An Explosion To Remember
Page 4 of 4
Finally let’s revisit the hole left by our explosion. Because the Shatter effect is placed on top of the original layer, there is nothing behind the explosion, except the original window. Reload the Photoshop window created earlier, and this time import the background room that you created earlier. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, just something that gives a rough illusion of depth. Place it behind the hole layer. Much better. But after an explosion of this magnitude, there should be lots of fire.
Going back to Artbeats, I selected the Fire and Smoke footage and corner pinned it into the composition, above the office layer, but still behind the hole layer. I used another Transfer Mode, but using the supplied alpha layer would also work. To make the effect more believable, duplicating and resizing the Fire and Smoke footage will give even more depth. [an error occurred while processing this directive] The only thing that I didn’t do for this shot was to include a lot of smoke pouring out of the building. This might be achieved easily with the Foam Effect plug-in inside After Effects, NewTek’s LightWave 3D HyperVoxels, or even discreet’s combustion 2.0. I’ll leave that portion of the effect up to you to create.
After all the tweaking and final adjustments, render the composition as a QuickTime movie, no compression using the DV NTSC codec, and it will import back into Final Cut Pro 3 without a problem. Don’t forget to turn the audio back on before you render.
I mentioned earlier that this tutorial can be done on either the Mac or PC, and ever since I mentioned that I have been using After Effects 5.5 on both the Mac and Windows OS, I have been flooded with e-mail from readers wanting to know which one ran better. To be honest this is like comparing apples to oranges (no pun intended). To me, they both performed exceptionally well, and After Effects runs solidly on both platforms.
But for the fanatics on both platforms, I rendered this effect out on my systems deep inside the DMN Central Division. Representing the Mac OS is Nadia, my new dual Gig G4 with 512Mb of RAM. Representing the Windows OS is Faye, my 1.4Ghz Athlon (single processor), also with 512Mb of RAM. In both renders, there were no other processor intensive programs running in the background. Nadia, running OS X, rendered this six-second, 22-frame composition in 4 minutes and 1 second. Faye, running Windows 2000, rendered the same composition in 3 minutes 58 seconds. By no means is this an accurate benchmark, but if the only thing separating these two operating systems is a few seconds per render, then I say stay on your OS of choice.
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| Click imge to view QuickTime final effect. |
Tune in next time to find out the fate of our sleuths.
Stephen Schleicher is the producer for www.digitalanimators.com and www.digitalwebcast.com. When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products he can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at stephens@digitalmedianet.com
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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