 
 
Hello everybody!
In this video I am going to teach you my method
of how to achieve the "Tenet Effect".
If you don't know what I mean by that,
it's this movie by Christopher Nolan
in which time is very weird *awkward laughter*
For some people time goes forwards,
for some people time goes backwards ...
I really wanted to try this in Blender
and I think I might have found a way,
but I'm not ... (audio of the inverted clip comes in, sounds a bit like an "inverted" vacuum cleaner lol)
*passive-aggressive Tenet noises*
 
*ight imma head out*
So, let's get started with a new scene in Blender.
2.8 or, or something.
What you're gonna need is, obviously, a video clip
- doesn't really matter if you just record one video and then
spit it or if you record two videos, but things you need to consider:
definitely the camera shouldn't be moving, or else we are gonna have to do some tracking
and that's a pain (for lazy people).
Also, you should try to make the videos as close together as possible,
so the lighting doesn't change. Don't do the same mistakes I did
in this case, change the focus and the lighting mid way through your recording process,
or else you're gonna be in a pain. Like I was.
One side of the video is you, normal time, and the other side, it's gonna eigh- eighter gonna be
a second video or you're gonna split it off. Preferably you're at the s- at the other side
so you won't have to do a lot of masking (you should wear yours instead).
You can do it, but ... yeah, it's a pain.
If you're a beginner, like me, anyways.
Ok, so let's say you have the video - here in this corner, you can open, eh ... video editing
*very very quiet piano music made in Garageband*
You can reverse it ... if you don't want the audio, somewhere here ... yeah.
You can reverse it clicking this button, but it doesn't reverse the sound,
and in my example I did do that.
That I did in Shotcut because in Blender, I have no idea.
Let's say you are like me and you already have it reversed (don't you mean ... InVeRtEd).
I would suggest converting it into an image sequence, because you should just
get used to it. You might wanna do some tracking afterwards, and it's just the best
to work with image sequences in case Blender crashes.
To do that: First of all, you need to go to render settings, go to "Colour management"
and change it to "Standard". The default is "Filmic",  usually, and if you're working with
footage from a real camera you always want to set it to "Standard".
Then if you have the movie inverted - the one that runs backwards - in the output settings,
you wanna change this to the format, because Blender doesn't do it automatically.
This video clip here is 4k, so um ... the double. That's the resolution of my footage, yours might be different
PNG, here, navigate to your folder where you want to save the image sequence.
Find the end here ... you can just hover over this, ctrl + C and paste it here.
So it renders. All of this. And then hit ctrl + F12, render animation. And then you have the sequence.
After you've rendered out the image sequences of your two video clips, you can delete the video clips -
- the, um, blue things that used to be over this here - aaand ... keep the audio, unless you wanna
do it completely silent, then it doesn't matter. But let's just say, this is the last one here. This is the one
that goes forwards, for me. So I'm gonna leave it from the beginning on.
Now, if you want to cut your sequence, before you imported it here to convert it into an image sequence
- just imagine here is the blue thing - you need to hit "K" and cut through both of them
so you won't have to later fiddle around with this to get the sound to match with the images.
But this matches for me, because I took it from the very beginning in blender and I'm going to cut it later
in Shotcut, if you want to know. You little stalkers. So let's say you have this left, you're left with,
you're left with this here, the audio of the normal clip, not the backwards one
What you want to do is head over to, to masking. So, let's say we're at frame one, here is where you're
going to start to make your masks. If you're wondering how to get here, because it wasn't by default,
you can just hit the plus button, VFX, masking, and you *weird language barrier noises*
come, come to this ... to this thing here. To get a mask, you hit on here ... either here to get a new one,
but you probably see something different, you probably just see "New". Give it a name, aaand the way
you, you ehm, do a mask - let's say here's a new mask -
You're ... gonna hit ctrl + click. See, like this.
Eh, if you want to close it off, you go to "Mask" ... and "Cyclic". And you can round it, usually
This one will be a little bit weird, but if you wanna change the handles, you can, here, change one
of those. You can add a new point in here if you want, and then change the handle type to something
and then you have a new point (and we were all born at a very young age, too).
What you want to do ... here, this is the normal footage. What I did was ... well, first of all
before the "Backwards" footage appears, you have only this footage, so make sure the mask is - here, like this.
Um ... yeah. And then you pick the frame
where you want the other ma-, the other footage to appear. This side here.
Um ... for me that was 100 (1000) and I, um ... it's a little fiddly (is that even a word?).
If you want to find out ... I, I, basically I went to "Compositing"
Make sure to hit "Use nodes", "Backdrop", and there might be a "Render Layers" node, just delete it,
we, we don't need it. Let's say you have nothing of this, you have, you just have the "Composite" node here.
