Tutorial: Red Giant VFX Suite

Reflection

The next effect that I used on this clip is Reflection. I didn’t know the best way to use reflection within the context of this clip, so I kind of went David Lynch with it and just made something that would somewhat disturbing. I superimposed this angled, distorted reflection onto the original shot and animated it across the screen (Figure 8, below). There are many different parameters within this effect that allow you to tailor it to your shot.

Figure 8. The Reflection effect

Supercomp

Finally, let’s look at one of the biggest effects within the VFX Suite: Supercomp. Red Giant graciously provided a comp and some media to work with Supercomp. Opening up the Supercomp panel, you’ll find it familiar if you’re used to other Red Giant plugins. It shares similarities in font, colors and general design scheme.

Supercomp is just that: a composition tool to streamline combining multiple elements into one final shot. In this case, we’re using all of these different elements to make this giant robot look really cool and hopefully very realistic (Figure 9, below).

Figure 9. The Supercomp effect

Let’s look at the layers. First, there’s the robot’s sword. It has two effects: layer glow and optical glow. I chose a purple color and again noticed that the color wheels in Supercomp are very similar to Colorista, another Red Giant effect.

For the fire layer, I added a heat blur. This doesn’t look like much here, but in the final comp, it makes the objects behind the fire distorted as if you were looking through some really intense heat.

With the eyes, I just added some glow to draw them out. They’re so tiny in the shot, and I wanted them to be more dynamic.

For the robot, I added quite a few effects. I added light wrap, reverse light wrap, volume fog, and diffusion. With all of these combined, the robot should look much more convincing in the real world environment he’s supposed to inhabit. Light wrap is similar to a rim light that you would see in backlit situations. And the volume fog adds some mystery by allowing the light behind him in the shot to create rays as if he were really there.

Finally, I added some blur to the mist and a purplish hue to the background plate for an unearthly palette. With all of these effects in place, the final product look like Figure 10 (below).

Figure 10. The robot with all of the Supercomp effects applied

And that’s a quick overview of what’s new in the VFX Suite from Red Giant.