Special Effects for Video

Add a touch of Hollywood into your video!

Special effects used to be an art practiced only by highly paid Hollywood technicians with big budgets. Today, with a combination of creativity and knowledge, you can incorporate some big-budget Hollywood techniques with low budget camera tricks and editing software. Learn how your characters can burn down a house or shoot up a car without any damage. Stage gun battles without bullets, blanks, or even a sound that would alert your neighbors to your career as a movie producer. Discover how to use green screen effects to put your characters in any setting.

As a result of popular demand, the editors of Videomaker have created a DVD that goes well beyond the basics of lighting, capturing quality sound or preventing your camera from shaking. This DVD contains 8 segments that show you how to break the barriers of budget restrictions with high-tech, low budget solutions to creating special effects.

The 8 Segments Include:

#1. Natural Transition FX

Before our editors dive into the high tech end of special effects, out of respect for the art, our editors decided to show you how to make transitions with style and creativity. In this segment you will learn many low-tech ways to do transitions. Why do we start a DVD on special effects with natural transitions? Because the computerized transition effects available in the most basic and free video editing software packages are a dead giveaway of an amateur who is just starting to use the software that came with their video camera or PC. The personal computer gives us access to all kinds of tools to enhance our videos, but don’t let technology be a substitute for putting creativity and thought into your videos.

#2. Creating Sound FX Foley Style

Jack Foley was a great Hollywood master in the art of creating sound effects. Here we show you how to create your own realistic royalty free sound effects. We first demonstrate how the Foley method for creating sound effects is used to integrate sound into your video. Next we go through a list of the most common sound effects and how to re-create them in your home or studio. This one segment is worth the price of this DVD alone since you will save time looking for sound effects and money by not needing to pay for the rights to use them.

#3. Green Screen Magic Glitter FX

How to use Particle Illusion and green screens to turn your subject into a wizard or magician or fairy godmother. Learn how to adjust the settings in your editing software to get a good green screen key so you can surround your subject with a virtual set. As an extra bonus we also include a step by step tutorial using Camtasia, so you can follow the editing process on how to add this illusion to your video from beginning to end.

#4. Creating Earthquake Effects

Whether it’s a volcano, shockwave from an explosion, or an 8.0 earthquake, our editors will show you how to rock your world with simple but effective techniques to create earthquake effects. This video covers the tricks used to sell the earthquake illusion inside a building or car as well as out in the open.

#5. How to Start A Fire With Software

Adding a real fire to your video would be a very expensive and dangerous effect. This video will show you step-by-step how to create the illusion of fire at your edit bay with Adobe Premiere, wondertouch particleIllusion, and Adobe Photoshop. It may take some time to make the fire look more realistic, but it’s definitely the better way to go if pyrotechnic experts and firefighters are not in your budget.

#6. Hit by a Car

A quick look at the year-to-year statistics from the National Highway Transportation Safety administration will show you there are over 100,000 car collisions with pedestrians and bicyclists every year. This video shows you how to re-create this common and life-changing effect without raising your insurance rates. This segment shows two methods for faking a person being hit by a car. The first method uses Adobe Photoshop and editing software and requires time and effort to add detail and realism. The second method uses camera angles to imply that someone has been hit.

#7. Gunshot FX

If you used real guns, blanks, or bullets to put a shooting scene in your videos, your neighbors would probably call the police. With post-production editing techniques you can have your shoot out anytime of the day or night and be as quiet as a church mouse. This video shows you how to add gun muzzle flashes and sounds to your video so you can make your gangster video anytime without disturbing anybody.

#8. Bullet Hole Special Effects

Learn the craft of making bullet holes appear suddenly using F/X to show something being shot up or someone being shot at. This segment compliments the previous segment and allows you to create the perception of bullets hitting cars, glass, buildings and/or the ground. See step-by-step how we use Adobe Premiere and Adobe Photoshop to create mayhem in your video without causing any damage.

Bonus Material

As a special bonus, we have included step-by-step screen recorded presentations of how we produced some of these special effects using Adobe Premiere, Adobe Photoshop and wondertouch particleIllusion. Sit back and relax as we show you the process of creating images and placing them with sounds into your video. Once you understand the basics of adding special effects into the timeline, the only limit to what you can do with special effects is your imagination.

We know special effects is a hot topic and at first we had difficulty keeping this DVD in stock. Although we considered raising the price, We decided rather to keep this DVD at the same low price of $24.95. Order today and add that little touch of spice that could advance your project from a good video production to a great one.