Star wars effect

romsman wrote on 5/8/2003, 11:20 PM

how can you do a lightsaber effect with vegas? is there a way to pin a image of the lightsaber on a certain batch of pixels so like it follows those pixels thus creating the lightsaber effect?

Comments

riredale wrote on 5/9/2003, 1:25 AM

www.alamdv.com

emmo2002 wrote on 5/9/2003, 4:32 AM

riredale have you used Alamdv2 much? I have it but have found the results a little grainy when I export it back into my timelines.

How do you find it?

Emmo

kameronj wrote on 5/9/2003, 5:29 AM

I have been playing around with AlamDV2 and LOVE IT!!

I like the fact that a lot of folks create different plug ins and you can create your own very easily. It is a very good little program for "spepcial FX".

As for exporting back and having the quality go poo-poo...I haven't seen that yet. But I've only been working with "test" AVI (uncompressed) digivid to start with less than a couple of minutes.

Hope that helps.

riredale wrote on 5/9/2003, 2:06 PM

emmo2002: No, I have doodled around with it a bit but have kind of filed it away under "tools which might be useful in a project some day." But do a search on this board--I think there are people who are very familiar with it and love it.

philfort wrote on 5/9/2003, 3:19 PM

I tried out alamDV, but realized it doesn't do anything that Vegas can't, so I didn't see much point in buying it.
alam just uses canned image sequences (or stills) overlaid on the video. You can easily do the same with Vegas. I think you'll find some Vegas lightsaber tutorials around if you search the forums for that.

But in response to romsman's original question, there isn't any way to pin the saber to a bunch of moving pixels in Vegas (nor is there in alamDV). You'll need to do it frame-by-frame, or at least "keyframe-by-keyframe" if the motion of the original object is smooth. It's fairly easy to use track motion in Vegas to rotate/size the lightsaber on the main video (just tedious to do for so many frames).