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Adding Lightsaber effects, NOT Rotoscoping!
Hello,
I’m fairly new at AE, but I did already learn to add Lightsabers into my movies by rotoscoping. Since that’s kinda hard work, I was wondering if there isn’t another way. Instead of the usual blue/green screen use a blue/green sword. The color can easily be removed with the color range effect. But here comes the trouble. I’ll need a new layer above my (keyed) source material. This new layer must have the shape of the piece I just removed from the source material, so I can use some gaussian blur on it to create the glow. Is this possible?
Thanks in advance!
Greetings, Barbatruuk
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3 Replies
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You could use the alpha generated by our keyer to compose another layer with just the keyed part and then you can add any effect you want to it.
What I mean is something like to use your keyer to produce an invert key into ahother layer and then compose it.16:9
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If the key-plugin doesn’t provide it, there’s always the Channel->Invert effect that can invert the Alpha.
Or if you precompose the keyed layer, you can use a solid layer with the “set matte” -effect, it has an invert alpha switch built in.
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That’s why in the first (oldest) Star Wars movie, they had plastic sabers with covered scotchlight, they tried to make them so bright that their colors would not change.
Alas, it didn’t work :-/Film with a very high shutter speed to avoid motion blur, but you’ll need oodles of light to compensate. Besides, the flickery motion of your characters may not be the effect you want.
Oh yeah,
here’s another (Theoretical) non-rotoscoping way: get two very bright marks at the start and end of your sword, motion-track them and apply the dots to start endpoint of a beam filter.
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