When creating a new video with the Stupeflix Editor, the first thing to do is to gather and upload images and videos to be included in your glorious project. But what if you’re missing a nice picture to illustrate your message? What if you don’t have pictures at all? What if you’d like to use an already created album on Flickr.com?
Stress not: the new Flickr pictures import is the solution to all your problems. It lets you search Flickr for pictures directly within the Editor, or select an already created picture Set:
The upload wizard then retrieves the images on Flickr matching your query. You can now select the images you want to include in your video by clicking on their thumbnail. You can also select all the pictures you see with the “Select All” link, or request to see more images matching your query if you haven’t found the perfect match just yet:
Once ready, your images are directly imported in your video project, so you can group them, order them, add effects, transitions, musics, texts, and all that great stuff.
Creating killer videos is faster and easier than ever. Don’t forget to thank the Flickr photographers for their good work!
The Stupeflix XML (SXML) Video Description Language is a powerful language which describes videos generated by the Stupeflix REST API via our publicly available XML Editor or a third-party website. Applying and combining effects, filters, animators, transitions to text, images and videos opens up a limitless universe of creative possibilities for video production. The Tutorial Series blog posts bring the focus on a particular video editing feature.
We show you in this post how you can create dynamic masks to reveal and/or hide parts of an image or video. More information and source SXML code for the video examples below are available on the Masking Tutorial available in the Stupeflix Developer Center.
Applying a mask is a common image or video editing technique to reveal or hide parts of the image or video. An intermediary greyscale image or video is created that defines which area is going to be shown (for instance white parts), or hidden (for instance black parts), or partially transparent (for instance grey parts).
For instance, this video is the result:
of applying this mask:
To the following original video:
The syntax used to apply a video mask on content is the following, where the parameter opaqueColor (color on the mask which indicates hidden content) is set to #ffffff (hexadecimal for black), where transparentColor (color on the mask which indicates shown content) is set to #000000 (hexadecimal for white), and where the source for the video mask (second video above) can be found at http://assets.stupeflix.com/code/tutorials/masking/wbmask.mp4
Such mask filters can be applied on any object (overlay with images and videos, stacks, sequences, effects…).
And such masks can be defined with any video, image, or combination of stacks, sequences, overlays, and effects. For instance, the two following SXML codes will produce the exact same video, try to paste both in the XML Editor if you want to try yourself!
Now, another thing to consider when playing with the mask filter: any intermediate color between the opaque and the transparent one will reveal the content with a partially transparent effect. So if black is your opaque color and white the transparent one, a dark grey will slightly reveal the underlying content, while a light grey will show most of it. What this means is that you can use the mask filter to obtain a dynamic and fully customizable alpha channel for your videos!
Finally, adding a mask filter at the top of your SXML means that the mask will apply to your whole movie project. Use this feature for adding a convenient post-processing effect to your videos with a couple lines of code!
The upload wizard then retrieves the images on Flickr matching your query. You can now select the images you want to include in your video by clicking on their thumbnail. You can also select all the pictures you see with the “Select All” link, or request to see more images matching your query if you haven’t found the perfect match just yet:
Once ready, your images are directly imported in your video project, so you can group them, order them, add effects, transitions, musics, texts, and all that great stuff.