Lightsabers Are EASY In Final Cut Pro 10.6 NO PLUGINS!

today we are gonna make lightsabers in final cut pro without any plugins so i have this random shot that i downloaded off of youtube hopefully they don't get too mad that i'm using their sword fighting clip all we're going to do is get our clip down in the timeline go on up to your titles and generators and scroll down to find your solids look up for the custom solid and then we're going to shorten this down you can do option and right bracket and that will trim it down to the length of your clip from there we can go into our generator options here and set the color to something like white or we'll go ahead and do a blue from there we're going to want to go down to our effects inspector and we're going to look up the draw mask drop that on there and it's important you do this in this order then we're going to look up the neon effect which is brand new and final cut pro 10.6 and we're gonna drop that onto our custom object there now we're gonna go over to our video inspector select our draw mask and just create four points it doesn't matter where we're gonna move them a little bit later perfect we now have a basic lightsaber so you're going to want to find your starting frame here and i'm going to just drag these points to be over the top of where we want our lightsaber to be now i'm going to drop the opacity completely so i can see exactly where my points need to be and it's going to be important that you match the motion blur of your scene so you can see how the shape of his sword is kind of this broader shape at this end and narrow at this end that is going to really add some nice dynamics to your animation and speaking of animation how do we animate this well you're going to come on over to the control points and click this keyframe button and now you can jump forward a frame and adjust these points to match wherever the sword is so you can just go through frame by frame dragging these points this is a tedious process for sure but if you do it well it's going to look so good and you are going to have an epic lightsaber and one thing i would quickly add is that you can actually animate the fill opacity to 0 when it goes behind him and then add another keyframe and animate it back up to 100 um and that'll give the illusion of it going behind him sometimes the lightsaber will technically need to be passing behind him but will still slightly be visible so this is how you add a mask really quickly so right here technically it should be passing behind him instead of in front of him you could push option click and drag and put that above and we can just do a really quick draw mask on this upper layer here and i'll just make it super basic right around him just like that and then you could feather it quite a bit maybe drag the fall off down and then we can cut off the frames before and the frames after so that it passes behind him and looks a bit more realistic so that is how you can do some quick masking also let me show you how you can make this lightsaber look a bit more implemented into the scene first we're going to want to work with the blend mode so if we come down to our compositing blend mode we'll just set it to add and that will help it have a little bit more of a glow effect in the scene also we could push option click and drag and we'll just duplicate this lightsaber and now we're going to go into the color and change it to white so now it's got a nice white glow with a blue outer edge which looks a little bit closer to what the movies do now this is a little bit intense so we can come back here and dial down the opacity and that should make it implement a lot better so basically from this point you would just replicate all of these steps for the red lightsaber and you would be set so that wraps up making lightsabers without any plugins but don't leave just yet because i am going to show you a plug-in that is going to help tremendously make these even better so what we're going to do is use mflare for my friends at motionvfx i actually purchased this with my own money but i do have an affiliate link and if you use that that does help me out tremendously anyway we're gonna come forward to the places of impact and we'll just mark it with m and you'll just go through and find all of yours impact zones here now we are just gonna scroll down and find mflare 2. you can see we have so many flares to work with i really like the space radiation one so we are just going to drag that onto our clip and you can see we have full control here we can drag this flare wherever we want we can drag the actual additional flare over here we can change the color of it to whatever we like and it does have a really really solid tracker built into it so you can use that to get the flare tracked into a scene very very quickly so all we are going to do is find our places of impact we will add a keyframe to our brightness to make sure it's that full hundred actually we'll drag it up to 200 we'll go back a frame or two and we'll set it to zero so that it just ramps up to full impact and then we'll go forward a couple frames with the arrow keys and drop it back down to zero and that's just gonna give us that illusion of impact really quick so i have all of those added in and you can see how amazing this plug-in is at adding the energy to this scene so the last step would be to add in some sound effects which i just did a quick google search there are tons of free lightsaber sound effects online so make sure you go and download those add them to your scene and you will be set with an epic lightsaber battle so that wraps up the lightsaber tutorial however there was a ton of extra stuff i did with particle effects and stuff like that so i created an extension of this tutorial for my patrons over on patreon.com so if you're interested in that make sure you go check out my patreon thank you so much for watching and i can't wait to see you in the next one

Channel: The Final Cut Bro

Views: 3,435

Keywords: The Final Cut Bro, final cut pro x, tutorial

Id: 4m-gODw7WOc

Length: 6min 18sec (378 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 29 2021