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Black Mask Effect like in Top Gear
Not sure if anyone is familiar with the show Top Gear with Jeremy Clarkson, but they have an effect in a lot of their shots where it looks like a black mask is around the corners of the frame, but blurred and when they go out of the shot the black kind of takes over the whole screen for a nice transition. I totally forgot how to use After Effects since college so it took me a while to figure out how to even get the mask in the right position, but I’m still having a hard time making it look good. Also when I export it to an .AVI and import it into Premier it looks very choppy and seems to be going in slow motion… whats up with that???
Here is a good example if you don’t know what I’m talking about…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HN9xlMgAPuU
I think I am making what should be a simple effect over-complicated due to my lack of practice and experience with the new AE. Any info would be great!
“There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who can read binary and those who cant”
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7 Replies
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Did you “export” from AE or did you render it out using the “make movie” command?
Also, it looks like a pretty simple effect. You could probably just create a mask and feather the edges, although it looks as if it may have been corrected a bit.
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A simple vignette effect can be achieved by creating a black solid, masking the center with the oval mask tool, setting the mask to subtract, increasing the feather on the mask, and then playing with the layer’s blending mode (the sample you posted looks like it might be similar to a simple Overlay). Place the black layer above your footage.
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Thanks guys… I’ll have to play around with it some more today. Like I said, I’m pretty much re-learning the entire program, so even those tips you gave me will take me some time to find where all the commands are to feather the mask etc. Thanks again for the advice!
“There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who can read binary and those who cant”
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Another thing it looks like they’ve added there is in addition to the black vignette, there seems to be a slightly smaller one where it’s blurred and maybe the levels crushed a bit more than the main pic. Just duplicate the mask on your solid layer and paste that onto a duplicate of the footage with some gaussian blur and extra levels on it..then just play with the size/feather of the new mask. Hey presto.
The focus in/outs between shots looks like it was in camera, but I’m sure someone has some fancy plugin that help recreate it.
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Ok, so I achieved the effect I was attempting using the technique that wuzelwazel suggested (thanks!!!). The only thing I’m having a problem with now is making the ending transition of the shot fade to black. I want to make it seem like the black mask takes over the whole frame like it does in the youtube example I posted. I tried just using a cross disolve in premier, but it doesnt really have the same effect as what I’m looking for. Once again I’m probably over-complicating things, but if you have any advice I’d appreciate it… you’ve been very helpful so far.
“There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who can read binary and those who cant”
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I figured it out!!! I just set a few keyframes and adjusted the “mask expansion” property in the timeline. Thanks again for all of your help!
“There are 10 kinds of people in this world, those who can read binary and those who cant”
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[zygotesoup] “The only thing I’m having a problem with now is making the ending transition of the shot fade to black.”
You can animate the shape of the mask, but I think it would be easier in this scenario to animate the “Mask Expansion” property into the negative (collapsing the mask).
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