[Benjamin Tattersley]

Thanks for your help 🙂

[Benjamin Tattersley]

movingX=thisComp.layer(“Meteor”).transform.position[0];
staticX=thisComp.layer(“Laser”).transform.position[0];

if (movingX==staticX){
500;
}else{
0;
}

just make sure your two x positions line up exactly on a frame

[Benjamin Tattersley]

Ive had a long think about this and if you have trapcode particular you should be able to use the grid emitter to emit your footage as a particle. then you can use AE’s 3d camera to move aroundd your scene. Quick camera moves with motion blur should disguise the fact that the layers all orient towards the camera.

[Benjamin Tattersley]

a little correction as to the terminology used there, evolution isnt a plugin as such, its more of a collection of stock footage. 🙂

[Benjamin Tattersley]

its a consumer grade hd camcorder and there is only some software to play back the file :/. ive been doing some research and found that there are some solutions to the problem and have also found that vegas can import and export the footage.

[Benjamin Tattersley]

thanks for the advice! has come in handy thanks!

[Benjamin Tattersley]

hey good question! ive been experimenting with this today and there are a few good plugins you could use. First i would suggest motion stabilizing your footage if you haven’t already and line up your clean plate frame. Use the difference matte effect in the keying section of the effects panel. IF you want to generate a clean plate throughout your footage, i might suggest getting the boris continuum 5 plugins pack and it comes with a great motion key plugin to extract moving objects from your footage. Use this o generate a clean plate along with the remove noise and grain effect applied before it. copy and paste the remove noise and grain effect to another copy of the footage without the motion key plugin and you should have two perfect candidates for the difference matte plugin. Make sure you precomp the motion keyed footage before applying the difference key to the other footage because the difference key cannot ‘see’ effects. then you can use this as a track matte for another piece of footage if you want to keep the grain. I would suggest rendering this out before using it in a project because it will take a very long time to render.

Let me know how this goes and if you made any changes because my method isn’t perfect but it should work.

[Benjamin Tattersley]

Right i can tell you how to do the effect of some smoking text engraved into wood as if its been branded on if thats what you mean. So first precomp the following in separate comps: your text completely pure white and the outline of the same text in the same position if you like as well although its not necessary, but will help you ass some more depth and realism. Now get an image of some wood or something and put it in a new comp. Take your outline text comp and place it in your main comp now, and place the filled text comp beneath it in the same position. Now fill the outline text with a darkish grey using the fill colour effect and set the transfer mode to something that gives a burned look to your wood. Now this next bit only works with trapcode particular. So take a new solid and apply particular to it. Set the emitter to your filled text comp layer and make something smokey with your particles and then duplicate your particular solid and make the emitter your outline text layer, and bump up the opacity to make it look like there is some dark smoke coming from the burned outline of the wood. Now apply cc glass to the wood or an adjustment layer, whatever you think gives a better result and adjust the settings until you get an inset look (make sure you set the bump map layer as your filled text) i would suggest checking out andrews healer tutorial for more info on cc glass. now apply some fractal noise to a new solid and use the trackk matte as alpha matte your filled text precomp and put it in the correct position in the layer stack and you have a quick editable burned in wood text look 🙂 hope this helps!

[Benjamin Tattersley]

if i understand what your saying you need to make the silhouette look transparent? Also from what i understand the image is just black with no colour. First of all put a water bottle on the table. Turn off all the lights and shine a torch through it. Study the shadow cast from the bottle and you can discover what parts of the bottle should be transparent and what shouldn’t, perhaps take a reference photo for later? Then motion track your bottle silhouette, either by hand or using AE’s motion tracker, and apply data to a null object etc. Then add a black solid and use masks to change the visibility of the different parts to match your reference photo, feel free to refer back to the bottle torch method at this point. Also from what i know about light, bottles generate caustics, which can be achieved by stretching fractal noise and using vector blur to generate a more organic feel, try using bezier warp to bend these into shape, don’t overdo the caustics though, be subtle with this technique. I really hope this helps, good luck!

[Benjamin Tattersley]

I Think you mean that you are masking out your head and animating its position to simulate it being removed am i correct :)? If i am then i might suggest taking a “clean plate” in other words getting the background of your shot, so you can place that there to cover the black hole. If you don’t have it, just mock it up in photoshop. If there is motion in your shot, motion track it! I forgot to once and had to re-render my entire project *sigh* and enable motion blur for your hole plugging layer to get it looking better if there is a lot of movement in your shot.