Paraplex

Logo match cut

logo-match-cut · by Paraplex

Build and fill a logo match cut: pictures that hard-cut behind a logo that never moves, recolored per cut. Brand colors, generated or uploaded pictures, speed, cut length, per-cut logo color. Load for any match cut request.

Logo match cut

A logo match cut is the logo held dead still while the world cuts behind it — a new picture every few frames, each one an object the logo could be printed on: a card in a hand, a tote, a wax seal, a jacket's back, a helmet, a sign. The eye stays on the logo; the pictures say "this brand is everywhere". Two rules make it work, and everything below serves them:

  1. The logo never moves. Same place, same size, every cut. Only its color changes.
  2. Every picture gives the logo somewhere to sit: one object, large, with a plain face at the exact center of the frame, and no text of its own.

How it is built in Paraplex

The Logo match cut template (Menu, Templates) is a group named "Match cut" whose children are the cuts — one picture each — and a "Logo" layer in front. The group plays its cuts one at a time in order, each for its hold, looping. Everything about it is set_match_cut:

  • holdSeconds — how long each cut is on screen (0.04–2 s). The template holds 0.25 s: an eighth note at 120 BPM, so every cut lands on the beat bed it brings. Four to eight frames (0.13–0.27 s at 30 fps) is the genre; under 0.1 s reads as strobe, over 0.5 s as a slideshow.
  • speed divides every hold: 2 is twice as fast. It is how a person asks for "faster" without touching each cut.
  • rhythm — steady, speed-up (a pass that quickens into its last cut) or slow-down (one that settles).
  • cuts — per cut: its own holdSeconds (a longer hold on the hero shot), its own logoColor, skip.
  • transition — how each cut arrives: none (a hard cut, the genre's default), scale-down (it lands at 110–125% and settles to the frame) or scale-up (it starts smaller, the edges showing, and grows to fill it); transitionAmount is how far (0.2 = 120% or 80%), transitionLength the share of the cut it takes.
  • order — every cut by name, in the order they play. Alternate light and dark pictures: the logo then flips color every cut, which is most of the effect's punch.

A video loops cleanly when the timeline is a whole number of passes (the dock's "Loop cleanly" does it; a pass is the holds summed).

The logo's color

On auto (the default) the logo takes the first of: the logo as drawn, then each palette color in order, that stands out at 3:1 against what is behind the logo on that cut — measured from the picture itself, under the logo's box. So set the palette to the brand's colors, most characteristic first: a brand-colored logo wherever it reads, the logo as drawn or ink where it does not. A cut can override: set_match_cut cuts { "Stone": { logoColor: "#c8f03c" } }. tintMode multiply keeps a grayscale logo's shading; solid fills the shape flat (the right choice for a colored logo that must become one color). A logo uploaded in several color versions (the dock's "+ Version") is chosen per cut the same way: the version that stands out most.

Filling it for a brand

Ask for what you do not have — the logo (the person drops it on the logo, or uses the dock's logo tile: SVG, PNG or WebP), the brand's colors, and a line on the world the pictures should come from. Then:

  1. set_match_cut palette (the brand's hexes) and theme (the look: "warm film photography, sunlit concrete, muted", "neon night streets, wet asphalt", "clean studio product shots on pastel seamless").
  2. Pictures the person has go on first — they drop them on the dock's Upload, which replaces the example pictures in order.
  3. For every cut still an example, generate_image with onto that cut, use photo and the frame's aspect (9:16 for the vertical template), and a prompt in this shape: "Photograph: <one object with a plain face, e.g. a blank ceramic mug, its plain side toward the camera>. The object is large and its center sits exactly at the center of the image, with a plain, uncluttered face there where a logo will be placed afterwards. Style: <theme>. Color palette: <the brand's colors, named and hex>; grade the whole picture in these colors. No text, no letters, no logos, no watermarks." Vary the object every cut (card, tote, cup, poster, jacket, box, phone, sign, keycap, patch); never two of a kind in a row. Each picture costs credits: say how many before generating more than three.
  4. set_match_cut with no changes returns every cut in order with what the logo does over it ("#0e0e12 (multiply)", "as drawn") and which are still examples — read it back, and fix a cut whose logo color fights the picture with its own logoColor.
  5. More cuts: generate_image without onto, then set_match_cut addCuts with the new layer's id (it is sized like the others and added at the end).

Timing to a beat

The template's beat bed is 120 BPM: holds of 0.25 (eighths) or 0.5 (quarters) stay on it. With the person's own track, set_markers on its beats and set holdSeconds to the beat interval (or half of it). A last hero cut held two beats (its own holdSeconds) before the loop gives the pass a downbeat.

Variations

  • Face match cut: people's portraits, the face centered and the same size in every picture — prompt "a head-and-shoulders portrait, the face centered in the frame at the same scale" — often with no logo at all, or a small wordmark at the bottom.
  • Text match cut: the brand's word found in the world — a book page, a newspaper headline, a street sign, a comment — the word centered and the same size each cut; the logo layer becomes a text layer over a highlight, or is left out.

Keep the principle: one thing holds still at the center, everything else changes.