Jittery “Brush Strokes” Effect

[Michael Szalapski]

Precompose and it’ll work.

– The Great Szalam
(The \’Great\’ stands for \’Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble\’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Albert Kowalski]

Hi Alex,

I applied the Posterize Time effect directly on my vector layer. But when I set it to 0 frames, it freezes and I cannot change its position, scale, nothing, which of course make sense, but this is not what I want to achieve. When I disable Cont. Rasterize on that layer, it works fine. But of course I need it for the quality, so this is not an option. Try it yourself, here’s my vector file:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/70h0e0gtlphbxtu/vector.swf?dl=0

[Alex Harris]

Thanks for sending a file. I’ll post some screenshots here to try and figure out what’s going on. When I put the brush stroke, then the posterize time effect on your vector.swf triangle, and on an illustrator file, I get no issues with the scaling and positioning freezing, with rasterization on and off. I do notice it freezes if you have the effects on an adjustment layer above the vector file, then precomp and try to adjust it in the main comp with continuous rasterization on. I may not be understanding though what you are trying to do, so hopefully the screenshots can clear things up. Let me know if this is what you are trying to achieve.

The Grey Cow

[Albert Kowalski]

Thanks for the screens, I should be more precise. I can move the object, sure. But when I try to ANIMATE the position or scale, then it won’t move.

P.S. Here’s my thread about my issues: https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/1122251

[Sherry Zhao]

Hey Alex, I have the same problem that the adjustment layer freezes my other video footage as well. Can I know which layers that you did the pre-compo to avoid that?

[Alex Harris]

Pre-comping the layer(s) you want to freeze along with the adjustment layer should not effect footage or anything else outside of that pre-comp. So in this case, a pre-comp that contains an adjustment layer with posterize time set to zero, and a layer with the brush strokes effect beneath it.

The Grey Cow

[Sherry Zhao]

Well…I have an animated footage which I want to make like a moving brush stroke painting. I tried your way of putting an adjustment layer with 0 posterize time and a layer with the brush stroke effect under that and made them a pre-comp. The animation is moving but there’s no brush stroke effect applied on. The sequence of the layer is: Pre-comp (posterize 0+brush stroke), footage. Did I do it wrong? Where should I place my footage?

[Alex Harris]

Oh ok, well in that case I’m not sure how you mean the effect to look, there’s a lot of variation in application. You could make/take a paint or brush texture image and overlay it using a blend mode, displacement map, etc, you can put the brush strokes effect directly on your footage layer and posterize it to like 8 or 12 fps to make it look more like a moving painting, or if you have separate animated layers, you could put the brush strokes with or without the posterize time effect at a lower fps on each one and make it look more customized like each layer is painted differently. If you are putting an overlay, it won’t look much like a moving painting, more just like a filter over the video. Not sure if any of those cover the style you want, but there’s a lot of variation there to interpret from.

The Grey Cow

[Will Reasoner]

I did EXACTLY what you said and it only freezes the footage to the first frame. No matter what I change that’s the only result I get, anything else gives me jittery brush strokes… not show what the hell was going through the minds of the brain dead morons at Adobe when they made the effect that way with no option to turn off the ridiculous jittery old Disney cartoon look