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making video into a cartoon – coming soon….
Hi folks-
Thanks to some folks at adobe (Bruce Bowman, who came up with the idea, and Mitch Wood who further enhanced it) and Creative Cow Leader Tim Kurkoski (for his technical assitance), I was able to further develop a way to create cartoons from video footage using only After Effects and Illustrator CS2 – no special 3rd-party filters:
https://www.allbetsareoff.com/Cow_Stuff/Full_Ad_12_FPS.mov
The process is still in the experimentation phase – The frantic/noisy nature of the colors are due to poor quality video – I don’t have a professional studio and lighting available to me for filming which would really help in the experimentation process- I shot this on consumer video camera with no lights, which is probably what many of you will do, so you should be able to get decent results. For Pros this will look even better. That said, it’s an extremly powerful method of creating an almost unlimited number of animation styles, in just a few steps. I am prepairing a tutorial on it now.
Here are a few more examples of what you can do with it – some are wierd, but I’m just playing around…
https://www.allbetsareoff.com/Cow_Stuff/cartoon_examples.mov
What do you think?
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
16 Replies
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I see… a scanner darkly ;o). Looks promising. One suggestion: You may wanna add a posterize time filter at the end of the queue. If done some similar setups with my painterly styles experiments on my webiste and making the framerates appear even lower this way makes it even more convincing.
Mylenium
[Pour Myl
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Is it changing each frame in real time like a filter, or are you manually changing each frame inside of Illustrator then importing them into AE? Looks pretty cool though. I especially like the style of the clip in the examples with the dog.
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http://www.mackwilliams.com -
If you watch carefully, you;ll see that the cartoon is moving at 12 FPS. The camera is moving at 30 – which now that you mention it, is an error. For the one that looks sketched it’s actually playing at 10 FPS. I showed a variety of styles and frame rates there so people could see.
But I happen to agree with you – low frame rates are better – as my tutorial will reflect.
The frames are not being changed in real time. They were batched several times in illustrator. No manual work- except on the first frame, the rest are automatic – with all the pluses and minuses that come with it.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
I must say, I’m always amazed at your tutorials. Very well made and great ideas. I’m really looking forward to this one as it looks like it will yield some really cool results.
Just a question…have you ever thought about making a keying tutorial? I’m sure you haven’t but I just thought I’d put it in your mind 🙂 It just seems like a ton of people are always asking about different keying techniques on here. I thought maybe one of your awesome video tutorials would help to get people (me included) started. Maybe make it geared towards DV users as this is probably what a majority of novices that don’t know much about keying would be using to begin with.
Anyway, just a thought. Of course it’s easy to come up with these thoughts when I’m not the one that would have to put it together 🙂
Keep up the great work Aharon, I know everyone here appreciates it greatly.
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Thx Aharon! Can’t wait to see your tutorial! This, I’m sure, will be pretty useful one day!
Sandman’s request for a keying tutorial was a very great idea! Since keying is much more used than putting real life footage into a cartoon look (well, for my case), a tutorial on tips how to key well would be very appreciated – of that, I’m sure – by a lot of people.
But again, take my suggestion to the third degree and concentrate on your tutorial ’cause I can’t wait to see how you did it more precisely. 🙂
Thx for contributing!
Your n#1 fan.
Justin Productions
Tangerin01@hotmail.com
Adobe After Effects 6.0 Professional -
Ah… but there are a bunch of tutorials available for keying, and virtually none for video to cartoon…
I’m not sure what i can do to make keying easier. Although i have one trick for making garbage mattes fast. There are other people here who do keying on a regular basis (Alas, I don’t) who would be better suited for this (such as Barend Onneweer or Andrew Kramer) than I. But I’ll put it in the queue and let it stew…
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
Yea, don’t take my post the wrong way. Trust me, I’m very anxious to learn that cartoon method. That keying idea was just something I’ve been thinking about for a while. I know there’s a great keying tutorial on here, and I’m pretty sure it deals with trying to key DV footage too. It’s just much easier for me to be able to understand and see how things are done with a video tutorial than trying to switch back and forth between reading and following along in AE.
Like I said, just a thought. I just know that out of all the video tutorials on here, you’re responsible for making most of them. If anyone else would like to tackle this task though, I’m sure many would be very appreciative of it. But I really do appreciate any of the tutorials I get.
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By the way, does anyone else think that cartoon effect, while cool and all, is inappropriate for Charles Schwab ads? Just seems a little gratuitous.
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Yup – but it got schwab major attention by doing something completely different from their normal thing, so in that way it worked.
In advertising, that’s pretty much everything that matters…
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
True.
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