How To Create A Reflection

Hey guys, this is Emeek77 and I got an email request on how to do a reflective surface. There are plenty of tutorials on YouTube if you all search it but he asked me so I'm going to him how I do it.

The way I do it is, I’ll get a picture that I want, this is my standard layout, let me switch to a layout that will help you guys see things better, this right here. Now I'm going to—I got my browser, this is just a different layout, I kind of made the window bigger, here’s my canvas and over here is my viewer, this is just a setup so, you all can see the canvas better, made it bigger. So now I've got my picture I want to work on our video or whatever and I'm going to drag it to my timeline. And here it is in my timeline. This is the clip that I'm going to be working with. So I'm going to double click it and load it into my viewer, and I'm going to go to my motions tab and scale it down to about 80, I guess.

Now that we have that done, I'm going to go back down to my timeline, push my option and shift key and click and drag up on my track and this will duplicate it. Holding the option key causes it to duplicate and holding the shift key causes it to move straight up and down without being moved to the side, it helps you keep things lined. So as I hold my option key and drag up as you can see, I have two video tracks, one and two, two duplicates of each other and this is all good. So now I want to click and drag a marquee around them, and I want to drag them up one track, drag them both up one track. So this means I’ll have my pictures on track two and three, and I will a blank track for revert for track one. So far, so good.

Now I want to go over here to my generators tab which is right here, and I want to click render, gradient and this will fill us a gradient up on our viewer. I don’t like it from left to right like that, so I'm going to go to controls tab, go to your controls tab and there will be a gradient drop down menu, click it and select horizontal from bottom to top. What that does is it makes your gradient from top to bottom as you can see. Now what I want to do is I want to click and drag my gradient down to my very first track, and as you can see, well scooted them down, I moved my gradient under my very first track. Now as you can see, I just have a gradient background which will help distinguish the reflective surface.

Now I want to click and drag my picture up a little bit so I’ll make room for the reflection, if you can't see your Y frames, just go up here to this button and make sure image and Y frame is checked, you should see your Y frame.

Now, I'm going to click on my top track and drag it down below my first track. So now we have two duplicate tracks one right under the other. So now depending on what you’re working on, you might need to flop it or flip it and in this case I need to use the basic 3D filter to get it to look like a reflection. So I'm going to go to effects, again video filters, scroll down to perspective folder and heres my basic 3D. I'm going to drag and drop it to the bottom video clip, which is the one on track 3. now if I double click this clip and load it in the viewer, go to filters tab I will have the controls for my basic 3D. And what I want to do is I want to flop it completely. I will take the X control and drag it around to 180 degrees exactly, when I do that, as you can see it flopped the picture around and now I have what seems to be a reflective picture but you and I can tell it's not a reflection. But you can see where we’re going.

Now things get a little more complicated but yet, it's simple too. So now we want to add a filter to make it look like a reflection, so you want to double click your bottom clip, so it will load into the viewer, I'm not sure if you have your bottom clip on track two or three, whichever it is, double-click it and load it into the viewer. Then we’re going to go over to your effects folder and under mat, select mask shape. Then drag and drop it to your bottom video or bottom picture. And when you do this, the picture shrinks because it throws a mask on it. So now I want to go over here, so this is automatically loaded into my viewer, I'm going to go under the filters tab, I can now have my controls for my shape. And what I want to do is I want to take my horizontal scale and I want to scale it out to where the edges touch, as you can see over here in the cameras, the edges are touching now. And I don’t want to do anything to the vertical scale. I want to click my center cross hair, right here and this will allow me to move the center of my picture. I’ll go over here and grab my little red plus and move the center of the picture up to where it looks like it would be a good spot. Like that, right there.

But still, it doesn’t look like a reflection, does it? Scoop this up a little bit more. So now we got to add one more filter, one more effects. So what we’re going to add is soft edges under—well let’s not use soft edges, let’s use mask feather, it’s right above mask shape under your mat folder in your effects bin. So, click your mask feather and drag and drop it to the bottom clip, whichever track you have it on. Go to your filters tab and you will see your adjustments for your mask feather, right here. So what you want to do is you’re going to take your mask feather slider all the way up. And as you can see right here, we have a pretty believable reflection going on. let me turn my Y frame off, adjusting my image. As you can see we have a pretty believable reflection going on in the canvas. I mean you can fool with it and fiddle with it, you can add drop shadows if you’d like. It's really basically up to you however you want to do it.

So there you go, there is a quick, basic reflection. Let me switch views here so I can show you, see. Now over here in my frame viewer, these are my vector scopes, my color. I can go to my frame viewer, and what this allows me to do is if you load a frame into this, then it will show you the before and after, as you can see. Now, I have my play head over it and when I grab these little boxes here, I'm going to drag, it will show me before my effects are applied and after my effects are applied. This is a really good way to check your work, you know do you like what it’s going to look like after you apply it or you do you not like it, just go into your frame viewer here and you can use this little bounding box to see what your—the clip looks like with the effect applied or without it applied. So, that’s a really good, neat little trick to check your work..

So guys there we go, there’s your quick reflection. I really hope this has helped. I hope it has done something for you guys and if you have any questions, p.m. me, give me a shout if this wasn’t clear let me know and I’ll try to do it better and I’ll try to do another one for you. So guys, I hope you had a merry Christmas and we’ll see you next time.