Light Saber
Special Effects:
Light Sabers
I captured the video with a webcam, and opened the avi file into Commotion Pro 4.0 Demo. Because the demo cannot save to disk, a screen-capture program must be used to extract the finished video. You can download 7 megs of lightsaber audio from www.theforce.net. I used the free program MovieXOne 4.0(now seems to be discontinued) to synchronize the saber with the video.
Download Light Saber Demo
My first attempt (~17 meg w/ sound)
How to do a Light Saber in Pinnacle Systems Commotion
- Load your clip with the actor holding the pvc pipe.
- Make a composite of the clip
- From the timeline window, double click on the saber clip. A window will pop up with name like "SaberClip (Comp-1,Layer-1)".
- Activate your rotospline palette (click Window, then Rotospline) and then rotoscope the rod:
- Double click on the rotospline tool (pen icon).
- Using a bezier-spline, rotoscope the first frame, middle frame and the last frame of your clip. You don't have to do the rotoscoping frame-by-frame as Commotion will interpolate the position of the rotospline geometry up to the next keyframe. Make adjustments to the rotospline path in-between keyframes until spline path follow perfectly the geometry of your pvc pipe.
- Activate motion blur on the path and set feather settings to go inward with a feathering value of 5.
- 5. Now render the alpha channel of the composite and save the clip to a new file called "sabercore".
- Click the eyeball icon to turn off the rotospline path and then close the rotospline palette.
- On the project window, add the new sabercore clip.
- Drag the sabercore clip to the timeline just above the original clip. Set the Transfer Mode of the layer to "Screen".
- Click on the sabercore layer and then add "Deluxe Edge Finder" from the Effects->Matte menu option.
- In the "Deluxe Edge Finder" effect, adjust the following:
- Set "View" to "Border"
- Set "Edge Threshold" to 25%
- Set "Border Width" to 18
- Set "Border Color" by clicking on the black box. Choose a color on the color swatch that will represent the glow color, say red.
- Set "Border Blur Amount" to 7.9
- Drag (again) the same sabercore clip from the Project to the timeline window just above the sabercore layer you added in step 9.
- Set the transfer mode of this new layer to "Add".
- Render the composite.
Some other people's sabers:
http://pub37.ezboard.com/fcombustion15105frm24.showMessage?topicID=4.topic
http://www.crewoftwo.com/duel/how_we_made_duel.html
http://www.crewoftwo.com/introduction/
http://moviemaker.home.attbi.com/starwars.html
http://www.egophoria.net/rotoscope/