Muzzle Flash

luger · Post by **luger** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 12:01 am

I followed the instructions on this site to add muzzle flash in adobe premiere,and when the timeline goes past where I put the image it just shows an x in the upper left hand corner, is there any way I can fix this?

DEDFX · Post by **DEDFX** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 1:20 am

There's an X there because there's no video there. It won't show up in your completed video, don't worry.

Epsilon · Post by **Epsilon** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 7:11 am

If you are using Adobe 6.5 or prior, you must render a preview file before the effect will display.

luger · Post by **luger** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 5:19 pm

Thanks alot for your help

UFProductions · Post by **UFProductions** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 8:17 pm

From another post I made in a different topic:

UFProductions wrote:First off you'll need a good photo editing program, I use Adobe Photoshop CS, but any program with adjustable layers and opacity will work equally well. The first step is to get your footage into Pinnacle and do all the initial editing, but no colour correction or effects. Now split the clip at precicesly the moment the flashes are to occur; just watch for the first frame of recoil in the frame by frame, then back up by a single frame. Take a screenshot of this frame, and save the files somewhere you'll remember them. Open these files in Photoshop and start painting in the flashes. I used to use stock pictures, but I've found better more variated results can be achieved through doing them by hand, and it doesn't take much longer anyhow. Play around until you get a nice looking flash, now comes the best part: using the burn/dodge tool highlight areas of the environment that would be illuminated by the flash (faces, wall etc...) It doesn't have to be perfect, the frame is only up for a split second, but it makes the difference. So do this for all of your muzzle flashes, save 'em as JPEG's and open them up in Pinnacle. Insert the pictures between the split clip where they came from and set them to appear for no more than 2 frames. After this do your colour correction to all of the footage including the pictures, with the exception of brightness being about 10% higher on the muzzle flash frames. Toss in your gun sounds, it's nice and easy to find the places with the split clips, and there you go: perfection! Sounds like a lot of work, but with having done it for several shoots I can edit a firefight in about 10 minutes.

Explaination is for Pinnacle Studio 9, but can be adapted to work with any editing program that allows for still images and screen-captures.