Digital Home Thoughts: Digital Juice Wedding Editor's Toolkit

Jump Sets
When I started playing with the Juicer and examining what was on the DVDs, I felt a bit confused as to what a Jump Set was and how it was intended to be used. A bit of reading on the DJ Website and looking at some of the videos that they have there and things became clearer.

Each Jump Set is a collection of a minimum of six items, all following a theme for that set. By using a set, you gain consistent and a highly professional look to your end product. The six items are:

• An animated background;
  
• An animated full screen wipe;
  
• A lower third;
  
• A template;
  
• An overlay;
  
• A transitional wipe.

The animated background and animated full screen wipe are identical in application to those seen earlier in this review but are themed to the set. This means that, in practice, you've got 70 animated wipes and 42 animated backgrounds in total in this product.


Figure 9: Jump Set 68's animated background. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (7.8MB).


Figure 10: The full-screen wipe from the same set. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (7.3MB).

Lower thirds will be familiar to anyone who has used a titling product - they are a graphic, traditionally a static one, which is placed in the lower third portion of the screen and act as a layer between the video and text. The difference with these lower thirds is that they are animated. As with the animated backgrounds used with text, having animated lower thirds adds a fantastic new dimension to the finished product.


Figure 11: The set's lower third. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (16.3MB).

Templates are a little bit confusing to begin with as, at first glance, they look similar to the animated background, so you start wondering what they are for and where the template name fits in. Their design and purpose is to provide a slightly subtler background so that text stands out more clearly - they are intended to be used with menu text and the like.


Figure 12: An example of using the template. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (12.7MB).

Overlays sit on top of the video and have an alpha area to allow the video to show through. You can see how this works in Figure 13. As with the rest of the set, though, the overlay is animated thus adding more interest to the content.


Figure 13: Set 68's overlay. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (10.8MB).

The transitional wipes are just like the wipes you are used to with your video editor, where the wipe defines a progressive change from the first clip directly to the second clip. Nothing new there, you might think, except for the fact that these wipes are themed to the set and therefore add to the overall effect you are aiming for.


Figure 14: Transition wipe from set 68. Click on the image to play the QuickTime movie (7.5MB).

The technique used to get the transition wipe working will depend on your editing package and this highlights another area where Digital Juice are strong - their knowledge and support for a wide range of professional and semi-professional products. Visiting the support section of their Website reveals common questions and answers including how to set up the transition wipes with many of the common editing products. They also have forums that other users and DJ staff frequent.