BW still of frame to color motion of frame

[Steve Renard]

I’m not sure what to call it, but to achieve that effect, I would turn on time-remapping for the layer and use Tint for the B&W effect. Here’s a step-by step:
1. Drag your clip (or comp) from the project panel to the “new comp” button to create a new comp with the same settings, duration, etc. I’ll call this new comp “FX comp”
2. In FX comp, with the timeline panel selected, press Cmd-K(Mac)/Ctrl-K(Win). In the window that opens, extend the lenghth of the comp by however long you want the still frame to be.
3. Drag the clip to the right so it the end of it is right at the end of the comp (hold down shift while you drag and it will snap there).
4. Select the clip and press Cmd-Opt-T/Ctrl-Alt-T to turn on time remapping. The time remapping keyframes will appear – leave them alone.
5. Drag the head of the clip to the beginning of the comp so that it stretches the full length of the comp now.
6. From the Effect drop-down menu, select Color Correction => Tint. Your clip will be B&W now. Keyframe the “Tint amount” value to bring it from B&W to color.

Good luck!

Steve

[Barry Lynch]

Sounds exactly like what I am looking for. Thanks for the detailed steps, I will give it a go shortly.

Thanks

Barry

[Lukas Thorsson]

6. From the Effect drop-down menu, select Color Correction => Tint. Your clip will be B&W now. Keyframe the “Tint amount” value to bring it from B&W to color.

Why wasting Keyframes if its possible to use expressions? 🙂 Alt-Click the Stopwatch of “Amount to Tint” and type

linear(timeRemap.speed,0,1,100,0)

and your footage is BW on play speed 0 and fully colored on play speed 1 (meaning 100%).

[Steve Renard]

That argument could be made in reverse too: why muck about with expressions when a couple simple keyframes will do the trick?

Plus you have more control over when the color comes in if you keyframes your Amount to Tint value. Maybe you want to keep it B&W for the first second or so, and then fade in the color. It would not be impossible to do this with expressions, but it sure is more straightforward to do it with keyframes.

Ten years ago, JJ Gifford published a brief intro to expressions here. Much of what is up there is still valid. In it he had “when to use expressions” and “when not to use expressions” statements. I’ll paraphrase:

When to use expressions: when you need live updating, or to simplify complex task(s).
When not to use expressions: whenever you don’t need to.

In this case, it’s clear to me at least that you don’t need to use expressions.

Steve

[Lukas Thorsson]

Hi Steve,

I just wanted to show up the second opportunity, “wasting keyframes” was a joke. In most cases the use of keyframes might be better, of course.

Lukas

[Steve Renard]

My apologies – I missed the joke! And I’m all for expressions in their proper place, of course…

[Steve Renard]

Ah, COBOL… I’m too young to have any real appreciation for it, but I’ve heard stories…

[Walter Soyka]

I started with Pascal, and I loved all the discipline that language enforced. Turbo Pascal was actually my first experience with computer graphics. I spent hours re-writing the old Windows starfield screen saver — something I could do now in AE with Particular in about a minute and a half. I wrote a plasma effect, too, with a rotating VGA palette. That’d be four minutes in AE with Fractal Noise and Colorama. Including render time.

Back on topic…

Expressions are great for building up complicated effects with simple controls, so I actually think that this is a good time to use an expression — IF you want the B&W and speed effects to be linked. It’s one less parameter that would need to be adjusted for a change later.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
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