• Adobe After Effects

  Echo effect question

  Posted by Robert Such on October 14, 2012 at 5:49 am

  I looked at other CC posts about the Echo effect and watched the CC video about applying the effect, but am still having no luck getting it to work.

  I have a shot of the moon crossing the sky and want to add a fading trail of repeated moons following it.

  Could someone walk me through how to use the Echo effect, please? Do I have to mak the moon? Pre-compose first?…

  Thanks.

  Erik Waluska replied 13 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 5 Replies
• 5 Replies

• 

  Erik Waluska

  October 14, 2012 at 3:02 pm

  Is your moon shot an animation or a live video of the moon? To get the effect you’re after you’ll need to isolate the moon first.

  If it’s an animation then pre-comp the moon animating across the sky and apply echo to the pre-comp. If it’s a video, then you would need to isolate the moon with a mask and pre-comp it and then apply echo to the pre-comp.

  Then duplicate the moon animation/video pre-comp, remove the echo effect, and put it on top of the echoed pre-comp layer so you’ll have a clean copy with no blending or echoes for the main moon.

  One problem you may run into is that the echo effect won’t be fully displayed until you are several seconds into the animation since it’s referencing an earlier point in the timeline to create the copies, so you may need to create an animation where the moon starts out of frame to account for this.

  Another option is to just make duplicates of the isolated moon animation/video and stagger them in time, reducing the opacity on the trailing copies as needed.

  Check out this project file and see if this helps to understand how it works.

  4796_moonechoexamplecs5.aep.zip

  HTH
• 

  Robert Such

  October 14, 2012 at 4:42 pm

  Thanks, I got it to work by switching to Maximum. Not sure Comp in Front doesn’t work. What does Maximum (and Minimum for that matter) actually mean?

  > One problem you may run into is that the echo effect won’t be fully displayed until you are several seconds into the animation since it’s referencing an earlier point in the timeline to create the copies, so you may need to create an animation where the moon starts out of frame to account for this.

  I am seeing this, will do that…
• 

  Erik Waluska

  October 14, 2012 at 5:23 pm

  Here’s an explanation of each setting from AE help:
  https://help.adobe.com/en_US/aftereffects/cs/using/WS09B6A698-8F9E-4a00-8D1B-07FC62FB2D30a.html

  They are basically blending modes applied to the copies. I would recommend screen mode and also duplicating a copy of the moon pre-comp with no echo and placing it over the echoed layer like in the example project in my previous post.
• 

  Robert Such

  October 14, 2012 at 8:14 pm

  Thanks.

  I duped the JPEG sequence onto layer 2 on top. Changed the layer mode to Multiply, and set the Echo Operator (on layer 1) to Maximum.

  Looks to work okay.
• 

  Erik Waluska

  October 14, 2012 at 11:39 pm

  Great, glad to hear you got it working.

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