Main  © 2002-2009 by Eiperle CGM

Light and glow effects - Movie


Motion light effects can give an impressive touch to titles. This workshop shows how to create light and glow effects using the CGM Light/Glow.

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 plus alpha channel (shown as visible in the channels tab) whereas the black picture only 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 Light/Glow video filter (located in Video Filters / CGM DVE FX) to the logo and open its controls. 


Final Cut Express: Set the Movement mode to Automatic Forward or to Automatic Backward.

Final Cut Pro: First set the Width and Glow of the light to the desired amounts, then animate Move by setting keyframes to 0 at the beginning and 100 at the end. The angle control Direction defines the direction of motion and in our example it's set to an angle of 74; brightness is defined by the Highlight slider, here it's set to 100 percent.

The Mode pop-up menu enables some special FX. Only Glow Area affects the light/glow area whereas Only Glow Color shows the colored light/glow area.