[Ben Griggs]

Have to agree with the above, you put the green for a reason, just key it out.

The only problem with this may be if you are working on an outdoors shot with lots of green in the background. If that’s the case just mask the general area around the face prior to keying it to be sure to only pick up the intended fields of green.

[Ben Griggs]

Hi,

After responding and the playing with this I got the best results with the puppet tool.
Apply puppet effect to the layer.
Set pins on the ribbon.
Twirl down the layer->effects->Puppet->Mesh1->Deform
Select the pin that you placed at the end of the ribbon and apply a basic wiggle expression to it.

Best,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

Hi,

There may be expressions for this, but, can’t help with those.

If your only using After Effects and no true 3D programs I think you are going to be stuck with distorting it. How you go about that depends on exactly how you want it to flap at the tail. Flattening and waving is a bit different than actually seeing part of the back.

If you have Zaxworks then go with that. If not then create a looping displacement precomp with something like Generate->Radio Waves and have it only affect the tail. The speed stroke and blur of this radio wave precomp will all greatly affect the outcome, so play with the sliders until you are happy.

Alternately use Distort->Wave Warp on a masked portion of the tail.

You can even go for the puppet tool, -it’s always fun- set a couple of pins in it and start puppeting =)

Hope that gets you waving -or flapping-,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

Sindre,

I was playing with this and got a pretty nice transition just with the distort->liquify effect. I’m not sure that this will “come out of the frame” the way your wanting so well, but tracked and matted for the inside of the frame I really like it.

For other threads about Mr. Mercury look through the following link, although your situation isn’t directly addressed they may be helpful in understanding the effect.

https://forums.creativecow.net/tags/cc_mr._mercury

Best,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

Joseph,

If you have Sapphire Plugins try “S_WarpMagnify” on your background and link the matte to your text outline layer. To get the edges looking better mess with the “blur matte” slider that is in the matte flyout of that effect.
That is just a quick and dirty way.

Also look into these for more in depth ways.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/227/8824
https://cowcast.creativecow.net/podcast/creating-a-magnifying-glass-effect–26

Hope that helps,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

Sindre,

It seems like a perfect job for the “CC Mr. Mercury” effect. With minimal tweaking to the default settings you should be able to produce what your looking for.

You will also need to blend the layers properly at the point they switch. I think this is best done by precomposing just the images going from one to the other that you are working on. Then add the Mercury effect to the precomp. This way the liquid it self stays fluid without trying to match the Mercury settings in reverse.

Hope that helps,
Ben

[Ben Griggs]

Riccardo,

I got pretty good 3D fog results using Trapcode Form. It will allow you to adjust Z depth of particles and use displacement maps for optimal positioning. Besides that, the use of masks and several fog layers will add nice depth. Form is good stuff.

[Ben Griggs]

After looking around this seems perfect for BorisFX
https://borisfx.com/downloads/
I haven’t used these before, but title toolkit seems to be the one. They have 14 day full trials.

[Ben Griggs]

The basic point was, I don’t think particular would be the best approach. Because it is not so easy to add so many different types of particles, it wants to produce a bunch of the same thing, please correct me if I am wrong.

The card wipe idea was just to divide a bunch of different things (in this case letters) into individual sections that can produce a smooth random movement.

Joey mentioned another good way of doing it by enabling per character 3d. I find that to be rather tedious with multiple elements involved. But by far the best choice for many situations.

It’s up to you how you want to go about it. But just one effect not all piled on each other like you just asked.

[Ben Griggs]

Brian,

It sounds like you just really messed up with the keyframes, like flipping around the time line while adjusting the transition completion. Go back into that AE file and look at the keyframes on that layer. It seems there should only be 2 unless your looking for more static in the movement.

Another thing is, if it seems totally random, look at the expressions for that layer. It may have been linked to some other property with the pickwhip pinwheel thing.

In general the wipes provided with AE have always operated very smoothly for me unless I have overlooked something like that.

Hope that helps,
Ben