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Motion blur effects on titles - Movie


How about some eye-opening motion blur effects? This workshop explains how to modify the transparent areas of a logo and apply the CGM Wind Blur.

You can actually play around a lot with transparent areas in Final Cut Pro/Express, but things can get complicated when making changes and it's important to pay attention to some basic rules.

When making 3D animations which include alpha channels they're normally rendered using a "straight alpha" function, but these animations don't look good before they are keyed over a background. The same is true of keyed logos. Let's examine the graphic used as an example in this workshop. The CGM logo has a black shadow, therefore the outer area of the logo should be black and you only see the shadow when it is keyed over a background, the alpha channel generating the shadow.

The red image shows the logo with the alpha channel included (shown as visible in the channels tab), whereas the black one just shows the colors of the image. 

* You`ll find the picture in the Workshops folder on the CGM DVE CD. If you don`t have the CD, all the pictures used in the workshops can be found in the download area of our website (www.cgm-online.com), contained in a single file "Example Graphics (used in the workshops)".


In our example the V1 contains the background scene for the logo and the logo itself is placed on V2. Apply the CGM Wind Blur video filter (located in Video Filters / CGM DVE 3D) and open its controls. 

Final Cut Express: Set the Movement mode to Automatic Forward to get a "blur out" effect, for a "blur in" effect use the Automatic Backward mode.

Final Cut Pro: Adjust the Amount of blur by setting keyframes to 100 at the beginning and 0 at the end, likewise set the Length of Wind to 10 at the beginning and 0 at the end. Leave the Use Background gadget unchecked as we don't want to mix the original and the blurred logo. Normally it's best to set the Alpha Type to the same as set in the timeline; the Automatic Alpha Type mode does this for you. To find out the current setting, control-click the logo in the timeline and select Properties where the type of alpha will be shown in the Video Items area.

To fade in the logo at the beginning of the blur simply apply the CGM Cross Dissolve (located in Video Transitions / CGM DVE Dissolve) at the beginning of the logo.

If the Logo has black edges they can be altered using the Crop function, just as the amount of blur can be adjusted with the Blur Area functions.