Hi,

So I just made a b/w film. 

A friend lent me a 'dust effect' .mov which seems to consist of white particles blowing past a black background. Very pretty.

I put it on V2, applied a Matte Key and called-up the Effects Pallette.

However after applying Swap Sources. Show Alpha and fiddling with Level, it seems there's a trade-off between seeing the background and seeing the particles. 

If you foreground the former you can't see the latter and vice versa.

There's a middle ground but would involve massively increasing the brightness on the initial track, which might cost definition, contrast, etc. 

Is this the only way to do it?

Fine if so, but just need to know.

My lovely friend who has little edit training seems to have achieved it in a heartbeat on (boo) FCP X.

Maybe (boo) FCP X is set up for this. I don't know.

Any thoughts most welcome,

Thanks,

J x

Hi Joe,

The Matte key is designed to enable you to cut through one video layer, to see another one underneath.  So you can either put a white (or another colour) underneath your main video  and put the dust matte on V3,

OR - far simpler  - use Luma Key instead of Matte key on the dust clip on V2.

Hi,

Thanks, I just had a play with the Luma Key and it seems to work better.

What's the difference in principle?

It still steals brightness from the original image but I guess that's just the deal. 

I added another track and boosted the Brightness/Gamma back up without too much loss of detail.

Thanks,

J