Hey guys, this is Eric from Final Cut Studio School. And I got an email from a guy who wants to know how to do a spotlight effect on a video on how to move the spotlight around. So I'm going to show you how I do it. He say he knows how to make the spotlight but he really needs help to keep framing it. So I'm just going to go through it from the beginning and show you how I go about doing it. So, what I want to do is I'm going to bring this picture down here. Now I got a picture in my scene I'm not going to worry about rendering it out because we’re not going to worry about editing it. I'm just going to show you how to do the spotlight. So now, the first thing we want to do is add some slug. So go to your little film strip here, blow your viewer, click it scroll down to slug and select that.

This will throw a black slug in your canvas. Now drag and drop that on top of your clip, on to track two. Now you have this black slug over top of your clip. So now what we want to do is we want to add a filter to the slug. So go to your effects scroll down until you find matte and under matte you’ll se mask shape. Take your mask shape drag and drop it onto your slug. Now you’ll see how this come up into view. Double click your slug to load it into the viewer. I'm mean you’ll see this little black in your canvas. I'm sorry. Double click your slug to load it into the viewer, and click on your filters tab. Under your filters tab you’ll see the settings for the mask shape you just drag down on top of your clip onto track two.

I'm going to set it to rectangle, round, or actually let’s set it to oval that would be even better. Okay now that we have this set to oval I want to select invert. Now, this is what we have. What we want to do now is we want to go down into our timeline and we’ll have this little black line. This is our opacity line and we can take it and drag it down like this. Watch as I do this, when I let go it’s going to adjust the opacity of that slug. Now you can see it’s see through. Or alternatively, you can go to your motion tab, scroll the opacity triangle down adjust it with the slider.

As you can see when I move the slider, this line down here are dynamically adjusts. You might not be able to see that in YouTube. Okay, so you want to set this to about where you—you know, think it looks good, it’s all up to taste. So now we can adjust our spotlight by going into our filters and adjusting our horizontal and vertical scale. Now, as you can see, our spotlight is in the wrong spot. We want to put in the right spot, we want to put it over this woman right here. So I'm going to go over to my filters tab and select the center button. We want to do this little red cross up here, I want to put it where I want it. Okay, so now one of your edges on your mask are just a little bit too much for you.

Well you can go back over to your effects, go back into your matte folder and select mask feather, drag and drop it into your slug. And when you bring up the softness you’ll see the edges of the clip are softened so now let’s go back key framing this. Yes I’ll go ahead and save it so you’ll stop bugging me. Let’s go ahead and key frame this now. It’ll park your play head wherever you want the movement to begin. Say the spotlight starts out up here on say at the person. If it has a person on top of this cliff, let’s assume and put it up here. So now we want to set a key frame for that. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to hit this little key frame button right here beside the center, like that, and it will set this little half diamond right here, it’s a key frame. Move forward in your timeline to where you want the spotlight to move to. Hit your center button and drag the spotlight to where you want it to move like down here to her. And that will set another key frame.

Now if you watch when I scroll between those two key frames it moves you see. It gets there, it will freeze and I can come here, you can set another key frame because you want it to hold on her for a few seconds then you can come up a little bit more. Hit your center button again, move it back up to the top of the hill, and it will hold there. So as you can see, it’s up to the top, it’s coming down to her, it’s going to hold, then it goes back up to the top of the hill. And that’s basically how you do it. It is that simple. Nothing to it, really, really easy stuff so I really hope you’ve learned something. I hope you got something out of this. If you have any questions all my contact information is on my web page or just get a hold of me right here on YouTube that’s probably the best place to get a hold of me anyway here on YouTube so hope you guys learned something and we’ll see you next time.