If I put some text on timeline white letters and a black background.

Then put a lens flare underneath.

How do I make the lens flare light pear though only the letters.

As if I take a black piece a paper and cut out the letters in the middle and shine a flash light behind the paper.

 

Thanks Mike

Try putting the text on a matte track and see if that works.

Matte track didn't work. So I tried changing the text color to green and applied the green sceen effect. It works but not like I expected it to. I wanted to see the light shine out more outward. You just see the light behind it. I though I would try it anyway.

Thanks Mike 

You're referring to an effect called Volumetric lighting. Unfortunately, Liquid doesn't have a volumetric filter, and I don't think there's one in HFX.

I think you're looking for specific effects that are found in Sony Vegas or Boris FX.

I don't think you'll be able to do this with Liquid, unless you have a Boris Red or FX plugin. Making your letters shine with ray of lights.

 

Maybe your problem can be solved with BluffTitler. Many, many title features are available.

 

Give it a try.

Bluff Titler can do what I think you are looking for, and it's only $40.  Go to http://www.outerspace-software.com/examples.html and scroll down to Light Beams.  See if that is what you are trying to do.  The smoke effect can be removed from the title very easily.

Hope this helps,

Denny

Alternatively, you can go to http://www.pinnaclesys.com/publicsite/us/Tutorials/Online+Tutorials/ and toward the bottom of the page, you will see a tutorial titled Hot and New, Liquid Edition and the Track Matte

Denny

Thanks guys for the info. I will look into bluff titler. I saw this on youtube and wanted to recreate. I thought I saw light rays beaming out of the letters but they were not. But I think I did what they did by making the background black and the letters green and applying green sceen effect. It looks cool.

Heres the link to the youtube video it right in the begining  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SimpRgB_qcE

Thanks mike

Again, the video you are pointing to uses the matte track feature of Liquid. Just put a title with white letters from TDK on the matte track of a video track. Also create a blank title and put that on the video track itself and add the animated lens flare to it. Should take all of two minutes to create that exact effect.

Thanks Lews. I tried the matte track like you said it does look just like the video. I did not know that you had to put the text on the matte track. I was thinking in layers and the matte track in underneath. What did the matte track do to the text? How or why did it key hole the text?

 

Thanks Mike

The matte track is a special kind of track and while it appears in the timeline below the video that is keyed through the matte it makes white material on a black or alpha channel background a key source. There is also a matte track filter in the RT Clip Effects that does the same thing as the matte track.

A little info on mattes:

Mattes are from film making. When you wanted to do a composite for a film, you'd start by making a black and white film (the matte). You'd put black anywhere you wanted to hide something from the original film, and white where you wanted it show. If you wanted to make something partially transparent, you'd use a shade of gray. If you held up the B&W matte film, you'd see that the white areas are transparent, the black are opaque, and the gray areas partially transparent.

Then you'd take the original film and the matte film, layer them together, and project the result onto a new film. Anywhere that was black on the matte would prevent the original film from showing through. The result is a 3rd film that removed unwanted things from the original.

To make the composite, you'd repeat this process with the other films to be layered together. In the end, you have 2 or more films that had regions keyed out (black). Then you'd take these films and project them together onto the final film. The black areas on one film would be filled in with material from the other films.

You can still find mattes in use today in film, except instead of optically masking out areas the film and mattes are processed electronically.

For video, the reason for using mattes instead of alpha channels is simple; it's very easy to manipulate a B&W image to control the transparency. No special format is required. You can edit the matte using the same tools in the editor that you use for the original video. This makes manually editing or cleaning up a matte much simpler.

One thing I've done for titles is to use a simple B&W title from TDK, put it onto the matte track, and then put the 2D editor on it and animate the title position. This gives you a title that moves across a background video while scrolling over a second video that plays in the title. It doesn't require any special titling software, and previews in real time even on a low-end system.

Thanks Lew & Dave. This is great! I never knew what a matte track was. I never used it before. It's funny but after Dave explained it. It reminded me of when I was a kid at Universal Studios and the earthquake ride was narrated by Charton Heston and he explained map painting which seam to be similar. Also at the end of Darby O'gill and the little people DVD they explain how Walt Disney did the same effects. Thanks again much appreciated.

Thanks Mike