Digital video effects (moving)
DVE moves
As a director you obviously need to be clear what you want the DVE move to do, and to explain that to the vision mixer. Give them time to program up the device, and check any move when it is finished.
During the recording use one standard expression to let the vision mixer know when you want any animation to happen. There is a tendency to use the name of the device, but there are dozens of different DVE makers, and they change every few years. It is better to say ‘Animate’ or ‘DVE’.
Special effects
There are occasions when DVEs are used to create a special effect, either in the way they move the picture or distort the video signal. Wobbly pictures indicating a dream sequence are part of most people’s visual vocabulary. Posterisation distorts the video signal, inverting colour and luminance information, and is still commonly built into DVEs, although I don’t know why because it is used very rarely.
Filters
As non-linear devices become more common in both post-production suites and in studios for replaying pre-edited sequences, the crossover between electronic filters and DVEs is becoming blurred.
Software for manipulating still images in computers developed what they called filters – often ‘plug-ins’ that could be bought from independent programmers. While they started as fairly simple devices to mimic lens filters, they grew to become mini applications in their own right, and are now capable of serious image manipulation.
These same filters could also be applied to moving images, which are, after all, just a sequence of still pictures. It took some time, as each picture had to be loaded, filtered and re-saved. As hardware speeds and parallel processing developed, computers were able to apply filters in real time – which is effectively what a DVE device does.
So in the future we can expect DVEs to be able to achieve many of the picture manipulations currrently being done on still images.
Picture with texturising video effect applied
Electronic filters, currently used in post-production and non-linear editing systems, should be built into digital video effects devices of the future.