Matrix Effect

There is a scene from the 1st Matrix movie where an agent is dodging bullets up on a roof top. As the agent dodges, his upper body splits into 4 ghost versions of himself, while his lower body remains constant and smooth. How can this effect be done using Final Cut Pro 4 or 5?

Christ, you're trying to use a $1000 application to do those effects?

Perhaps some more constructive device....

It would require a locked down camera and or motion tracking camera against a green screen...carefully marking off where the actor stood so you could replicate the movement and then disolve in each version of the actor moving in other directions and changing the opacity or transfer mode (screen - hard light etc) to create the ghost effect - certainly doable on a 1000.00 application - even the free IMOVIE if you were skillful in how you shot it -- as for the slow mo and "round the actor in freeze frame" trick - that's a bit more complicated -- they did it with a good number of still cameras rigged to fire off in sequence put in the line with the actual motion picture camera so when they froze one frame they could jump to the next still frame and circle the actor as if that person and everything in the scene froze.

Andy

You are asking quite a lot from an NLE. The application has nothing to do with the actual effect of the shot. You have to shoot each object (I would suggest greenscreen @ 60 fps) in each position and composite it all together - time remapping the ftg to get a smooth slomo. After Effects Pro is the perfect app for this.



When life gives you dilemmas...make dilemmanade.

Sorry, the question had me weirded out...

If the background of the shots are identical, ie. an immobile camera, then you can probably composite multiple shots of the actor. With the legs staying still, though, chances are you'd shoot that as a separate element, perhaps even use a still. But Final Cut really wasn't designed to do anything as advanced as this -- if you're trying to approximate a 'draft' version of the effect, all well and good, but if you're trying to make it look as slick as in The Matrix, I don't think FCP can do it. It just doesn't have enough options on the effects front.