Large swoosh across screen

[Rob Schultz]

Sounds like a shape with some transparent bits. You could make it in Illustrator or After Effects, but if you wanted to stay totally in FCP, you could lay out a matte color plus a mask of some kind (shape, 8 points, etc) and either animate the mask or keep it fixed and use the motion tab to pull the whole shape across the screen.

Some local news stations just use parentheses and square brackets blown up to enormous sizes for their ‘swooshes.’

Do your own trickery on a layer below, with some kind of transition between the two shots timed to match the movement of the swoosh. You might put in a wipe, or do it manually with a crop effect (motion tab again) going left to right so that the seam is underneath the giant ‘(‘ moving across the screen.

Hope that helps.

Rob Schultz
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This post, like so much of Creation, is notArt.

[Chris Tompkins]

Think Alpha Channel…

Chris Tompkins
Video Atlanta