+, but then just add light
in order to see only a few of the BCC+ effects,
and in the lights category, apply light to the clip.
Once that's done, I'll head to effect controls
where we can click on the effects editor
in order to launch it.
Let's now decide on a preset by going to the top left,
heading to the foliage category,
and I'll click on a few branches presets
in order for us to preview them.
I like number 17.
First thing I'm going to do is just reposition this gobo
so it's on the left-hand side of the wall here,
I'll follow this up by increasing its brightness a bit,
just because it's on a darker surface,
I'll add a bit of displacement,
and let's just add a bit of a color gel to this,
I'll just choose my own color of a blue,
followed by increasing the blur.
Now I'm going to apply this gobo,
this initial setup.
Excellent.
I'll twirl up all of its properties,
and let's right click to rename this.
I'm going to call this Left.
Now that we have one gobo,
let's just simply copy this and then paste it,
and then choose another preset
and then move the gobo somewhere else on the back wall.
So I will choose to right click copy, followed by paste,
and now we have that copied,
let's rename this so we don't get confused.
This one will be Right.
I'll twirl down the properties for this duplicate,
head inside the effects editor,
where I'll now reposition this copy
to the left hand side of the screen.
Now we just want to note
that we'll have to reapply the color,
and now that that's set up,
I'll apply to go back in to Premiere Pro,
twirl up the properties,
I'll select the effect and press command C or control C,
followed by control V, command V.
We'll rename the effect,
but this time calling it Middle,
twirl down the properties, head into the effects editor,
where we'll go to the foliage category
and just choose a different type of foliage
for the center of the screen,
and I'll now move it and position that over
to the middle of the frame,
where we'll also change the color.
Now, all that's left to deal with once we've applied that is
to make sure that this gobo doesn't appear
over our subject or the piano.
We can rely on Mocha,
directly inside of BCC+ light under pixel chooser,
in order for us to accomplish this.
So I'll head to the bottom of the effect,
go into pixel chooser and turn it on.
Once we do, we have access to launching Mocha,
and when we head in here the first time,
just note that you won't see the effect, but that's okay.
What we need to do is just create a shape
for either where we want to restrict the effect
or not have it appear,
and then invert it inside of our effect controls.
I'm going to create a very simple shape
in order to track the movement
of part of the plane of this piano,
and then attach a more complicated shape to that.
Mocha has a bunch of pre built shapes
at the top of the effect,
I'll click on the square one,
and let's select this plane here on the piano.
Since the motion is very simple, as we saw earlier,
I want to click on translation and click on it again,
so we just have that, that's all we need.
Now, let's start by tracking this example backward.
I'll join you once this track is done,
and then we can track it forward.
Now that the track is finished,
I'll just scrub through this track
so we can see that it was successful.
Now, this is not the area that we want to use as a mask,
but what we can do is utilize this tracking information
and connect another layer to it.
So let's, first of all, rename this layer Track,
and I'm going to now select the X Spline tool in Mocha,
and draw a tighter shape around the subject playing piano
and the piano itself.
I'll press command A to select all these points
after closing out the Mocha mask,
and now that I have it positioned in the correct location,
I'll name the layer Mask,
and under essentials, I'll link to the actual track.
You'll see that the gear icon actually turns off
for this layer.
Now there's no need for us to have the actual track on,
all we want is that mask data,
and now that this is all set up,
I'll just show you that if I move through the screen,
we can see that that mask actually moves
with the track that we connected it to.
Excellent.
I'm going to close down Mocha,
make sure I save the data,
and we can now see that the actual mask is restricted
to that area that we just defined with that second layer.
Let's switch this.
So under pixel chooser, in our mask settings,
we're going to choose, first of all,
to invert the mask by placing that on,
and we'll also increase the feather value around the mask.
As you can see, the gobo is now behind our actual pianist
in the frame.
So here's an example of the three gobos
with some subtle movement
by animating the different corner pin values
that are attached to them.
With a little bit more tweaking,
we could perfect the look of each of these gobos.
Let's head into After Effects,
where I'm going to show you guys a few more examples.
Okay, in this scene,
I'm just going to turn off and on BCC Light,
so we can see that the gobo was added to the actual tunnel.
In order to give the appearance the light was moving,
key frames were added to the X and Y position,
as well as a simple wiggle expression
to the light's brightness in order to make it flicker.
If I bring your attention here to the composition,
we can see the brightness value
having that wiggle expression,
and the position value of the gobo being affected over time
from the beginning to the end of the clip.
Lastly, if I head inside of BCC Light,
I'll head to the bottom of the effect
where we can see that pixel chooser is on
and that a rectangular shape was used
in order to mask out the middle of the frame.
In order for you to see this,
I'm going to turn on pixel chooser on,
so we can see the masked area, and off.
For our final example,
I'll head to a composition called Reverse Stabilization.
I'll select the clip and just play back so we can see.
For this example here, three gobos were added to the scene.
Let's take a look at them
by me turning them off inside the comp.
So this is the one on the left-hand wall,
the right hand wall, followed by the floor.
Now you may notice
that the actual shot has camera movement in it,
so to integrate it into the shot,
I had to either use Mocha or another method.
Inside of After Effects,
I decided to just use the built-in warp stabilizer
for this particular task.
So let me go to the first,
turn off the bottom warp stabilizer effects,
where I just want to show you
that warp stabilizer here is on,
where it's set to no motion
along with an objective of reversible stabilization.
Since it locked off this shot,
I was able to place each of these BCC Light gobos
into their particular area,
then add another version of warp stabilizer
after the gobo effects,
making sure that the objective for this one was set
to reverse stabilization,
easily accomplishing placing these BCC light gobos
into my action scene.
Okay, it's time to review all of this information
that we've just covered.
As you can see, BCC Light allows you to enhance your shots
by choosing from hundreds of light modifier presets.
Now, if you need more, set the gobo type to input,
and reference a still or clip in your timeline.
The method of selection changes per host,
and you can find this in the documentation.
Now, finally, you can easily position and master gobos
with the help of pixel chooser.
So what did you think about this video?
Please let me know in the comments below,
and thank you so much for watching.
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