How to make smoky titles

[dajutster0039]

OK, I'll try and keep this breif, and I appologize in advance for this "off-topic" post, but I know you guys are all the video experts and I need some help. Having said that, I am making a movie with some very particular intro credits. They will be brief and simple execpt for the style they are presented in. I want the titles to be composed of smoke. Dynamic, flowing smoke. White on a black Background. I also don't want to take full screen smoke and mask it to fit the title; I want the smoke to take the shape of the title, preferably in 3d space. To transition between two titles, the smoke would either fade and dissapate and return for the next title, or morph into the next title.

Now I can imaging most of you reading this are rolling your eyes, but don't fear, I am condident there's a way to do this! I edit movies with Pinnacle Studio Plus v9.4. I own Blender3d and am fairly skilled with it, and I also own winmorph from debugmode (not saying much, both are freeware ). I want to know if anyone uses thes programs and knows how to do this or if anyone knows of any (reasonably priced) software or plugins that would let me achieve this.

Thanks in advance

[dipstick]

I'm not exactly sure what you are trying to do. The easiest way I can think of would be create a black image with white title letters. Select the letters and delete them to make them transparent. Save as a psd or png with alpha chanel. Put that image over a smoke video clip. You should see a black background with smoke in the shape of the letters.

If that's not what you want, but instead want the smoke to take a random shape of the letters, then you'll need to do it with a 3d app. Since you already have Winmorph, go back to Debugmode and download Wax2. There is a particle generator filter that may do what you want. I've played with Wax2, but not with the particle generator. Anyway it's free, so try it out.

Wax2 will definitely let you mask the smoke like I mentioned in the first paragraph.

[canadateck]

Is this what you are looking for?


http://www.creativecow.net/articles/lind_tobias/spooky_film_title/Spooky_film_title.mov

[fmctm1sw]

Have you looked into particleillusion. It will do at least some of that stuff...

[guns1inger]

canadateck : that tutorial at the cow was the first thing I thought of as well. The link the tutorial itself is this http://www.creativecow.net/show.php?forumid=1&page=/articles/lind_tobias/spooky_film_t...tle/index.html

Bookmark the Cow, it is a great place.

[canadateck]

Thanks..LOL..I thought that was the Link.I see it was just the final Video.They do have some great tutorials over there.

[dipstick]

Yo guys......... I'm pretty sure he said "Reasonably Priced S/W". I don't consider AE to be reasonably priced.

Here's a quick attempt with Wax2 I did:
smoke.wmv

It's not as fancy as the AE tittle, but it's still cool. I did it with the texture generator plugin. Not bad for a free app.

Another option would be Ulead Cool 3D.

[reboot]

DVDLab Pro and D-FX will probably do most of that.

[dajutster0039]

Thanks everyone for your fast replies and I appologize for my delayed response . I just downloaded wax2 and I'll play around with that. I'm also looking into using Bleder 3d from here. Its a great program buts its 3d particle generation isn't as flexible as I wish (after all, it is free software). I don't just want to use a matte to cut down a movie of smoke like dipstick suggested, instead I want the smoke to flow creating a somewhat irregular and flowing outline to the letters. I will play with Wax2 to see if that works. Canadateck's link is much closer to what I wanted but I'm a broke high school student who can't afford AE . I'll do my best with what I have and get back to you guys with my results.