Here’s a new two-part tute on how to create a laser effect that burns your text into a sheet of metal. While this can be achieved using CS3, it’s a lot easier with the Convert Text to Masks option in CS4 and CS5, so I’m using CS5 for this one.
I ran over a bit on part two and had to butcher it to fit into the 15-minute limit – so it’s a bit choppy, and I cut out the parts where I added a flicker to the laser highlight, masked the smoke layers, and re-adjusted the keyframe positions on the Opacity values.
The full project file is available from here – though it’s probably not that useful as you’ll need to manually keyframe the effect position to match the text you’re using.
And here’s part two:
