Can “echo” be gradually increased in size?

[Mylenium]

No. Echo simply accumulates existing buffers. For what you are trying to do you will probably have to find some third-party plugin, though I’m not aware if such a thing exists. The way I picture it, a good place to start would be using Trapcode’s Echospace or Digital Anarchy’s

[Mike Clasby]

What kind of object? If it’s an outline, say a star, you can make a star mask on a solid (comp size), then apply Render > Radio Waves.

Wave Type: Mask
Mask: Mask 1 (if it’s your mask shape)

Producer Point: Animate (keyframe)this over time to get your motion path.

Wave Motion >
Frequency: Crank this up then…
Lifespan: Lower this until you get the trail you want controls fadeout).
Expansion: Adjusts how big your stars get

If you tweak the Radio Waves>Stroke>Start Width and End Width you can get solid shapes, like a solid star in my example, but when they overlap the blending looks like add, so it doesn’t look so great.

I think you should be able to do solid objects with a Particle System, like Particular maybe, but I’m not versed well enough in the particle systems.

[Shane]

The object is a person running. Here are a couple screencaps showing what I am trying to recreate.

https://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l104/Vilandra06/bscap0003.jpg
https://i94.photobucket.com/albums/l104/Vilandra06/bscap0005.jpg

You can see that the trails behind him are not exactly a duplicate of him (like echo). They are more like a rough outline of his figure. They do slowly expand, and fade, but also give a slight distortion.

I talked to Aharon Rabinowitz, and he recommended watching his displacement mapping tutorial, which was very helpful, but my problem is producing these trails.

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

After you psted the question, I tried this myself – and you;re right the big problem is that yeah, it needs to get bigger and fade afterwards. Short of converting the keyed footage to an image sequence, and then frame by frame placing the position of each running frame correctly and then having each frame animate by scaling up and fading out (and this took quite a while), there’s not way I can think of to do this.

I tried it with both echo time and particlular, and with echo time you already know the issues, and with particlular, you don’t have the option of emitting one frame, and holding it, and then the next frame and holding it (which sucks becasue it has the rest of the tools you’d need, such as size over life and opacity over life). It’s frustrating becasue it;s the one option in all the possibilities for using video frames as particles that isn’t there.

Anyway with that rediculous effort (One I’m not likely to repeat), I got this:

https://allbetsareoff.com/Cow_Stuff/SuperRunCD.mov

—————————————-
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

[Shane]

That actually doesnt look all that bad, but like you said, its a long exhausting process, one that no one wants to do repeatedly. I wonder if there are any plugins out there that would do this, cause im out of ideas, unless I e-mail the studio that does this effect, and bluntly ask them, although I really dont want to do that and come across as though im trying to steal their effects.

How exactly did you get the distortion to work like that? Last time I tried, I was having some problems, and I think it was because I was using an alpha channel for the map, and I think the black needed to be a 50% grey, because the entire image was being distorted. Im assuming you probably did something similar, but had some animated noise behind the alpha, correct?

[Aharon Rabinowitz]

No BG at all on the Displacement map.

And I set it to use the dsip. effect to use Brightness for distortion.

I also used the displacement map as a 25% visible image between the “actor” and BG, and set the transfer mode to Add. This helps accent the distortion without making it rediculous, and slightly tints in color like in the video clip.

—————————————-
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

[Spidy2167]

Shane or Aharon, did ether of you get this to work? I’m very interested on this effect. I have some Volleyball footage I would like to apply this to if at all postible.

[Spidy2167]

Shane or Aharon, did ether of you get this to work? I’m very interested on this effect. I have some Volleyball footage I would like to apply this to if at all posible.