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Q.How do you get to Carnegie Hall?
A.Practice, practice, practice.
Q. How does Ringling Brothers and Barnum Bailey Circus get their elephants to Madison Square Garden?
A.They walk them through the Midtown Tunnel.
Q. What's the quick new way to get drawing effects in Sony Vegas?
A. VASST's Edge Detective plug-in.
I'll explain the elephant bit in minute, but first let me tell you that this tutorial will show you how to use VASST's new Edge Detective plug-in to quickly achieve a cartoon look. Recent ads from Charles Schwab and Microsoft have used a very similar look.
http://www.slate.com/id/2131287/?nav=ais
Edge Detective is a new filter from the mad media mavens at VASST. Edge Detective does what no single filter in Vegas does to quickly grab the edges within an image. There have been other ways to create a cartoon look in Vegas, but Edge Detective is quicker and I think the results are better.
Let's take a look at the Edge Detective interface
The most important control in Edge Detective is "Edge Style." It's just to the right of the VASST logo. There are two edge styles "Sketch" and "Cartoon." Sketch is similar to a line drawing whereas Cartoon is capable of great detail. Under the VASST logo notice that Sketch and Cartoon have individual controls. The controls on the left side of Edge Detective GUI are style-specific while the controls on the right side are global. When you choose an edge style, the controls, the controls for the inactive style will be grayed out.
Wait a minute, you said you would tell us about elephants? OK, here's the part about the elephants. When the Ringling Brothers circus comes to New York, there is an annual ritual called the Elephant Walk. The train cars that are big enough to carry elephants are too big to fit in the tunnels that go to Manhattan, so they walk the elephants through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel and down Broadway. I went down and shot some video with a consumer-level, one-chip camera in very low light conditions. For our tutorial we are going work with a shot of the elephants entering a tollbooth. (I don't know if the four feet equals two axels or not or they pay by the trunk or what.) So let's put our clip on the timeline and apply Edge Detective.
When you apply Edge Detective to clip, you can see the clip changes. The default effect is applied without adjusting any parameter. This is because the default Edge Detective Effect is to open using the edge style of "Sketch" with an Edge Threshold of zero. This does not mean no effect is being applied, this is actually the most sensitive setting. Also notice that the default background is set to black and the default edge is set to white.
If you slide the threshold all the way to 255, you end with just a black screen.
Now switch the style to Cartoon.
Notice that this setting is more detailed. Look at the elephants tail in both pictures. Also notice that in Cartoon Controls the Edge Threshold is set to 50 and Smoothing is set to 2.0. If you slide the threshold all the way to 255, notice that unlike Sketch there is still some detail in the image and if you slide it to 0, there is intense, intense detail. I'm going to set it back to default and look at the global controls.
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