particle Illusion has alot of bubbles and bubble effects:

http://www.wondertouch.com/

Thanks much for the replies ... I'll look into both of your suggestions to see if I can find my bubbles :)...

You can't go wrong with Particle Illusion. They have everything from your bubbles to fire explosions in fact there are almost 3000 particle emitters which are 100% configurable. What else is awesome is that you can render with an alpha channel which gives you amazing effects when you pull it into Vegas.

WARNING: Particle Illusion is very Addictive and should only be used when a sane grown up is present!

Pi? Marvellous!

Grazie

" I've heard that After Effects CS5 "might" have this ability. I am looking further into that now. "

Yes and no. You could build pretty realistic looking glass spheres and bubbles but it's no one click wonder even after you've gone through the moderately steep learning curve of After Effects itself. On top of that you're going to need a particle plugin and that's more cost and more to learn.

There is a simpler way, shoot your own. All you need is a black background and what is know in the theatre as "black light". That isn't a UV light from the 70s, is a narrow slit / wall of light. Dead easy to make with some black cardboard and a light source. All you want is for the light to hit the bubbles and not the black background. Then blow lots of bubbles while rolling th camera.

Capture footage. Use a luminance key to extract the bubbles then composite onto footage with the Add compositing mode. If you had the foresight to shoot the original bubbles at different focal lengths then you can layer them in Vegas.

One tip when you try any of this stuff. Don't give up, sometimes the intermediate results can look really poor, wait until you get it all composited together before you trash the idea. I just did something like this and was about to throw it out the window but stuck with it and in the end not bad, not too bad at all.

Bob.

You can create bubbles in photo programs like photoshop. Play with the transparency and then layer them in Vegas.

Dave T2

To add to Dave’s idea, create the bubbles in BW + grey tones so you can use these if you are using individual image tracks for the bubbles= hard light comp parent
Add defocus and sphere fx and on images will help with a warp on mask
Then screen all tracks in the final mix


edit visual