Trying a possibly impossible effect

[George Goodman]

Sounds like your on the right track.

I would just make a giant video wall and used the keyed dancer as a track matte. Then take another instance of the keyed dancer and play with its blend mode – maybe multiply – and put it on top of the trackmatte. The problem is that the color is going to have to be dictated by the dancer as it would change as he moves. Because of that, the video wall colors will have to be updated as he moves so no clip can ever really stay the same color.

“|_ (°_0) _|”

Sincerely,

George

http://www.vimeo.com/georgegoodman
http://www.linkedin.com/in/georgefranklingoodman

[Ben Allan]

Thanks for the advice. I’m not too worried about the colour of the footage changing. I was going to make it all desaturated anyway. What I don’t want is a track Matte that shows new footage as he moves I just want the block to move with him. I understand I will need to key frame some parts but there must be a way we can get the majority of it to move?

[George Goodman]

I see.

Ya, the tricky part is that since he’s a dancer, he’s likely moving different parts of his body in different directions.

You could try doing some camera tracking with different parts of the body, like and arm, for example, and then parent the clips on his arm to the null. The problem besides having to track a bunch of different parts of the body is that the clips would have a very rigid movement.

Maaaaaaybe there is something you can do with a sampleimage expression where you check the alpha channel and if it reads it as nothing there it moves the the footage – but that would be really tricky and might actually have terrible results. Could be worth asking in the expression forum though.

But to be honest, I don’t think there is anyway you can totally escape the track matte effect. As the body turns, the footage would have to warp to have it continually fill the body without cutting off some of the clip or showing another. Can you actually visualize how the edges of the video should be moving as the body moves?

Perhaps if you had a central line that through the middle of the arm and body etc, you could stick the video edge to that, but thats just a lot of keyframing and manual moving. Plus, if something twists, it’s still going to cut off some of the footage like a track matte would.

“|_ (°_0) _|”

Sincerely,

George

http://www.vimeo.com/georgegoodman
http://www.linkedin.com/in/georgefranklingoodman

[Mike Zimbard]

There’s an old tutorial that shows how to do this using card dance:

https://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e/ae50_e.html#

This sounds like the effect you’re looking for. Card Dance will be really handy to break your dancer footage apart into tons of tiny mosaics. Hope this helps!

– Mike

[Ben Allan]

Thanks George that’s a great help. I will give it a go. I’m testing it out at the mo. And will be filming the dancers so I can asked them to keep it basic. Thanks again!

[Kevin Camp]

if you went the card dance route, you can use a gradient layer to effect properties of the ‘cards’.

i don’t think you’ll be able to get the cards to move with the dancer with this feature, but you could use a matte (maybe blurred matte) of the dancer as a gradient layer and use that to effect the scale and/or z position of the cards… so as the dancer moves within the frame, the small videos seem like they get displaced in space, which might be pretty cool.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Michael Szalapski]

One way to guarantee that you could do this would be to create a 3d model of a dancer based on the actual dancers’ movements and attach videos to the model in the 3d program.

– 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.

[Ben Allan]

Thanks for this, the Card effect looks great i’m a big fan of Ayatoweb. I think i’ll give it a go! Thank everyone!