~~~Adobe Products "Jump to Lightspeed" effect~~~

ok heres the .mov, sor 3 I believe.

click

and of course, thanks to Golden_Y for being so kind as to host it.

 

hey thats looks good....better than anything i can do
-bert

 

Hey guys.....

Just now I was watching the lightspeed scenes in RotJ (When the whole fleet travels to the Death Star II) and noticed something kinda painful.


The stars and the lightspeed lines don't match; they weren't from the same picture. Now, it cuts so quickly that no one can tell, but we've been working soooooooooo hard to make this work from an existing shot.

I like your style Antilles; how'd you do that
?


I just thought of another way we could do this, actually. Like JUST NOW. We shoud use shape-keyframed white masks like in Ryan's AE tutorial. Start as small dots, and leave them for a few seconds, then pop in a keyframe then and one at the end. Make the second keyframe really long little lines. Wouldn't that work? I'll post my results later on today, after I get home and fiddle a little bit.


Peace; Fig

 

yeah, do you really want to mask like 200 stars separately? Thats a separate mask for each star. And then another mask thats elongated for each star? and remember they have to come from the direct center of the screen. Anyway, it might take you a while, but good luck.

 

since there might be renewed interest in this thread, i should tell you that it looks better if you bring the rendered video from 3ds max into After Effects and duplicate the footage layer, but blur is slightly, change the white to blue, and turn both layers' transfer mode to add.

 

I will talk with my After Effects Instructer durring class tomorrow. and see what we can come up with.

for the spinning blue of traveling through lightspeed I am working on something wiuth combustion....

 

Ugh, here's a quick version of lightspeed in After Effects I talked about earlier.

Lightspeed.

 

Ugh, here's a quick version of lightspeed in After Effects I talked about earlier

That looks *really* good - great work!

 

The original jump to lightspeed effect was achieved by the same optical "slit-scan" technology that Douglas Trumbull used in the "stargate" sequence near the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What they most likely did, which explains why the stars and lines don't match up (though I'm working on a tutorial that has a way of matching them up and keeping everything simple and scalable right within Premiere itself), is they had a background plate of the stars... then a separate slit-scan camera where a slit in front of the lens is moved slowly while the shutter speed is set to a long exposure... so that the shutter stays open longer as the slit is moved on a roll... and the light bulbs or whatever they were, were moved towards the camera... in the final print, the end result is like what happens if you take a photograph of cars zooming by with a long exposure... obviously the tail-lights leave streaks, right? Except if you're shooting with a motion picture camera instead of a 35mm still camera at a very low frame rate and long exposure... you get the streaks, but you're capturing the motion of them, as well.

Try to keep this in mind when tring to achieve something that resembles the original effect... rather than necessarily resorting to CG for everything under the sun. My personal opinion is that I see far too much CG in fan films, and films in general... and CG lends itself to things not looking like they're quite there. I guess my rule of thumb is... if your effect looks cheesy with the resources you have, don't use it. It ends up detracting from the story. But that's just my personal view on cinematography and storytelling through film.

I'm trying to use a simple matte technique to achieve the same effect in Premiere alone... I just have to do some tweaking to the matte right now to make it look right, and then I'll be able to post a tutorial or something.

 

I totally agree with you snow dog... peole these days don't like using there minds for creativity, they want the comp to work for them.

-Josh

 

Sorry to dredge up this old thread but i have a new version of the lightspeed effect using 3d Studio Max...

here

avi, divx5, 1.60 mb

I should have made it a .mov for the Mac guys, sorry!

a very special thanks to Brentk7 for hosting it at fanflicks!

 

Hey, old threads aren't bad. Just old.

But I understand how completely dumb you feel posting here again, where people would have liked you better if you made a new thread.



J/K...

Fig

 

I thought the thing looked good. BUT , Maybe it was just my monitor, but it seemed that the streakes appeared form stars that weren't there... also, I think the star streaks were too thick... I mean, if ya watch those hyperspace jumps, half the effect is coming out od hyperspace. Cus those star streakes lingered too long imo.

-Josh

 

Oh, yeah. Really great. But the lines do linger really long.


Fig

 

I'm aware they linger too long, the clip was made specifically so you can cut at any time. Thats also why the stars don't elongate for about 2 seconds. Usually, you would cut out of it halfway through the clip (half length) to an outside shot of the ship disappearing etc etc. And about the thickness, yeah, thats perspective for you. Unfortunately, at this time, theres no way to change that. The good thing is, however, if you cut out of it when you're supposed to, the thickness is not apparent, and not a problem.

And also, someone mentioned that maybe a few stars elongate out of nothing, you may be talking about the ones closest to the center. I had to make those stars very very thin, otherwise, when they are elongating, they would cover half the screen with their thickness. But regardless, in the hyperspace jumps in the movies, stars do appear out of nothing (or very very faint stars). Anyways, hope you liked it.

 

if you are talking about first person view, in AE try going to blur, radial blur zoom. Douplicate the layer and set the top layer to screen, repeat if needed