Need to do a Star Wars wipe in MC 5.0.3

[Neil Patience]

I have made a soft diagonal wipe using Animatte before.
Its sort of complicated to describe but pretty easy to do.
I think what I did was add the incoming video to a new video layer and apply the Animatte effect just to the overlapping portion which was the duration of the required wipe.
Then draw a diagonal line from the required corner to corner in Animatte using the poly tool. Then to complete a triangle shape I drew outside the frame linking the start and end positions.
So I had drawn a right angle triangle with the horizontal and vertical line outside my frame and the diagonal across the middle.
Its important to make this triangle big enough to allow you to move it without your straight edges becoming visible.
Then feather the edge to give the required softness.
Then just key-frame the triangle you have made so that the diagonal starts in one corner and ends in the other. You might need to expand the triangle in size a bit as you do this to give the illusion of just the diagonal moving or the straight edges will become visible and you need to keep them outside the frame.

That’s it you should then have a soft edge diagonal wipe.

Probably another way of skinning this particular cat but that worked for me.

If my rambling explanation does not make sense let me know and I can email you a project with just that effect in.
(I have v5.51 though so not sure if that would give compatibility issue with 5.03.)

best wishes
Neil
http://www.patience.tv

[Andrew Mckee]

Yeah, Animatte is the way to go here. Softness can only be added to the horizontal or vertical wipes, not the diagonal unfortunately.

Andrew McKee
Editor/Colourist
Avid Certified Trainer – MC5.5
Apple Certified Trainer – FCP7
Pixelwizard.net

[Scott Cole]

If the wipe only appears once or twice in your promo, then Animatte is a way to go. However, if the exact same wipe appears multiple times, it may make sense to create a black to white (or white to black) matte signal of the wipe and used that to drive a matte transition. I think you’ll find the render times quicker.

M. Scott Cole
Senior Post Production Editor
60 MINUTES
CBS News, NYC
sc6@cbsnews.com
mscottc@comcast.net

[Ra-ey Saleh]

A while ago someone made some Plasma Wipes that did this. Send me your email and I’ll send you the files. You literally just drop them into your Plasma Wipes folders (both Pal and NTSC) and they pop up in your Effects Palette.

Ra-ey

[Ra-ey Saleh]

ps.
Alternatively don’t forget that AniMattes can also be added to transitions directly (you don’t need to layer video tracks), so once created it can easily be re-applied.
You can also draw any shape you want and soften as much as you want.

Ra-ey