How to really use the video post.

You have probably seen the video post in MAX many times. but if you are thinking "Video post?, oh yeah that's where I make lens flares and stuff" well then you might want to read this. The MAX video post isn't just a place to add cheesy lens flares or glows. The video post is actually a nifty little non-linear editor. You can edit movies with the video post, if you want. You can manage multiple cameras, you can composite, you can even load PhotoShop and Premiere filters.

This little tutorial will show you how to make a cool animation with only having to render 1 3D frame, yes only 1! The animation we are going to do isn't ground breaking stuff, but you will learn a technique that will help you work faster, especially when adding video post effects that use either a 2d image or image channels to generate.

Examples are glows, highlights, PhotoShop effects, wipes and so on. I haven't found a way to do lens flares this way yet, because lens flares use an object for a node, same with DoF effects which use a focal node. Maybe in a future release of max we can get a DoF and Flare based on object or material channels, or object depth. Lets get back to the thing we are doing today.

We are going to make an animation of a blurred out text that blurs less and less to become visible, then start to glow, then blurs out again. Yes you have seen that a hundred times before, it's a very popular effect. There are probably thousands of ways to do this effect, but today we are going to use Lens Effects Focus, Lens Effects Glow and the MAX video post.

• 
  First lets make some text.
• 
  Go to Object properties Set the object channel to 1.
• 
  Assign some cool material, I'm going to use this white, semi transparent material.
• Click the render scene button.
• 
  Check the save file checkbox, then click the files button. Now choose the RLA file format, click the setup button, and check all the channels. Name the file and press save. Now reset max.
• 
  Open the video post and click the Image Input Event button.
• Click files and select the file you've just saved and click ok.
• Now select the new track in the video post.
• Click the Add Image filter event (the button next to the Image input event button) and choose Lens Effects Focus.
• Click ok. Double click on the focus track in the video post.
• choose setup Click preview click VP Queue.
• Now you see a blurred version of your picture. Make sure the radio button is on scene blur.
• Uncheck the Lock checkbox.
• Set the Vertical Focal Loss value to 0 and the Horizontal Focal Loss to 100.
• Now you see a blurred streak.
• Drag the time slider in your max window to 30 and click the animate button.
• Set the Vertical Focal Loss value to 100.
• Drag the time slider to 60 and set the Horizontal Focal Loss value to 0.01
• Drag the time slider to 90 and set the Horizontal Focal Loss value to 100.
• Now you have made the text Blur in stay then blur out.
• Now move the Lens Effects Focus slider in the video post 10 frames to the right. So that it starts on frame 10.
• Now open the max track view.
• Open the Video Post hierarchy, then open Lens Effects Focus.
• Make sure you are in edit key mode.
• Now you see that the first key of the Horizontal Focal Loss track is on frame 10. Click the add key button and add a key on frame 0.
• Right click it and make sure the value is 100.
• Now close the track view.
• Scale the Image input track (its name is probably filename.rla) to frame 100 by dragging the end point to frame 100.
• Select the image input track then click add filter event and choose fade.
• Click setup and mark IN.
• Scale the fade track from frame 0 to 10 by dragging the end point to frame 10.
• Select the Image Input track again and click the add filter event button.
• Now choose Lens Effects Glow and click ok
• Double click the lens effects glow and choose setup.
• Click VP Queue, then Preview and set it to use Object Channel 1.
• Move the time slider in the max window to 0 and go to the preferences tab of Lens Effects Glow.
• Choose a nice glow color, I'm going to choose blue.
• Set the intensity to 42, move the time slider to 10, press the animate button, and then set the size to 14.
• Move the time slider to 15, set the size to 50 and the intensity to 100.
• Move the time slider to 20, set the size to 14 and the intensity to 42.
• Move the slider to 30, set the size to 0.
• Unclick the animate button and click ok in the glow dialog.
• Scale the Lens Effects Glow slider in video post to go from frame 0 to 30.
• Now move it to go from frame 40 to 70
• Open up the track view and open the video post roll out.
• 
  This is how the track view should look.
• Move the Lens Effects Glow track to go from frame 40 to 40.
• Now select the Image Input track in video post and click the add filter event button, choose fade again, then click setup and choose out.
• Scale the new fade slider to go from frame 0 to 10.
• Click the time configuration button in the max window, set the length to 110 and click ok.
• Move the new fade slider to go from frame 100 to 110 then move the lens effects focus and image input sliders to go from frame 0 to 110.
• Now click in the middle of the open white space in the VP queue, click image output event, click files, choose AVI and select a filename.
• 
  This is how your video post should look.
• Now render the video post and when it's done look at the AVI.

Now you have learned to make your very own "Hollywood excessively used blurred text opening credits" type of effect on your text, now wasn't that fun?