How to create this effect in FCS

[David Roth weiss]

Are you asking about the rainbow that comes right at ya???

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles
https://www.drwfilms.com

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A forum host of Creative COW’s Business & Marketing and Apple Final Cut Pro forums. Formerly host of the Apple Final Cut Basics, Indie Film & Documentary, and Film History & Appreciations forums.

[Sean Connelly]

No sir, while I wouldn’t mind figuring that out as well, I was referrind to the strobe/rainbow effect behind the characters as they are dancing. 🙂

-Sean

[Sohrab Sandhu]

[David Roth Weiss] “Are you asking about the rainbow that comes right at ya???”

I think he is referring to the colored mattes surrounding the characters.

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[Sean Connelly]

Correct. I was afraid it was just a bunch of colored mattes, layered behind a frame by frame edit of the characters. Was hoping to avoid all of that editing, haha.

-Sean

[Rob Schultz]

Well, in that case, Sean, what you want is a stack of layers.

Foreground actors
innermost color layer
middle color layer
outermost color layer
background

These can all be built from one piece of footage, you just need some way of creating the matte for the foreground element. If they were on a greenscreen, say, you could create the matte from a key. If it’s a piece of footage like a finished cartoon, you’re probably looking at some rotoscoping. In the former case, you could probably pull it off without too much difficulty in FCP. In the latter, I’d definitely move over to a program more suited to the task, like After Effects.

Duplicate your original footage and create your matte on the top layer. Now you’ve cut out your foreground from your background. Make as many duplicates of that top layer as you want for each color level, and you can fill the inside of the matte with any number of techniques, from a simple fill to a colorization to using the layer with the cutout as an alpha channel for a layer of solid color. For each layer of solid color, you can scale up the layer a bit and not notice any ill effects since the footage has been colored over anyway. In AEX you could also just copy the mask from one layer to another and expand it a bit each time.

Waiting around for my renders to complete,

Rob Schultz
–
Better Radio is a comedy podcast. In space. And iTunes!

[Sean Connelly]

Thank you!

-Sean

[Zane Barker]

Keep in mind the example you posted is animation, therefore drawn, the same effect will look quite different with actual video footage.

However like Rob said After Effects would be much better suited for this effect.

**Hindsight is always 1080p**