VIEWSCREEN TUTORIAL by Gwen Demulder

Many people may wonder how the create those neat viewscreen scenes in Star Trek. Today I am going to give you an answer using a picture of a viewscreen, a 3D animation of a ship in warp and 2 Adobe programs namely premiere and photoshop(this one is optional).

1. Preparing the viewscreen
First you open the picture of your viewscreen, scale it a bit so that it matches your video resolution.

Next we are going to select the area that is the image of the viewscreen itself using the selection tool.

Now we need to add another layer, when that is done we can fill the area with a nice blue colour. When that is done save the file as a jpg file, or any other format you would like to use.

 2. Adding the animation
Go and open your adobe premiere, import the viewscreen picture and the animation. Create 2 video tracks and put the viewscreen in the above one, and the animation in the bottom one.

Next we will configure our bluescreen settings. As you can see we've got our effects control in the upper right corner, click on transparency setup.

Select blue screen in the key type selectbox. Now you will have to give your treshhold and cutoff. I've taken treshhold = 100 and cutoff = 30.

The viewscreen part is now ready.

Now we will scale our videoclip so it will fit our view screen a bit more.

click on the green bar which is your video, then click on video motion in the effect controls window.

There are only 2 things important here, first of all set your first and last frame coördonates to 0,0. This should stop the clip from moving across the screen. Now you can set your zoom to take a certain part of the clip, I am taking about 60% of the clips size (which is 352 x 288, the pal vcd resolution) Do this for the first and last frame.

Now you are ready to export the clip. Go to file, export timeline, movie and save the movie.

then you might get a movie like this one (download)