Border filter with lightwave effects

Has Graeme or anyone less clever than Graeme devised a border filter or video generator that resembles a metallic picture frame with lightwave spotlight effects?


I hope you have been watching the local stations new DTV channels. As they have been rolling out HD 16:9, they have had to devise ways to still be able to use old 640x480 4:3 or 720x480 3:2 footage in the new 16:9 format.

Most put those old video clips inside a metallic picture frame, with a Lightwave type reflective animated spotlight going up and down the frame.

The old 4:3 or 3:2 content fits inside of this metallic picture frame... which they then place on top of a 16:9 format background of static or animated fill color, or fabric or texture.

I have done this with success in FCP using the border effects basic border and bevel border... the those effects are not metallic frames and do not have lightwave spotlight effects. I have made some static picture frames and stacked them under the old format clip in FCP with success.

But now I want it ALL, in one - clip, metallic picture frame and lightwave effect.

What to the experts think we should do to replicate this effect the HD TV stations are using with their fancy hardware and software?

Make the graphic in Photoshop. Then, simulate a spotlight effect by animating a soft circle gradient with a composite mode applied (either FCP or Motion). If that is too much for you to handle, check out [www.digitaljuice.com]. They have tons of this stuff already pre-built for you.

Or open Livetype and go to Objects > Metallic. There's a bunch of shiny animated borders and plates there that you can squish, slow down, speed up, change the colour of, cut holes in and so on to do what you need.

Oh yeah. Forgot about the ol' Objects. Plenty of metal frames there.

Oh, but they're SO funky and clunky...

Not at all elegant like KCBS2 uses on their newscasts...

I'll keep checking out the ideas and let you all know, as always...

I'm not suggesting you use the stocks as they are - you have to do a BIT of the work if you don't want to pay any money.

Somehting like this? I just cropped a silver stock from Livetype, added a tint to a second version and put an inverted four point garbage matte inside them both. If you spent more time you could make something a lot nicer.

[s149.photobucket.com]

Hey Jude

That is awesome...

can you put the LT doc somewhere so I could study it more intensely?

Thanks nick@triangledream.com

Well I did most of the work in FCP, so the Livetype doc won't really help. I've also tossed the FCP document, but all I did was, in Livetype, choose one of the silver 'stocks' and make it as big as I could. Then I sent this file to FCP.

In FCP I cropped the rounded edges off so that the stock was square. Then I added a four point garbage matte and inverted it - the inversion is just a check box in the four point garbage matte filter. This makes the middle of the square transparent. There's a version of this in a tutorial of mine here : [www.kenstone.net] . It's right down the bottom - the section with the red car in the blue background.

Then I made a copy of the silver box, scaled it up a bit and put it underneath the first box. Then added a tint filter so that it looked more brassy. I also added a black box between the two, but this is optional.

Hope this helps