Spot Light/Sweep Help...

[HeyYouComOvrHere]

Hello, I'm fairly new to this and have Pinnacle's Liquid Edition. I am trying to start my DVD movie with a faded black screen with a spot light flashing around the screen revealing SOMETHING...the more and more the spot light moves around the screen, the brighter the background image becomes until the image is completely visible. Can someone point me in the direction of a tutorial that does this? As I said, I am fairly new at this but have done a few DVDs in the past.

TIA

Mike

[Arky]

Hi Mike,

first of all, congratulations on your choice of NLE. I use Liquid Edition myself and I always find it strange that so many people prefer to use Adobe Premiere, even when they do not need hardware support.

Anyway, getting back to your question, I have not tried to accomplish this myself, but my advice to you would be to take a look at Boris FX7.

http://www.borisfx.com/products/FX/tour/lights.php

One of the features is exactly what you require. Now, if you were to apply a very slow fade-up from black, on your video, this would serve the purpose of gradually revealing the whole video image. This is simple in any NLE, Edition being no exception. If you were to additionally use Boris FX7 to create the animated light-sweep effect, then the combination of the two would, I believe, result in exactly the effect you describe. I regret that I cannot support you with regards to BorisFX itself, since I am not (yet!) experienced with it, but you may download a demo and try it for yourself. Manuals are also available from their website, in .pdf format.

Boris FX 7 is currently on special offer for $199 (not exactly peanuts, I know, but it's very good value at that price). you can get it directly from BorisFX's own Yahoo store, or you can get it from http://www.videoguys.com/borisfx.htm#borisfx7

This product is incredibly powerful, and consequently, if you have further compositing and special effects to create in future, FX7 will more than likely accomodate most, if not all, of them. It's like After Effects but directly integrates into your NLE and offers more (editable) pre-set effects to save you time. In absolute terms, After Effects is more flexible, but if you do not intend to spend a small fortune on additional filters, you would be better off with FX7 because it integrates several as standard, whereas After Effects integrates very few as standard. After Effects cannot directly 'plugin' to an NLE system, although Edition can communicate with After Effects via the 'X-send' function (BTW, a quick tip for you:- 'X-send' also works for Cinemacraft standalone encoder, provided you start Cinemacraft before you 'X-send'. Edition will generate a couple of error messages, but close these and you CAN encode directly from the timeline! (including insertion of I-frames at timeline marker points, although these will not include markers in the MPEG stream)).

Anyway, good luck. Please let me know how you get on. I am sure many other DVD authors would be interested to see your findings.


Arky ;o)