light trails. how to?
 

hi there
I am trying to achieve a similar effect to this
YouTube - Motion- light trail

I think this dude used after effects though. is there a similar way to do it on Vegas, maybe using a plug in?
also what makes this video interesting is that the dude didn't use a led at all!!

Fed

I'm probably mistaken but it appeared to me not to be a post editing effect. Seemed to me to be occurring on the surface of the glass the subject was writing on. He was "writing" on glass, wasn't he?

Anyone else agree? It appeared to be drying a bit as they wrote.

Create an Illuminating “Light Painting” Effect using After Effects and Trapcode Particular.

That is very cool.

So many great toys, so little play time :)

I certainly don't have the time for After Effects.... : (

If you don't have time for AE then you probably won't have time for my suggestion! It also involves expense in the form of BCC7/Genarts for Vegas.

I would shoot the footage of the finger writing in the air then keyframe something like the BCC Comet filter or one of the Genarts plugins like Smoke, Fireball etc (with appropriate tweaks to extend the life of the particles and their appearance), to follow the tip of the finger. You will need LOTS of keyframes to get it looking as natural as the clip shown here. A touch of glow, dropping the opacity etc should come close.

BCC has motion tracking but I'm not sure if you can map other plugins to the mocap data or whether it just features in specific BCC plugins (which I think is the case). I'm doing this from memory as I have removed the BCC/Genarts demos from my system.

If you can use the mocap data mapped onto an appropriate effect then draw a big red dot on the end of your finger to make the tracking easier. It will be masked by the light trail.

Of course you may have to put up with crashes every few minutes. I removed the demos of all OFX plugins and probably won't look at them again until I read here or elsewhere that they/Vegas work solidly together. Oh, plus they aren't cheap.

Well its not quite as neat, but its all done in Vegas.
Prob bout 90min from putting the cam on tripod until render. Worth the time? I'll give it a go in AFX and see how much faster it can be done. The keyframing takes most of the time and you have to do that in AFX as well......
but, its fun to do it in Vegas anyways.
:)


For anyone who wants to see, here's the zip

Thank you so much Gerald!
You're incredible!

Awsome!
Well done for taking the time and trouble to do it.

Very cool Gerald.

Excellent, Gerald. Thanks for sharing the veg. It wasn't until I replaced the 'handsome bloke' track with some generated media that I could see what the V E G A and S tracks were doing.

I couldn't quite work out how you had achieved the effect in the second part of your clip though. The letters looked much more 'handwritten' than in the veg (ie better). All looked excellent though - and all without third party effects. Nice work.

Thanks for the kind words people :)
Ian,
Yes, I didn't think of that, without the background media and the text set to Dodge compositing mode, they wont show correctly.
I guess the only correct way to do these with a .veg would be to have a link to any required source files so it opens exactly as intended. Then people can begin to tweak things themselves.
Still, if people want to check out the FX settings and masks etc it might lead them in directions they havent been before, which is what I'm always looking for myself.

The comp mode is carried across OK, but as you say, you need something at the bottom of it all to show it up. What should be sitting on New Track 5 at the very top of the veg?

new track 5 is just the mix down of the project to one track to enable the syncing of audio.
My PC was struggling a bit to play it all.
:)