Free Looping Motion Backgrounds?

[Mark Suszko]

Jumpbacks has given away some free downloadable samples in the past.

You can also make your own from scratch, basic ones are not all that hard to do. If you describe your technical setup and software, I’ll talk you thru an example you can make by yourself in an hour or less.

[Del Holford]

Like Mark said, doing it yourself is pretty easy. Just layer some circles, blurry colored backgrounds, etc, throw some light changes on it over 10-15 seconds but starting and ending in exactly the same place (so 5-7 secs going and 5-7 seconds coming back to the start). Then lay them end to end forever. This may be too general for you so you may still want to contact Mark.

Del
fire*, smoke*, photoshopCS2
Charlotte Public Television

[Mark Suszko]

Nope, that in a nutshell was what I was gonna tell them. I do like to look at jumpbacks and de-construct them to get design concepts and ideas. Livetype in my FCP has it’s own looping background generator built-in, as does Apple Motion, so I tend to use those first. When I’m in the linear suite, I have an old single-channel DVE I love because it’s just so responsive and intuitive – I use that to throw together stuff for looping backgrounds sometimes, usually soft amorphous shapes with varying color and transparancy, passing over each other. In that suite, I have to go to and from tape a genration or two to build up the layers. In the NLE rooms, I use whichever compositor is handy: boris, combustion, etc.

Soft looks are not the only way to go; you can make more complicated and hard-edged stuff in a 3-d program, and the timeline interface and absolute positioning tools make seamless looping a snap. One of my first projects in that veing was making a continuously spinning 3-d coin with some NICE reflecting surfaces on it.

In the linear suite my best loop on the Alladin was a rushing asphalt road surface with dashed yellow and white lines whizzing by. To generate the road surface, I used the random clouds generator in photoshop and threw some embossing and blurring onto it. Translucent paining on of blobby oil streaks between the tire paths added verisimilitude. Once I had a stretch of road long enough, I just created a looping DVE pass on it that perfectly matched begining and ending positions with a linear motion type. I ran off ten minutes of this to tape, (single channel remember), then brought the playback into a fresh DVE setup that let me angle and distort and even bend curves into it at will. The final comp looked for all the world just like the view 3/4 ahead and to the left, out your driver’s side window, (in the USA) if you were watching the paint stripes unwind past your car. It looked like I had gone out and shot it with a camera, the blurring of the fast motion helped a lot.

[Mike Cohen]

a quick way is to create a mild gradation as a background – maybe add some blur – try the satin layer effect in photoshop – then make a new document, with either clouds with blur or various soft shapes over a transparent background – make this image like 4000×500. Then in your editing program, do a move from left to right passng the overlay over your background. You can always take a slowed down shot relevant to your project and stick that between the two layers with like 10-20% opacity. Make the move as long as you need it and either render it out or nest the sequence, and use a 2-3 sec dissolve if you need to repeat it. Much nicer than a static background for text builds.
This is without using AE or Boris, do it right in your NLE.
Mike