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Hey and welcome to another fun tutorial
and today I'm going to show how you can create
this cool effect here. Where you can have this
flame in your hand and it looks pretty realistic actually.
How come these effects are all some stuff you
can't actually have in real life?
I always feel stupid calling them realistic.
Who cares? Let's get started!
Now there's a similar tutorial to this one online already,
but I've changed a few things and I think it's
easier to make that way, in case you know the other one.
Just in case.
So, we have the hand footage here.
I'm just going to drag that to a new composition,
on the 'new comp' button.
And this is footage from videocopilot.net.
And I don't have any footage of a hand myself.
Unfortunately if I did it would be really bad quality,
so sorry, but I'm not using that. I don't wanna...
That's embarassing for me.
I haven't got my new camera yet.
So I've got this footage from videocopilot.net,
this is Sam Moya's hand. It was in the bug tutorial,
where you got bugs crawling on your face or
up your arm. And this is the footage from that.
You can download it as well, it's in the project files
for that tutorial on videocopilot.net, which
I'm already saying for the 3rd time, I just noticed...
Who cares, let's get started.
Now what you want to do first is you have your footage
and you want to track it.
So you're going to go
'Window' and open the 'Tracker Controls'.
Now you're going to go to 'Track Motion',
zoom in here a bit, select this track point
just scale it up a bit.
And move it to those points over there, for example.
These work pretty well, not always, but they
sometimes do. And because I don't want this tutorial
to waste any time, I've already created that tracker.
Well, I'm going to copy the one from the preview
I just showed you and we'll use that one instead
for this tutorial. What you have to do
is you just basically set it here and you create a
new 'Null object' in your composition and once
you've got a track you just click on
the 'Analyze Forward' button here when you're on the
first frame and analyze this footage and then you can
apply this data, you can edit this target, make sure
it's the null and apply the data.
And that's how you would then have your tracker
null object. Now I'm going to just take the one
from the other composition. I'm going to go to
Edit -> Copy, and paste this null object in here.
I'm just going to call it 'Tracker'.
And you basically, when I turn the visibility on here,
it's stuck to my footage, basically to the middle of the hand.
I didn't track all the way, I tracked to like...
I'm going to stop this at 2 seconds, press the 'End' key
to end this here.
At 2 seconds, and now we've got the footage tracked.
So, our next step would be to import the flame footage.
Now there's footage like this on detonationfilms...
Oops, that was a mistake, sorry.
We pull it into our composition down here.
There's footage like this on detonationfilms.com.
You can just go there and download it. It's a really
cool website with lots of flames and gunshots.
I really recommend it.
We're going to set this layer's transfer mode to
'Add', so that the black disappears.
And this label down here, from detonationfilms,
that's only on the very first few frames,
it ends right about here.
And because this is fairly long footage,
we're going to drag it back until we've got this
one spot that we want.
There's a spot at the end where it just blows up
and then burns for quite some time.
So we'll go there, at this moment, and we're going
to drag it up into the middle of our hand.
Then, holding one of these corners, and the Shift key
on your keyboard, you can scale it up with
a uniform scale, so it doesn't distort anything.
And we're going to make it even bigger and that should fit.
And this is important, you're going to have take
the 'pig whip' and parent this to the tracker
so that it also follows the tracking null object and
it stays on the hand the entire time.
Now I'm going to pull it up even a bit further there.
So it's in the middle of the hand, and I think that
fits pretty well.
So, now make sure you've got the flame footage selected
and we're going to Effect -> Color Correction -> Curves
and we're going to add some contrast.
So drag this up a bit, this down, just a tiny bit.
So you can see a difference here, just a tiny bit.
In contrast difference. It's not that great, but
makes it look a bit better.
And also Effect -> Blur and Sharpen -> Sharpen
Because it's slightly blurred we're going to add a value
of 25 and that brings back some of the details.
You can see there.
Ok, we're done with the flame footage.
Now, some people like to stop at this step.
It looks like he has a flame in the hand, it doesn't
look that realistic, it doesn't really look like anything.
It looks really composited and fake.
So we're going to add a New -> Solid
We're going to call this 'Orange Glow' and
in the color selection make sure you get a color like this.
I chose 250, 150 and 15 for the RGB values,
you can just use them as well.
'Make Comp Size' and 'Ok'.
Now I'm just going to leave the tracker at the top
and we're going to turn off the visibility for this layer
for a second and take our pen tool and we're going
to draw a quick mask here on the hand.
Something like that.
Turn the visibility back on and you see we've got that.
Now that looks really really odd, so we're going to go to
Have this layer selected and hit 'M' 'M' and
the mask feather, we'll feather this out a bit.
And then with this layer selected hit Shift + T, which
also opens the opacity, and we're going to pull this down
all the way to 37%, that's what I chose for
the previous composition.
We have that now.
And also we're going to change the mode to 'Add',
so instead of that normal orange dark type,
we have a "glowy", I don't know how to describe this.
More like glow on the hand actually.
This is one of the important steps, go to
Effect -> Stylize -> Glow
And I'm not going to change it to this simple
glow here, we're going to go to alpha channel, which
makes that ring there.
And now, we're going to set the glow threshold all
the way up to 95% to pull that ring in there, maybe
even a bit more, just so we get that ring in the middle there.
And I might pull this over a bit, it doesn't have to fit
perfectly on the hand like I added earlier.
The glow radius we're going to push up to 92,
so we've got the ring blurred out.
And the intensity we'll also pull up to 8.
So it's really bright, this already looks a lot better.
It's important what I just missed here, is that
the glow is below the flame.
Did that even make a difference now?
That's odd, oh well...
The glow also has to be parented to the tracker,
so that it moves with the hand.
And now this looks really cool.
There's only one thing we're still missing, and that
is a flicker on the glow, so that it looks bit more
realistic. For that we're going to open
the opacity and instead of adding keyframes
that affect the opacity we're going to Alt + Click
on the little stopwatch and we're going to add
a wiggle expression.
And the one we're going to add is wiggle(10,10)
and hit Enter on the numpad.
What this does is it changes the opacity value
10 times a second it changes it by 10 percent.
And this is from my limited experimentation with
the first test... This seems to look pretty cool.
If I do a quick RAM-Preview, we can see how this
turns out. That looks pretty cool.
Maybe we can go back into our orange glow
and turn up the threshold, oh we can't pull
that any further, we have to make the mask a bit smaller.
If I think about it, it looks okay, as long as this ring
doesn't go off the hand. We've got the nice glow
around on the fingers, over here and over there.
On the thumb here, it looks really cool.
If you found this tutorial any helpful, please go and
visit my blog [no longer online, sorry].
That's my YouTube username, on the blog
you can view my tutorials, you've got these
embedded right here in the YouTube player.
And if you go to fullscreen, you won't see this very
well, but this is HD, you'll see this really good.
It lags a bit too, because I'm recording, but you
can watch this tutorial in HD from a really
fast server at YouTube, I really recommend it.
I'm going to go to the homepage right now.
There's all my tutorial, please visit, comment and
tell me what you think.
Thanks for watching, bye :)