Digital muzzle flahses and hits

[Cheesesailor77]

I'm shooting my western in a few weeks and am still trying to decide how to handle the guns. It looks like if we need to, we can actually shoot blanks, but any gun fire of coarse gets me nervous, and then you need to notify the polics and get a cop on set, etc.

Can anyone share information on trying to do it digitally? I don't have ANY experience with it and don't own any of the software. So it would have to be something I can learn to do and would have to be done in FCP. Sounds absurd to me, but I figured I might as well ask :)

[Rich Lee]

muzzle flashes are only 1-3 frames long and can be super easy to composite....easier if you dont care about any smoke lingering around in the air...if you want some smoke its about another 10 frames or so you might have to track in...but still no biggie..im sure FCP can do this no problem.

check out the samples and try using them to composite. scale/rotate/position it to your liking and then just over lay them with a "screen" or "add". make sure you adjust the levels/contrast of the clip so that black is black and not any shade of gray...

http://www.artbeats.com/prod/search.php?pg=1&act=Search&kw=muzzle+flash&ct=

[John C Lyons]

http://www.the-lyons-den.com/25years/media/shotgun%20blast.jpg

here's a screen cap of a single frame from a REAL shotgun blast at night (that's OLD XL1 footage btw). It was only visible for one frame depending on how realistic you want to go with it.

[Cheesesailor77]

would there be any chance of finding someone here that could do it for me? Besides finding someone, what would the logistics be? How woul I send him the footage etc?

Are there any tutorials on how to do this in FCP?

[Zach Lien]

there's a program made for this stuff. fxlabs i think. i forget that its called- anyone else remember?

[David G. Smith]

Here is a resource you may find useful. I have not tried them, so can not speak as to quality. It does look cool though.

http://detonationfilms.com/free_stuff.htm

Good luck.

[Filmjunkie677]

This is what Barry recommends.

http://fxhome.com/effectslab/

Its cheap and fairly easy to compose. And very realistic!

[Cheesesailor77]

investigating...

is there any weird 24p problems that might occor with this?

[surf]

jusat make a fluid effect in maya and composite it. :) even you can use Maya Live

[David G. Smith]

jusat make a fluid effect in maya and composite it. :) even you can use Maya Live

Ouch!!! :shocked:

[Cheesesailor77]

isn't maya $1000? I might as well get after effects right?

Which Barry reccomended Effectslab?

[Zach Lien]

cough...BITTORRENT...COUGH

try it out before you buy it. you can use bittorrent to find a demo

[Matt Grunau]

You dont need to get anywhere near Maya, nd you certainly wouldn't want to rely on fluid dyanmics. Maybe a particle system of some sort. gunshots a usually only 1 frame, and very easy to create in photoshop and then compsite in. ake some time to simply research wha most gunshots look like )white inteior leading out to yellow-orange-reddish, blurred and blended together.

[Jeremy Ordan]

Another solution, and this is the cheap cheap cheap solution is to download the demo of Particle Illusion. It is not a cheap piece of software by any means (about $399) but you can download the demo and just render out a couple of hundred effects and then crop the effect you want so you don't have the watermark and layer it on top of your gun. It works and has a user interface easier than after effects. I don't understand after effects at all.

[John C Lyons]

gunshots a usually only 1 frame, and very easy to create in photoshop and then compsite in. ake some time to simply research wha most gunshots look like )white inteior leading out to yellow-orange-reddish, blurred and blended together.
Drat, my post and still image must not be showing up... :embarasse