Basically, hit shift A ... add an "Image" node ...
Here, hit this. Navigate to your footage, the image sequence
- you have the image sequence, yay. You put this here, if you have "Node Wrangler" ctrl + shift click here
and it will show what, exactly what you have. Let's just delete this shit.
Here, that's what I have *obnoxious laughter*.
SUBSCRIBEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE
Next thing you need is the "Alpha Over" node, so just shift + A, search for the "Alpha Over" node
and get it. Then you take the other clip and put it inside of the other image (wtf). You might switch around
to see ... this is the foreground ... see, and this is ... this here is the background.
And then you can just scroll around and see where you want ... you just need to decide this for yourself
where you want, uh ... it to appear. Once you've decided, go to "Masking" aaand ... first of all, you're at frame one.
Hit "I" to insert a keyframe. Then scroll up to the moment where you want the other footage to appear.
Let's say it's 1000. Go one frame back, 9-9-9, hit ano-another times "I" without having changed anything,
so this way you'll make sure the mask won't do anything weird while you're not babysitting it.
Ummm ... frame 100 (1000!) you make it smaller so the other footage will appear here.
Then hit "I" again. Well, select everything with "A", or only select the ones you moved - I just always select "A",
probably not the best idea, but I just do that (life mood). Hit "A" to select everything, hit "I", make another
keyframe. So basically, what you have now is a mask.
*Volume of background music increases slightly*
So you have this set up, right? The way to import this mask now is, you import ... here, hit "Mask",
take the mask, pluck it into the factor of your "Alpha Over" node, search the new mask
And then ... here you can see how screwed you are when you ... do it like me and think it's a good idea to change
the focus and the lighting throughout ... filming. Here, this ... was a pain in the ass, but I'm ... I'm so
lazy, I just didn't want to do it (record it) again, so I just fiddled around with this. Ok, you have this.
Alright. So if you go on, basically you can see ... this side here is forwards, this side here is backwards.
Are we done? No, we're not done. Because it looks shit. WhAt are we going to do? Well ... I did some shit here.
What did I do? This here, I created new masks. The first thing I did was blur this mask here.
So you can add a "Blur" node.
I just always use "Fast Gaussian", because ... why not, I used it once, it worked, so ... what the hell (indeed).
Doesn't matter which one. This one is more sensitive, so just ... choose three or something.
Here, this blurred out now. Much better, right? You could end it there ... if you made a good movie (video clip),
you can just now start ... maybe playing around with this here, with this ... with this shot,
because it's always easier to make something more blurry than more sharp.
But you know, who, who are we kidding, if you're working in Blender, you know like I do that, even though
you planned to do something as easy as this, you'll end up with crazy, weird, and very impractical
node networks. Unless you're not such a beginner-loser (yikes) like I am.
Basically, you can make this better with more sets of masks. Aaand ... I'm telling you why I used the masks,
I used the masks, because ... well, technically I wouldn't have needed to use ... different sets of masks, but
here, there's this moment, this epic moment ... if you do want to recreate this, make sure you throw something
in the backwards scene, because that's absolutely AWESOME (!!!).
Look, here. I'm throwing something, right? It would be pretty inconvenient if the sheet of paper
just appeared here in thin air, right? We don't want that. The solution is to take that mask here ...
You know, I'm not gonna do it properly because it's a waste of time, but you know, it's easy, ok? It's easy.
So, you have then this, it's very sharp and the paper appears here, problem solved? Wait, let me just hit
a keyframe, or else it won't update. No, the problem isn't solved because here, look, that's where we blurred,
remember? Let's go here, that's the mask ... Here, we blurred it, so ... what you see here is this image
bleeding into this image, because it, there's a grey area. So what did I do? What was my solution? Well, another
mask, because, you know when, once you start playing around in Blender ... that happens.
I created this "Mask mask" aaand put it over the place, this critical place. Look, here, it's here.
In the exact moment where the sheet is flying around here, I made sure that the mask is over that.
And what does the mask do? Well, I'm going to show you. Where is the "Mask mask"? It's here.
The "Mask mask" was mixed with the "Forward" mask, basically. Let's just do it again. Because I'm too lazy.
Let's go to the "New mask" ... where is the problem? Where is the problem? It'sss ... somewhere around here.
So let's just create a new mask. "New ... new mask mask".
You want it here (darker). Looking you are, um ... new mask ... dang (WTF).
You made the new keyframe here, so, here, you're gonna make a keyframe here too, for ... for this, for
the new "Mask mask", go back one, you don't want it there, so ... just move it up and hit a keyframe,
so it just moves here. So what does it do? Well I'm going to show you.
