I’m not sure why, but I don’t instinctively think of building effects with Presets.  Yesterday on a lengthy stage day my Gaffer asked me for a cop light effect.  No problem, I’ve had cop light effects in my template forever.  Except…he wanted half the pixels to flash red twice, then the other half of the pixels to flash blue twice.  Any time you have a mixture of parameters (intensity and color) presets are the obvious answer.  It’s not at all difficult, so let’s do it.

Select your tube and put the first two pixels in red and the second two in blue.  I have color palettes for those, so here is what mine looks like: 

Next, you want to take the blue pixels to intensity 0. 

Now, select all the pixels (not the Master Intensity) and record a preset.  I’m labelling mine Cop Red. 

Next, select the red pixels and take their intensity to zero.  Select all your pixels and record a new Preset called Blackout.

Finally, select your blue cells and bring their intensity to full.  Select all pixels and record a  Preset named Cop Blue. 

Now it’s time to make the effect.  Double tap Effect to get to Effects Blind.  Create a new effect and select an Absolute Effect.  Type Action 1 Thru 8 Enter Enter to create 8 lines.  Police lights pop (rather than fade) on and off, so arrow to the right to the Time column and set them all to zero.  But if we keep the dwell the same, the effect will never have the time to show itself.  So set the Dwell to a time of 0.1. 

Last step is to go line by line and input the presets into the Level column.  Here is what the completed effect looks like. 

Go ahead and label the effect.  Now give it a test.  The only thing I dislike about the effect is you have to copy the data in each preset to each new tube you want.  Other than that, it’s simple and effective.  I think I’ll spend some time pondering what effects might be more elegant (or simply possible) with Presets.  What about you?  If you’ve been using presets in your effects for a while, share what types of effects you use them on in the comments!

Photo by Scott Rodgerson on Unsplash