Digital Home Thoughts: Digital Juice Wedding Editor's Toolkit

Animated Wipes
The animated wipes are wipes with alpha channel information that animate in then out of the composition so that, at one point in that animation, one or more frames covers the full screen. The end result is that you blend from clip 1 into the animated wipe and then into clip 2. This offers a themed alternative to transitional wipes, where you blend from clip 1 to clip 2.

Here is an example. I took the Heartburn wipe and adjusted the colour from its original pink to be closer to the mauve colour worn by the bridesmaids. I then placed this on a higher video track within Premiere Pro and job done!


Figure 5: Animated wipe in action. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (8.2MB).

One thing that catches the first-time user out with animated wipes, and some of the other content from Digital Juice, is that you have to render that sequence within your video editing package. They question why this is, given that Juicer has already done the job. The answer is down to the alpha channel - because the wipe is acting as a transition between one clip and another, there will be frames, as seen in Figure 5 for example, where the frame from clip 1 or 2 needs to be blended with the clip from the animated wipe, thus resulting in a rendering process.

The range and choice of animated wipes is stunning, as is the quality of the animation and rendering. Figure 6 gives a taste of some of the wipes, but it really is only a taste - a static photo doesn't really do justice to the animation. I've included a link at the end of this review to the gallery on the Digital Juice Website where you can see the animation in action.


Figure 6: Some of the animated wipes.

The primary benefit to a video editor when using these wipes is that they introduce a visually appealing changeover from the first clip to the second clip that isn't normally available within an editing product.

Animated Backgrounds
The animated backgrounds are all full-screen and loopable. They can be used to design menus or to place behind transitions that don't fill the screen. There isn't any alpha channel involved as they are intended to sit behind your existing material.


Figure 7: Text displayed over an animated background. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (23.6MB).


Figure 8: A transition over an animated background. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (3.12MB).

If you look at the two QuickTime movies above, you'll see how much impact is added by the presence of the animation. This is particularly true in the case of the cube transition. Typically, this would happen over a black background, although you could relatively easily introduce a simple colour background or even a static image. The ease, though, in which you can drop an animated background behind the transition (and, again, I've colourised the animation to better match the dress colour) just adds a whole different level to the end result.