Chapter 14. Advanced Techniques

The title of this chapter is somewhat of a contradiction in terms because pretty much everything in Liquid Edition is advanced, but it's so easy to use, it appears simple. The effects team that worked on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back created a scene that involved the largest number of models to appear simultaneously in one place. It was the first film to achieve something like this (copied endlessly now with CGI), and at the time it was impressive, but one of the team members later made this comment: "It looked good, but it didn't look nearly as good or as complex as the effort needed to accomplish it." Liquid Edition reverses this concept so that your project looks complex, but you don't need to apply that much effort to get the sort of polish usually reserved for professional productions.

The techniques you learn in this chapter are primarily about workflow and special effectsthe former being an area that every editor wants to smooth out, the latter being something that most users want to dabble in, but an area that is perhaps only really applicable to the professional user.

This chapter appears at the end of the book because most of the techniques I describe here require you to understand at least the basics of how Liquid Edition works. For example, because compositing uses the various chroma keying filters, they follow the rules you learned about in Chapter 9. Similarly, you'll better understand how to create and consolidate Subclips to save space if you've already read about media management in Chapter 4. In short, this chapter deals with the icing on the cake and techniques that polish your production to the highest level.