Fight Effects

S

southalabamaque

Member
I've recorded some of my team's boxing matches and I want to know how to edit in the punch effects used on the UFC commercials and in the movie 300. Everytime someone is hit hard and cleanly I want to show the power of the blow by adding some type of "light", "fire", effect from the attacker's glove to that person's face or head.

1. What software do I need to get in order to be able to do this? I only have Vegas 6 and Photoshop for I've only been doing simple editing thus far.

I'm pretty confident I can add the sound effects I want using Cool Edit, but I have no idea on how to get the video effects I'm looking for.

Any help or insight is much appreciated.
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You need an effects generation software to be able to create those kind of effects. Like the ones where the fire blast charges whizz past hitting their shields in 300. One simple fx generator would be particle illusion its quite an inexpensive software except for the downside that it can only render to resolutions that you can display on your monitor. The rendered video cant exceed your monitor resolution. You have some other particle generators out there and also more complex fx systems such as discreets combustion. Now the basic logic is to get a video with the effect. Eg. that will be a video with a blast of sparks going off. Then put this on a layer on top of your fighters video, fire fx video on track 1 and fighter footage on track 2. If your a novice first start by clicking the blending mode on your track button. The one that lets you mix the upper video with the lower one. Its preset to alpha. Change that to Add or Overlay. You will see the fire (the dark portions of the video just disappear) as if its on your actors. Now comes the second part. You have to click on the event pan and crop button at the right upper end of the clip itself. Then try expanding the crop frame so that video becomes small. Then also reposition (pan) the frame so that the effects is small as suited and apperaing directly on the punched area. Make sure the timeing on the timeline matches the punching moment. Play around on these lines and you should be able to get the look. Alternately if your fx video is rendered with an alpha channel then its a transparent video with only the fire showing. 32 bit uncompressed would enable you to get this with alpha channel. Well if not you can just work with blend modes and a normal video except that the fire is only visible and the other areas are darkish or black. You can even film real sparks or fireworks and use that video as long as the other areas in the video are dark.
 
Thanks, I played around with a couple of effects and the light rays kinda was what I was looking for once I got it localized right over the glove at point of impact but just as you said, the rest of the video was dark when I got the ray bright enough to show. I'm gonna try to find an explosion and see if I can use it using the method you suggested.

How do I designate a particular moment on film to use the effect and not have it continually there when I dont want it on screen?

Since our uniforms are blue I tried using the sample tool and used some blue rays to show a blow from my team mate and I really like that idea but everything just gets too dark.
 
How do I designate a particular moment on film to use the effect and not have it continually there when I dont want it on screen?

>> by putting an empty video track above your fight video. Then drag the fx clip onto that upper track. Now the upper track mix method should be changed to Add or Screen or Overlay depends on what your taste of the mix is required. These 3 mix techniques wont need an alpha channel in your fx clip since they only add the pixels together from both videos. Timing is just a matter of dragging the position of the clip onto the upper track to coincide with the punch moment. If you mean the sparks are showing for too long. Then thats a catch because the tempo or time length of the effect that you get on these free sites are fixed. Try this,,,if you feel the fx is lasting too long after the punch then just hold the edge of the fx clip and pull it inwards to shorten it. Also use a a small fade to make it real looking. It should start sudden so no fade on the start of the clip. But the sparks should fade out as he takes the blow so fade as you seem needed. Also you can vary the speed of the clip. By holding CTRL and grabbing one of the ends of the clip and sliding inwards or outwards. This will either slow down the clip or speed it up depending on which way your stretching it.


Since our uniforms are blue I tried using the sample tool and used some blue rays to show a blow from my team mate and I really like that idea but everything just gets too dark.[/quote]

>> Try different mix methods. I dont exactly understand what you mean by everything gets too dark.
 
In order for the blue to actually show the rest of the screen gets really dark, I want everything to stay normal except the actual poin of impact. I'm currently looiking for that UFC commercial...each time a guy got hit, they 1. slowed the action, 2. did some cool light effect at the point of impact, and 3. did a cool skeleton effect through the guy's body that symbolized the power of the blow traveling through his body before he just collapsed to the ground. I can wait to learn the very difficult skeleton effect but I think I'm not reaching too far to try and add some light effects just at the point of impact..
 
The light effect should be no probs. Thats again layering. I recognize the skeletal impact effect your talking about. I think they used it in a couple of jet li movies. Im thinking you might need some actual paint work. Or xray type images to work with combined with some rotoscoping. Because as he fades to skeletal view. The bone image should matchingly turn along with the real video, which leaves us with some pretty complex motion tracking or unless we have a way to make the orginal video look like a skeletal type of image by fine tuning it with some vegas filters like mask creation etc. See if you can get some filters to make a person look like a skeletal transparency. If you succeed then its a piece of cake. Just have one more layer of the face video matching frame to frame. Then use some bezier mask animated to show as if part of the face is turning skeletal. But im guessing the easiest way for this to work would be to get a 2d photo xray image of a hand or use one and build the rest in photoshop. Then ull have to use an external morphing tool to make the bone fit only the face outlines. Morphing allows you to stretch an image or video like a drop of oil into any outline contour that you need. This could cause the bone to flex and stay put as if it is really inside the hand or face then youll need animated 2d images of the bone breaking. But please be realistic. Your going to spend an awful lot of time doing something like this that could last a few seconds. Not that its impossible. But ull have to ask yourself is it worth that time and effort. Remmember the effects you see in these hollywood movies are not done by people like us working in a basement studio. There are literally teams of guys that work together to pull off one fx shot. And they work for months on one such effect etc. The directors spill loads of money on that one shot etc because the market is so global and they have a revenue model to recover a hundred times of that money spent. But im not discouraging you. Keep playing. People have achieved incredible results with simple tools. And vegas is powerful. But dont try to do this overnight for a client. It wont be worth it.
 
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