So basically, what you want is to combine those two masks. But not necessarily combine them,
but just make sure it becomes sharper here, so this part here is as sharp as the mask was originally,
before the blur. So what will we do? I just used the "RGBMix" ("MixRGB"). Probably there's a fancier method
but I'm not doing anything fancy (just yet). ... It's the "Mix" node, you put it here.
So basically, what you want to do is mix this mask with itself. With a factor of one, it's going to use
the bottom socket. With a factor of zero, it's going to use the not blurred. This is the area you want to
controll where it's blurred and where it's not blurred, so where it is white it's going to use - and if it looks
shitty like this, just switch the sockets - let's go back here and see if it did something -
yeah it did. See? Now what I have done here in addition is add another "Blur" node for the "Mask mask"
so it does not, it's not as sharp. This is what this mask looks like.
This whole network here is for this mask.
Well, here you don't see this, because this is not the place where ... yeah, here, there it is, so, you know, see?
There it's sharp. So I added this here, what is all of this shit? Well, I realized, in my first clip that I used,
which I'm probably not using on Youtube, the shift from this footage, this here, to this footage was way too
intense and abrupt because it happened in one f-, one frame. So I decided to expand the shift
over a few frames. So what I ended up doing was mix this "Forward" mask - this "Forward" mask is
basically the same mask as the "New mask", here, we did. That's the "Forward" mask.
I mixed that with it- let me show you. Here it's very sharp, you know? Here on this side, it's completely
the second footage, the backwards footage, and here is completely the first footage.
And I don't want, um ... abrupt from white to white, because before that it's all white ... see?
And what I want to do ... was ... a transition, so it doesn't go immediately black here, so it goes grey.
I achieved that with an "Add" node, because "Add" just ... adds this value. If I add a value of zero
to this "Forward" mask, it stays the same. But if I add a value of one ... black being zero and white being one ...
everything is one. And I just used 25 frames, here, for the transition and hit a keyframe here, at one, and
then a keyframe at zero. Here, 25 frames after that. If you want to do that as well, you just need to make sure
that in this period of time, the second footage doesn't appear, or else the second footage will be a bit
transparent and then ... maybe you want that effect, maybe you don't, just do it on purpose, whatever you do.
The mix that the way I wanted, again with the "Mix" node, mix it with itself and as a factor, you just take the same
mask, here. Ok, so that's the crazy network here. So we talked through all of that. Now what the heck did I do
here? Well, the focus ... I might not want to bore you with those details. What I did, here, was, make a bit of colour
correction with a "Color Balance", you'll make ... I just ... changed those around a bit so the footages looked
better together. Blurred this footage a bit because ... again, like I said, it's ... it was sharper than the other one.
And now, this mess. (...) I used that because I blurred the footage so much, I just tracked my nose and
then made another mask, the "Focus" mask, and parented the "Focus" mask to the tracker
aaand ... used that to keep my face at least sharp, it didn't work as planned because it still looks shit,
but you know what? Who cares. I also blurred the mask, because usually you just want to blur the masks, that's
always better *more weird laughter noises*.
Aaand ... the usual set up, "Mix", footage, blurred footage with, uh, the usual footage and decide with the mask
where, which goes whi- where ... and there you have it! When you're done, make sure that the "Composite" node
is in the last node you have here - by the way, this premultiply and convert premultiply - I just play around
with this until it looks good, that's my strategy in Blender, basically just play around until it looks ... okay.
Okay, you have it. You're done. You're happy with what you got. What I did here - still need to say that -
I offsetted, I made the start frame start at 1000 instead of one, because the second me doesn't appear
until halfway through the shot. So, if you, if you're second shot appears immediately, don't worry about it -
if your shot is offset, like in my case, here, offset this, then go back to the "Video Editing" and
1000 frames later, so, at 1000, you want to put the audio of the second shot, if you have an audio of the
backwards shot. Also, make sure that if you cut the backwards shot, cut the audio the same.
And then put, just put the audio here, inside of the, um, video editor, you can make the volume a little less
in the backwards shot, if you have the backwards shot's audio, I made it at .6, before it was at 1.00.
Make sure the resolution is right, make sure the frame rate is the same as in your shot,
make sure the end frame is as far as you want ... um ... choose where you want the end thing, the end video to
go, choose the format, I use "FFMPeg Video", RGB unless you want to use "Alpha", then you can't
*unintellligible noise* If you want to use "Alpha", you need another "Container", "Codec", all of this ...
Um ... I just changed this here, fr- uh, from ... "Medium Quality" to "Perceptually Lossless" to feel fancier
(There it is)
Make sure ... because first, it's "No Audio". If you have audio in one - either one of them - or in both, like I -
make sure you select this, right? Make sure both of THEM are selected. Aaand ...
Yeah, I think ... that should be it.
(...)
HOPEFULLY
Okay, um ...
Bye.
