Help with random image dissolves.

[Dan Ebberts]

It would be a bit of work, but you could do it with a script. If it were me, I’d have the script build a separate comp for each location in the grid and randomly populate the sequence.

Dan

[Filip Vandueren]

[Midnight Oil] “I was thinking about importing the images as a sequence, but I don’t know how to make it randomly jump around with dissolves between them. If I could do that, I could just start the sequence at different times on the grid.”

If that scenario is random enough for you, where you have 1 sequence that just is looped,

then why not just first make one or two comps with the 15 frame-dissolves, (takes about 5 seconds with the sequence layers command)
render them out, re-import and interpret the movie to loop 99 times.

Now you can drop those movies in your layers and with the “pan-behind”-tool you can choose your start-point.
If you don’t want to alter the startpoints manually, enable time-remapping and add a random static value to each layer’s current time.

—

An all-expression way could also use time-remapping:

set up a pre-comp with al your images sequenced.
make a new comp with two copies of that precomp.

let’s say you want to fade in a layer over 1 second, hold for one second, then fade to the next, hold for one second etc.

create some opacity keyframes for the top-layer to reflect that animation:0-100 in 1 sec, hold 1 sec, then 100-0 down, hold 1 sec, then put a final 0% keyframe.
add a loopOut(type = "cycle", numKeyframes = 0)-expression so the keyframes get repeated.

give the time-remapping this expression:


holdTime=4; //hold each frame 4 seconds;
holdOffset=0; // offset 0 seconds
maxTime=source.duration-source.frameDuration;
seed=Math.floor((time+(holdTime-holdOffset))/holdTime);
seedRandom(seed, timeless = true);
random(maxTime)


do the same for the bottom layer, but here, change the holdOffset-value to 1

copy that pair of layers for each square and scale/position them.

Keep in mind that being a true random sequence, you will get duplicate frames from time to time.

[Greg Neumayer]

I had a similar project where the client wanted a “globe” tiled with the various clips. (ya know. the corporate video type of “world” animation.)
I simply took ALL their clips into a comp in AE, used the offset and overlap command to space them out and dissolve between them, then made sure that that sequence could loop seamlessly.

Then, to make my grid, I just made a comp of the same duration as my long string of clips, laid out the grid of tiles, using the same footage for each tile. Moving to some random point of the timeline for each layer, I hit CMD-SHFT-D to split the layer, and I swapped the two pieces on the timeline. This puts your cut point at the end of your timeline, and butts together the start and finish (which should be already a seamless transition.) Keep splitting the layers in a different place for each layer. (there may be a super-easy way to do a time offset now with scripts so you don’t even have to split the layers)

When you’re done, you’ll have a grid of tiles that all use the same footage loop, but because of the time offset, they look like they’re showing different clips randomly.

-Greg

Antifreeze Design
https://www.antifreezemotiongraphics.com