simulated police flashing lights

[Mark Suszko]

Can you give more detail as to the footage?

Typically, if you have a shot of the cars going past the camera, you’ll then track each car and apply the tracking data to a comp of the flashing lights.

Are you just asking how to make and track the comp of the flashing lights?

The lights on the cars are only half the job: to really sell it, the lights have to seem to react with the background. This means you’ll have to make an extra layer in the comp that carries a soft red and blue pulsing glow across buildings and things tracking with the lights, harder colored reflections in anything reflective like windows or chrome or water, and perhaps even a top layer with some tinted lens flare for the hot spot of the lights shining into the virtual camera lens. That last top/front layer with the lens flares can help hide faults in the rest of the comp by being overly bright and dazzling the scene.

[Carl Endres]

Heres a link Mark if you want to check out what I’m doing.

https://www.brickfish.com/Pages/VideosSeries/VideoView.aspx?pid=1068065&vid=7416_59422628

You might even get a chuckle if you take a look. It’s only a minute long.

I actually do know how to track the lights once there made, my question had more to do with how to make the lights themselves, and get them to flash. If you check out the video you will see that all the scenes are daylight. I should have been more specific.

I’m gonna do a part 2 on this video at some point, You really brought up some great recommendation to really complete the effect so thanks.

[Mark Suszko]

I’m not an AE guy. But since these things are going to be attached to the roofs of the cars going by in a blur, you can get away with a lot.

My guess though would be to make the light bar head-on, in photoshop, apply an expression to each of the red and blue strobes to make them cycle, then do a perspective change to make the whoe thing look right once tracked to the cars. GIS images of mars lights and cop light bars for guides when building it.

Guess 2, build the things already in perspective, you can do a mirror flip on them as they reach exact screen midp-point (covered by a flare) and they’d still read correctly as the car moves out of frame. The motiion is relatively easy since all your cars look 90 degrees to the camera the whole time and make no moves in z-axis.

Why didn’t you just build the cop cars with a light bar to start with, then you’d only have to track a blinking light?

[Carl Endres]

Hey Mark,

Thanks for taking a look. Actually the copcars allready have the light bar, its just hard to see because they zip by so fast and also have motion blur.

I think once I can get a half way realistic strobe flash, its just a matter of parenting the flashing light to the cop car precomp. Each of those cop cars are the same, just offset in time and speed.

I guess my real question now is how to make the light, and make it strobe. AE,PS,and premiere is about all I have at my disposal. If you have any suggestions in terms of building the lights and making the flash I would appreciate it. I just haven’t done a lot with lighting in general yet on many of my projects.

One more thing, did ya get a laugh – Thanks again – Carl

[Mark Suszko]

Yopu telegraphed the Krispy Creme thing a little too long, and I wanted it more prominennt in the last shot. In my town the local donut is Mello-cream, and it beats KC all to heck.