Is there a way to crossfade a looped clip with itself? e.g. say I have a 60 sec video clip playing, I want the last 10 sec to crossfade with the first 10 sec of the same clip, and continue looping. I’ve tried a few approaches using multiple layers, the TCM, cue list but can’t seem to crack it. Any ideas?
Hey!
This is a great question; though it isn’t quite something VDMX was built for, I have come up with a way you can go about this, and along with that some basic conceptual tips that might help you come up with some other routes.
The main detail is that the first time the movie plays, there isn’t a fade from the previous cycle, which makes the first cycle longer by the duration of the fade. Once the process is going from A to B and back again, conceptually the length of a playback cycle is {duration of the movie} - {duration of the fade} because there is overlap.
So this whole process is lot easier if you jump in after the first cycle, at which point you can think of your loop like this,
We can set up this automation using an LFO to drive the movie times / opacities of the layers. In this case I set the top layer to OpenGL- Over mode and faded it in and out from blocking the layer behind it, but if you are working with alpha channels you may need to fade out the back layer too…
Two notes about this technique are…
- It works nicely with rate changes / random time jumps by using the rate / time sliders within the LFO plugin.
- This does not work very nicely when you want to adjust the duration of the fades or the duration of the clip being used, as it requires manually changing multiple waveforms within the LFO. In this example project included as an attachment I set things up as a 2 second fade for a 10 second long clip.
Seamless Loop Example.zip (31.9 KB)
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Ah brilliant! I didn’t think of using LFOs.
Mostly I’m working with ambient artists, or music that is otherwise not beat-driven, so I’m usually avoiding hard-cuts.
Thanks, I’ll have a good play with this approach!
Fun problem.
Can we tweak Motion Blur to use definable duration for the buffer?
Also thinking of creative uses for Tom’s delay plugin
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Reflecting on this novel solution from @davidlublin (thank you David!) and thinking that a nice feature request would be: Add cross fade option to layer source loop options along with Loop and Reversing Loop: Crossfade loop.
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