More Info. Needed On Clips

I bought this clip "animated white reflectors" because it says "put your product inside" leading one to believe it was translucent black, the only way strobe lights would be valuable.

It turns out it's solid black. I notice there's a lot of clips I would buy if I could get this answer and others. There's no info. on the clips nor any way to contact the creator. I did buy Stage Curtains that worked out great because they were semi translucent plus I was able to empty the green screen built in. Very smart clip. Although the green screen should've been a little bit darker, but who's counting.

I guess I could take more risks if you took clips back that don't end up working, do you do that?

To contact the author of a clip you can click on the user name next to "Uploaded by". On the next page there's a "Send sitemail" link that will allow you to post any message to the clip's author.

I'm not familiar with the strobes clip (love the curtains though). If the video codec is PhotoJPEG or MJPG, it is highly unlikely that there are semi-transparent areas as these codecs don't allow transparency info. Animations and PNG codecs do - but that's no guarantee that transparency is included.

I usually add "alpha channel included" in the description on my clips when it is - obviously not everyone does that. Would be nice it that kind of info was part of the tech data (and searchable, too!). Good suggestion!

By the way, most submitters here will do custom versions of animations, if there's a demand for that.

Wow, thanks a lot for all this info. And I can definitely see myself needing some of your work in the future. Right now I'm in a low budg status, but when the show goes on the air, I won't be as low and I'll be able to do a lot more custom orders.

So do you do customs? I like some of the text I saw of yours (text usually has to be custom for obvious reasons), particularly the slot machine style, that's original. I'm sure custom is more than regular, I'd like to know how much. I guess it depends on the work, I don't know if you can just plug in new text to a design like the slot machine or if you have to reinvent the entire thing. I would imagine you wouldn't for that because you did the letters, but might have to for something like the liquid gold.

I assume you are talking about "circotasu's" spot light...
https://www.pond5.com/stock-footage/65528

if you are using after effects change the "blending mode" to linear dodge, that should work. It will make the darkest areas more transparent, black will be totally invisible and greys will be semi-transparent.

I certainly do custom work. Price depends on amount of work needed and on the type of licence you need. Anything that could be used to be submitted as stock is basically in the same price range. Exclusive licence and very specialized material is more expensive.

As for customizing existing animations: Those that are available here, like the lightning series, liquid gold, slot machine... are set up in projects that allow for relatively easy customization. It's a lot more to it that just exchanging text, but it's not a re-invention either. Stop motion obviously is different - that would have to be done photo by photo which is a lot of work. But I do that, too. :)

ironstrike,

I don't have after effects, is there something equivalent in Final Cut Pro, I like the idea of getting rid of black, although FCP's opacity feature does a decent job with black, darkens the picture a little, it doesn't work with white that good.

well someone had MUSIC, I can't remember if that was you with the word MUSIC glowing, I want that and the words THE and SHOW to surround it.

No, sorry, I don't know how to use final cut pro. A lot of people on here use it though.

FCP does have compositing modes similar to After Effects. There isn't a 'linear dodge' mode. However,'add' will probably work well, and you can experiment with 'hard light', 'soft light', 'overlay' and 'screen' to see if they give the effect you're looking for.

Here's what you do. Put the spotlight clip in a track above the clip you want to add the spotlight to. Right-click on the clip in upper track and look down the pop-up menu for 'composite mode'. Hover your mouse over 'composite mode' and a submenu appears, from which you can select the compositing mode you want, such as 'add'.

I'm not an expert on how exactly each mode works so I can't give you a definite answer on what will work in your case, but a bit of experimenation ought to yield something you can use. I'm sure there are plugins available for FCP that will give more compositing modes.

Hope this helps.

Wow, I never knew about right clicking and finding composite mode, I've used everything else on the right click so far, it's about time I used this. I see add does something interesting to the coloration, I don't think it's as good as opacity, but it might work better in some instances. I was wondering, after you click add or the choices, is that it? Or can you change the levels of that add? Nothing appeared under filters so I'm assuming not.

Thanks for the info. clipper. I appreciate. I just learned motion movement the other idea, previously when I wanted to flash text, I was doing it frame by frame. There's some instance where I still have to, but that helped a lot when I found that.