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Effects Help

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Hi everyone,

I am new to video editing as a whole, I've managed to follow ADIGITALMANS GUIDE, and now have the movie on my computer, I will be using a program called Adobe After effects to add special effects, I've watched Adywans fan edit and I was blown away, I was looking to do the same type effects, re-do the lightsabres and and extra Tie Fighters to some scenes, how would I go about doing these in After Effects??

Any help would be most appreciated

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What Adywan did took him a LONG time to do, and he had the benefit of doing some of the effects with 3-D computer modeling if I'm not mistaken.

A lot can be done with After Effects, too, but it'll probably be too much for someone to explain in a reponse to your thread.

You'll be compositing shots to create/modify existing footage and will likely be rotoscoping (lightsabers and composite layer elements). Check out Creative Cow for some free tutorials and poke around to see the training they have for sale on DVD.

You can also check out Lynda.com, a training pay site, for some sample After Effects tutorials.

If you have specific questions on tricks with the methods you begin to use, people on this site will probably have more to say; you can also ask folks at the Creative Cow forums.

Good luck with your project.
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darkhelmet said:

What Adywan did took him a LONG time to do, and he had the benefit of doing some of the effects with 3-D computer modeling if I'm not mistaken.

Actually the only shot that had any CG ships was the TIE fighter approach in the Death Star battle. The rest was done by using cut out photographs of the models and adding the motion blur effect that's built into After Effects. There is hell of a lot involved with doing anything like this. if you are adding extra ships to existing footage of a battle, for example, you need to mask all foreground elements , most of the time using keyframes to mask moving objects on each frame. Then you have to map out the movement for each extra element, making sure you test the movement each time you add an element to see if there are any conflicts with existing footage. Then there's your lasers. best way to do this is to grab a frame from one of the films that has a good straight laser. then just cut out the laser and you can use that for every laser for that particular colour. TIE lasers work better when you have cut out a laser sequence from the movie. mask each laser against a black background ans create a short avi file containing only the lasers. when you come to compositing lasers then add them to your project, adjust the positioning, size and rotation and use the "screen" blending mode.

The way i learned was just by playing around with the program and trying all effects settings to see what they can do.

Lightsabers you need to rotoscope every frame. It gets bloody tedious after a while, trust me.

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