Final Effects Complete 5 Sparks - Olympic Promo Tutorial

By John Lafauce

The Beijing Olympics may have ended but your gold medal imagination doesn't have to. The 2012 games in London should provide plenty of inspiration for your ideas and Boris Final Effects Complete 5 Sparks can help you realize them - quickly and easily. FEC 5 is a suite of third-party ADN Sparks® plug-ins designed for Linux-based Autodesk Flint, Flame, Fire, Inferno, and Smoke systems.

The Tutorial

The following tutorial will turn a static, plain graphic and title into an eye-catching promo with the help of FEC 5 Stylize filters, FEC Presets, and an FEC Automatic Wipe transition. This tutorial was created in Autodesk Flame Batch.

To demonstrate FEC's ease-of-use, no parameters were keyframed for this tutorial, but feel free to animate any FEC control you wish.

1. In Flame Batch mode load the following HD 1920x1080 media from the Library:

A black-and-white still of the Olympic Rings

An exterior Artbeats clip of Big Ben and London

The Look

The nice thing about FEC is, even if you don't have fancy graphics to work with, there are filters available that can transform your plain source material into total eye candy. Since we are starting with a colorless, flat image of the Olympic Rings, let's add some color and dimension to it.

2. From the Batch node bin, drag a Spark to your desktop, which enters you into Sparks Browser mode. Navigate to the FEC_Stylize category and select FEC_3D_Relief.

3. Attach the source media to the inputs of FEC_3D_Relief Spark. Make sure the Olympic Rings are connected to the Front and Matte Inputs, while London is the Background.

We will not be using a PC Layer (to learn more about this feature, refer to the Pixel Chooser Help documentation) for this effect but the input requires an image anyway. All FEC Spark Inputs require an image regardless if you use them or not.

4. Double-click the FEC_3D_Relief node and select Edit to enter the parameters module.

5. From the Preset pulldown menu, select the Thin_Stark_Blues preset. The Rings now have a light blue edge against a darker, gradated blue background.

Now that we've added some color to the rings, let's stylize them.

6. From the Batch node bin, drag a Spark to your desktop, navigate to the FEC_Stylize category and select FEC_Glass.

7. Connect the output of FEC_3D_Relief to the Front, Background and Bump Map inputs of FEC_Glass spark. The Olympic Rings should be connected to the Matte input.

8. Double click the FEC_Glass node and select Edit to enter the parameters module.

9. Invert the Matte input.

Feel free to load any of the pre-made filter presets or create your own glassy look from scratch by tweaking the various controls.

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