I've looked around and haven't been able to find an effect like this...

I'm editing together a sweet 16 party video and I know that the girl would really like it if i could make her video look as much like the MTV show as possible. So any help would be great.

I currently use FCE 2.0 for editing and of course I have iMovie ('06?). I'd really like to be able to change the color of the sparkles too.

Thanks in advance,
Kevin

I think you'll need an application like Motion to do what you want.

Joe

I know that motion will do what I need, the problem with that is that I just don't have the funds for the final cut suit right now. I've been upgrading my hardware this past year and just can't go for a large expenditure on software right now (in a few months maybe).

Does anyone know of an in-the-mean-time solution? I could maybe spend about a hundred or one-fifty on the software for this. I was really hoping for a plugin for FCE. The effect doesn't have to be exactly like the one MTV uses, just in the ballpark. Any ideas???

Thanks again for the suggestion, Joe. I really wish that I could go that route (and I know that it is the best route). I'm just not there yet.

Thanks,
Kevin

Kevin, a standalone app like particleIllusion is typically used to create that effect. You can get a SE version for $99. Not sure if that's overkill for you, but check it out:

http://www.wondertouch.com/

For the sparkles: in iMovie, using a pure black clip, do the sparkle thing you want to do. Export that (the sparkles over a pure black background) to a quicktime clip.

Bring it into FCE in a layer and put it in a video track over the regular video...from here you can play with the color corrector on the sparkles layer.

What specifically are you looking for for making it more MTV-like...could you post a sample image that you'd like to use as a style target?

Thanks for the tip, Cole, I tried it this afternoon with some pretty good results. It may just work. After I throw together a rough cut I'll try using the effect from iMovie, but if that doesn't work it looks like Tom's idea of Wondertouch will work.

Thanks guy for the help,
Kevin