How to get the fade effect used in this video at the 0:26 mark?

[Steve Bentley]

As in another post recently I think there is also (adding to Dave’s post) a noise that is acting as a luma mask with the noise’s contrast being animated so that it fills in over time. The block of text seems to radiate outwards as it comes on and fills in unevenly which the noise will do.

[Jaden Salvatus]

No, not the next. I’m talking about at the 26 second mark

[Jaden Salvatus]

Thanks but I’m not looking for the text fade. I’m talking about at the 26 second mark

[Steve Bentley]

Sorry, I, like Dave took it as the text resolve you were looking for.
The Emma Watson fade is two elements (or more). The background comes in first with Emma (as a separate layer) on green screen and keyed or rotoscoped, holding as a silhouette before she is brightened. She may have interactive lighting on her that was shot on set or there was some color correcting with masks done to brighten different parts of her before others.
The front elements are another layer – either shot out of focus (this is called “bokeh”) or done with a filter like Lens Care’s Frischluft so you can animate the amount of out of focus – AE’s Lens Blur can sort of do this but no where near as well.
All of these elements are done as 3D layers placed at different depths and the camera is pulled back through them to get some parallax and depth – things farther from the camera recede more slowly than things close to camera. (or they are all flat layers at the same level and scaled in concert to give the multiplane camera effect)

If you are going to color correct down to a silhouette, in other words, a severe crushing of the levels, use a high color depth comp (16 or 32 bit) so there is lots of head room when you start pushing those sliders around, otherswise colors will band and oversaturate. Also try putting a desaturate (HSB effect) before your color correct in the effects stack so that crushed colors don’t bloom and posterize.

[Jaden Salvatus]

What about the fade when it transitions from Emma Watson to Dan Stevens, or from Dan Stevens to Luke Evans?

[Steve Bentley]

Its all just multiple elements being darkened or fading out at slightly different times – and all part of a pullout camera track, each element having it’s own alpha or using silhouette as an alpha to reveal the next scene, and with depth of field to being used to draw the eye. I think this looks more complicated than it is because of the liveaction elements used.
While the elements could have been all shot with a dolly out and similar timing,I think it would be easier to just shoot them at a higher rez than needed so you have the source pixels to work with and don’t have to soften the image when they scale up (in the end zooming is just scaling when are working in post; from a pixel perspective). You can scale footage up to about 130% before it really starts to degrade – depending on your compositing software.