Disco ball light effect

[Mike Clasby]

Disco Ball: If you mean the little light squares that are projected on the Walls and dancers, this isn’t bad.

Two layers: A white solid with Grid and Polar Coordinates (overlay mode) to give the pattern of light squares above the video clip of your dance scene).

Layer 1) White Solid, 2 to 3 times the size of the comp.
Render>Grid
Size From: Width & Height Sliders
Width and Height: 30,40, to your specs, will adjust later to resize projected squares
Border: 20 (tweak)
Invert Grid: Check the box

Distort>Polar Coordinates
Type of Conversion: Rect to Polar

Move the position of the White layer so it’s at the lower right corner of the layer to be projected on (below), or somewhere else off-screen, whatever looks good.

Change the Mode to overlay.
Rotate the white solid with keyframes, 1 rotation over about 10-12 sec (to taste)

Optional tweaks:

You can also add a little Blur>Vector Blur, Natural at about 4 to give it a little star shape.
Or
Distort>Turbulent Displace to give the light path a little variation.

Layer 2) Dance Scene or the layer you’re projecting onto.

Of course this doesn’t displace the light over the dancers correctly, you’d need a displacement map (may be complicated) but the above can give an impression of the light squares projected onto a scene. As an alternative you might checkout Rick Gerard’s tut on Gobos and light projection here:

https://forums.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=2&page=https://www.creativecow.net/articles/gerard_rick/Projection_tut/index.html

By the by, Serge has a nice Disco Ball here:

https://www.nyc-visual.com/Disco_Ball_M.html

[Manny Rellesiva]

If you are using After Effects 7.0 …try the preset animation palete. Go to Animation Presets > Synthetics > Globe rays. It looks like a disco ball and you can see the different effects used.