tv picture effect

[Michael Szalapski]

Is your camera moving in the shot? If not, a simple corner pin effect will enable you to place your tv’s content (which I assume you have in a precomp) on the screen. If you have things moving in front of the tv screen, such as an actor walking through, you’ll have to duplicate your footage layer and rotoscope the person out so they’re in front of the TV.

If your camera is moving then everything’s pretty much the same, except instead of applying the corner pin effect manually, it might be easier to use corner pin tracking. I haven’t had any experience with Mocha yet, but there are help files on Adobe’s site and tutorials aplenty (including some here on the COW). If you want to use AE’s built in tracker, there are tutorials out there, but Adobe’s own help files will work nicely too. Basically, switch to the motion tracking workspace, select your footage layer, and choose Track Motion. Then under the motion type choose Perspective Corner Pin. Place your tracking markers on the four corners and go!

There are other tricks you’ll need to do that are the same with every compositing job. Match the color, blur level, and lighting on the TV precomp to the footage. Add some sort of light reflection on the screen (how this looks depends on what your TV looks like). And all those other normal things.

If the TV is a CRT one, don’t forget about reflections on the screen of things in the room, perhaps duplicating your footage layer, masking out the tv screen and laying it over your tv precomp with some layer blending mode and lowered opacity would work.
Also, don’t forget about the bending of the screen, you may need to try bezier warp, or some other distort tool to match the curvature of the screen.

– 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.

[Todd Kopriva]

There are some excellent step-by-step tutorials about this. You just have to know what to search for. The magic phrase is ‘screen replacement’.

Here is an After Effects Community Help search for ‘screen replacement’.

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Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
putting the ‘T’ back in ‘RTFM’ : After Effects Help on the Web
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