Feel free to message me on youtube or tumblr if you have any questions!

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Content aware scale video tutorial

Tools needed:

•Your video editing software of choice (and some knowledge on how to use it, I can't really help you here sorry!)

•Neil Cicierega's content aware scale script http://neilblr.com/post/42948042669

•photoshop cs5/6, make sure you have quicktime installed too or you won't be able to import video into Photoshop

•Some patience, these videos take a little while to make, but once you get the hang of it you'll be shitting them out in no time, also the patience to read this WALL OF TEXT.

Lets get started shall we?

If the video I'm using is longer than about 15 seconds, I cut the video i'm using into 15 second chunks in premiere and save them. Next I convert the video frames to layers in Photoshop

(File->Import-> Video Frames to Layers)

You have to work with roughly 15 second chunks of video because Photoshop has a 500 frame import limit, if the video you're working with is 30fps then 30*15= 450, the chunks could be a bit longer with 24fps video, but just use 15 second chunks.

You COULD bypass the frame limit by importing multiple video chunks into the one photoshop document I guess, but fuck that, photoshop has a 2gb file size limit, I wouldn't even try it.

Now, before you go running the content aware scale script, save yourself some time by copying a few layers of the video into a new document and try playing around with them using the content aware scale tool (Shift+Ctrl+Alt+C is the shortcut on Windows), scale them around a bit and take note of the scale width and height up at the top, that will be what you'll want to put into the script tool later for the desired effect, there's also a button that looks like a little man called "Protect skin tones", try playing with that too! It's good to find the effect you want before you commit 15 minutes of your time to running the script and then finding out it looks like shite.

Anyway, back to the actual video part! By this stage you should have the script installed, you'll find it under

File->Scripts->Animated Content Aware Scale.

Now, to get the same constant effect, move the Starting width and height sliders to wherever you want them to be, and set the ending height to the same number, for all of my videos I use the first Algorithm;

"Content aware scale -> scale"

If you want to squish your subject gradually, it's best to do this if your video is under the 500 frame limit/15 or so seconds, because you will have to break up the effect over the several chunks of video and I cannot into math/it's a massive pain in the arse so you can figure that out for yourself.

Basically just set the starting height and width to 100 and just change the ending height and width to whatever you want for a gradual squishing effect, or the same if you want to scale it bigger (script lets you scale up to 300%)

Depending on the resolution and your computer it can take 5-10 minutes or so to do one chunk of video.

Then I render the finished thing as a video File-> Export-> Render Video

I usually use H.264, make sure your framerate and resolution match the source video!

Finally I throw all the video into premiere, sync it up with the original audio (might need to adjust each piece on the timeline if you fucked up the framerate I think, otherwise the audio might be longer than the video)

And then I export it and laugh at my own work.

Please note that adding 500 frames into photoshop all at once and then running the script may make your computer stand up, find some pants, put them on and shit in them if it's not very powerful, I have a pretty nice pc with an i5 2500k and 8gigs of ram and I still get the low memory warning from Windows, so try not to run too much shit in the background when you're messing around with it.

Hopefully this tutorial was somewhat useful, I'm sorry if it was kinda long winded and shite.

Once again, feel free to message me on youtube or tumblr if you have any questions!