Creating a Commodore64 look?

[Jesper Hellvik andersen]

Hi Dave

Thanks for the respons. I’m not sure if I understand this correctly though. I tried making a comp in quarter resolution and then dragging it into a full resolution comp…this only turned the whole thing back to full! Also I don’t understand how the palette could only be 1 color….

?
Jesper Hellvik Andersen
Promo Producer
Discovery Networks Nordic

[Kevin Camp]

to get the 64 colors, the easiest way may be to render out as a gif file. you would need to find a 64 color palette to select in the gif color options (you can proably use a phostoshop gif palette, you may need to export it from ps… i’ve never tried this).

you could also try posterize, but the palette won’t be very precise… you could try to create a more precise palette by separating the color channels… try set channels, leaving red to red, setting green and blur to off. then add posterize set to 4 colors.

duplicate that layer and change the red to off, and set green to green. duplicate that layer and change green to off, and blue to blue.

now set the top two duplicate layers to the blending mode add. this should correctly combine your color separations to create an rgb image, but this time it will have a limited color palette. add mosaic (or maybe cc ball action), or do dave’s trick to pixelate and it may look pretty good…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

just testing the separate channels idea (and trying to remember what 64 color games looked like)… you may want a higher posterize setting for each channel… like 6 or 8…

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Jesper Hellvik andersen]

Thanks guys

Your ideas sound pretty good! I’ll try it out.

P.S. Dave, now I understand what you were trying to explain to me in the first post.

Thanks again

Jesper Hellvik
Promo producer
Discovery Networks Nordic

[Martin Vilcans]

I started to write a long post about the specifics about the C64 graphics hardware and my ideas about how to try to simulate the effect, but then thought that it’d be faster to just try it out.

I posted the results in my blog here.

My test is just still images, but the same thing can be done on a film strip image that you export from After Effects. I don’t think you can do it in just AE (in a convenient way). I’d love to try it on video material.

Martin Vilcans
Stockholm, Sweden
http://www.librador.com

[Jesper Hellvik andersen]

Hi Martin

THIS IS GREAT! You really got a hold on the right look there. Thank you so much…and I’m glad my question inspired you! I might give you a call if this is the way we’re taking our project…are you busy the next month? Can’t promise you anything…depends on my boss:)

Cheers
Jesper Hellvik
Promo Producer
Discovery Networks Nordic

+45 27262470

[Martin Vilcans]

That’s cool. I’ve got plenty of time next month. Feel free to contact me, martin at librador.com or +46 70 2400115.

Martin Vilcans
Stockholm, Sweden
http://www.librador.com

[Kevin Camp]

it looks like you could do it straight from ae… but you would need to create a color palette to use when rendering an animate gif (it may work for any format uses a limited color palette, gif was the only one i could think of).

you can create the 16-color palette i n photoshop. just bring that 16-color image into a blank rgb ps file. then choose image>mode>indexed color… uncheck the transparency option. the ‘colors’ should read 16. now choose custom from the palette pulldown, and choose save to save the palette (take note where you saved it, you will need to find it to apply the palette). once you saved it you can cancel and open ae.

in ae you can send you comp to the render queue. click the output module, and choose ‘animated gif’ from the format. click ‘format options…’ and choose ‘other…” from the pulldown. find the color palette you created in ps. now you can render with only that color palette.

unfortunately you only have ‘dither’ as an option, it would be nice if you could use pattern or another dithering option, as you would in photoshop… but of course you could create an action in ps to convert images to indexed color with that palette and the dither options you wanted, then run that as a batch operation on an image sequence….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW