Slit Scan in AE CS3

[David Bogie]

Try google for SLIT SCAN EFFECT and similar text strings. There are some easy ways to simulate the original effect designed by Douglas Trumbull for “2001: A Space Odyssey”. it all depends on what you think slit scan should look like. The old illustration in AE’s manual has been a joke for a decade. it doesn’t do ANYTHING to simulate the footage in Kubrick’s film.

toi understand how time displacement works, you need a few hours to experiment with simple footage that maybe has a car driving slowly past a stationary camera. Use a simple black and white art file to experiment with the effects of the grayscale pixels on the car footage. Then try using a simple grayscale gradient. Note the word ‘simple” keeps coming up.

There were a few free slit scan plugs for AEv3+ but they have all vanished or been purchased by larger effects packages.

bogiesan

[Kevin Camp]

[david bogie] “There were a few free slit scan plugs for AEv3+ but they have all vanished or been purchased by larger effects packages.”

yep, i remember walker effects had a slit scan effect called stargate. the package was purchased by digieffects last year, but i think you can find the package for $20-30… try googling ‘walker effects’ if you want an all in one slit scan effect.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Filip Vandueren]

Ok,

first of all watch Ehran Sterns great tutorial about time effects in After Effects.

https://podcasts.creativecow.net/after-effects-tutorials-podcast/blend-and-bend-time

Here’s how to do a slitscan:

Creat a comp,
throw your slitscan picture into this. The originals from 2001 have been decoded here:
https://seriss.com/people/erco/2001/

Fit the picture to comp width.

Create a solid: comp width, and a few pixels high (5 px worked for me)

Keyframe your picture to move from bottom to top or vice versa, and then enable the solid as a track matte.

Now you have the actual slit scan: just a few lines of your image changing all the time, at the center of your comp.

Precomp all of this as “slit”

On the slit-layer create 2 “CC Blend FX”
the first one should be set to:
Instance= “Paste”
Transfer= “Add”
Accumulation= 98%

the second one: Instance = “Copy”

Now, a lot of effects don’t work with Time Blend, We want to scale this slit continually and unfortunateley Transform is one of those that doesn’t work.
But “Magnify” works !

So add the Magnify effect inbetween the two CC-Blend FX-s

Shape= “Square”
Center = 50% of Comp , 35% of Comp
Magnification = 104
Size = 512 (or your comp width / 2)
Blending Mode = “None”

After the Magnify effect, but before the second CC Time FX Blend,
add a “CC Radial Fast Blur”
Center = 50% of Comp , 35% of Comp (same as Magnify center)
Amount = 1

Don’t forget to ‘clear’ the Time Blend Caches often while tweaking (as described in Ehran’s video)

That should do it:

(right click to play if all you see is a black bow)

[David Bogie]

Filip, I bow. Most excellent work. And a great use of another confusing filter, CC Blend. (Got anything to help folks understand CC TimeFX?)

Please see the post from Todd from Adobe asking for links to Cow resources to be included in the Adobe online help system for After Effects. Your description and sample movie should DEFINITELY be attached to the Slit Scan reference.

bogiesan

[Rusty Shackleford]

what about a slit-scan like in Schofield’s Mims video?
https://keithschofield.com/mims/mims-move.mov

[Filip Vandueren]

The “screwdrivers” are basic vertical Gradients fed into the time displacement effect.

The group shots are some other weird gradient, impossible to tell what it was, could be as simple as a horizontal gradient.

Obviously this was shot at pretty high framerates, you need that temporal resolution to work with or it just falls apart.

[Rusty Shackleford]

so for the screwdrivers, the gradient would move? and the displacement map would be keyframed?

[Filip Vandueren]

No,

you use “Time Displacement’ which is a different effect than Displacement mapping, you’ll find it in the Time-category.

The gradient map used is just a vertical gradient.

Nothing moves or needs keyframes.

Since the people are turning around about their axes, when we displace every horizontal line just 1 frame more, you’ll get a screwdriver effect.

[Rusty Shackleford]

ok cool.
yeah i meant time displacement. my mistake.

[Hayden Martin]

ok. this could confuse you!
In this video for Foreign Beggars, I feel a displacement effect may have been used to invert a fisheye lense…?

HERE:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pb55ep-DrSo&feature=player_embedded

This vid could be in the complete wrong forum but I DO feel it has relevance to time displacement…
I really want to use this in a promo project for Canon and the deadline for a roughcut is soon! looking forward to hear from you guys!

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