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How do you put an arrow or circle on a video? HELP PLEASE


benright15

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Hi all, I am making a highlight tape of my football season and I am all finished except for one part. I need to put an arrow over me, or a circle around me, before each play but I am unsure on how to do so. If someone could please help me out I would greatly appreciate it!

 

Thanks in advance

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HI

 

OK, It is possible to do this fairly easily but success depends a lot on whether your image in the video is moving or not. And it will require you to create an image of your arrow or circle, although you can probably download one or use a suitable clipart. In practice I use a graphics package (no longer available unfortunately) called Micrografx Draw but there are many other programs that do a similar job.

Using Draw (or similar) it's pretty easy to create an nice large red arrow on a black background (say, pointing downwards.)I make this some 500 x500 pixels in size and save it as a jpeg image (gifs and BMPs work just as well.) I keep the Draw image copy in case I need to move the arrow on the black background.... see below.

 

So. ...Open VP in timeline mode and add the background video and the arrow jpg image to the media list.

Drag and drop the video onto the sequence line and the arrow image onto the overlay track.

Previewing in the right hand window will reveal your overlay image reduced in size and usually at the centre bottom of the screen.

Right or left click the overlay and drag left or right below the sequence line until it appears and disappears in your film at the right instants.

 

So far you have your video with the red arrow, rather small, still on a black square at the bottom centre of the display. The next step is to make the red arrow black background transparent.

 

 

As you have clicked your overlay it will now appear in the left preview pane. In the control area under the overlay image click the "Chroma key select" button (green with the black pawn shape...you may have to scroll the control panel to the right to find it.) Left click the square marked colour and select black from the colour card. The red arrow will stay red but the black background will show a chequered pattern. Now set the "Background" slider to the extreme left (0) and the "Foreground" slider to the extreme right (100). On clicking OK you will see your red arrow in the right hand preview window has lost its background and only the red arrow shows up against your video clip.

 

Now you need to position it. Right click the overlay again and set the rough position of your arrow with the arrow matrix square (no pun intended :unsure: ) followed by as much adjustment as you can with the "Size" slider and the "Border" setting.

If you find you can't get your arrow into exactly the position you want then you can estimate where your red arrow needs to be relative to its original black background. (You can bring this back easily enough and get an idea.)

 

Save your VP project and then simply open your original Draw image, (remember it was saved ;) .) Now you can move the arrow component to where you think is should be and resave another jpg with the same name into the same folder so as to overwrite the first one you made. Reload the project and the new arrow should now appear, hopefully in a better position.

 

Obviously it doesn't have to be an arrow, "Draw" (or similar programs) can easily create a red circle. If you have to use a clipart arrow you won't be able to move it about its background, but you could use the VP "Crop" effect to crop it off centre to get the same effect.

 

However, you can't make your overlay move except by playing about with the "Zoom" effect or the overlay scroll which will be very hit or miss.

 

As you can see its a bit phaffy but quite interesting to do.

 

 

Hope this helps.

 

Nat

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