Blaise Douros
Forum Replies Created
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It’s not the filter. The problem is that you are shooting light that is highly saturated, and it’s maxing out the values available in the codec. It’s the equivalent of a bright sky clipping to white, only instead of brightness, it’s the color saturation that is clipping. Not much you can do about it–it’s a limitation of the camera’s sensor and codec. We see posts on here all the time with similar issues, and it’s always centered around live concert footage because of the heavily-gelled lights.
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Use the Beam effect.
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After Effects doesn’t do this. You’ll need to use a native 3D app. You can sort of fake it with the Mocha planar tracker (or with the full version of Mocha), but After Effects is not designed to track 3D objects–the only 3D tracking available is the 3D Camera Tracker, and that is the wrong tool for the job.
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Just download Video CoPilot’s fantastic (and 100% free!) plugin Saber. It does more than just lightsabers, so you should have it in your arsenal anyway; it’s incredibly useful for all sorts of energy effects.
It’s sort of silly to self-limit to only native effects when there’s a free tool that does exactly what you need.
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We could help you better if we could see what your footage actually looks like.
One thing that can really enhance fluorescence (which is what you’re actually trying to shoot) is using a yellow filter on the camera lens; it blocks the blue or UV (depending on which kind of fluorescence-generating light), but allows the other colors to come through nicely. Do a white balance with the yellow filter on the lens before the white lights are turned off, and you’ll be in good shape.
I used to work for a company that built lights specifically for shooting video of fluorescence in underwater settings.
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I was working on a comp today with this exact workflow, so the timing was good ☺
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In my opinion, there’s absolutely no need to use Mocha for this. All you need to use is the After Effects point tracking system.
Pick two nice consistently-visible points–maybe the mouthpiece and the upper point of the bell–and track them for Position and Rotation with the two points that appear. Set the Attach Points a little above the hands, up on the trombone slide, and apply the Position and Rotation data to the graphic you’re trying to attach. Adjust the Scale, Anchor Point, and Rotation properties of your graphic to align them, and you’ll be done.
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Premiere can’t do that, so you won’t be able to do this without going through the extra step of using a secondary EXIF editing tool.
Have you thought of just using the Timecode effect on the timeline, and just living with a small box of timecode on the image?
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Your order of operations should go something like this:
1. Take your footage into Mocha and track it.
2. Export the results back into AE, and apply them to your shape graphic. This step will warp and move the shape to match the position and movement of the plane(s) you’ve tracked.
3. Now that the shape is moving with the face, use blending modes and any other compositing methods you like to blend it in with the skin. This might involve creating a B&W copy of the footage to use as a displacement map for textural blending. Or it might be as simple as finding the right blending mode. My experience is that blending modes can be quite useful for this sort of thing.
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Hmm…maybe the Shatter plugin could get you close enough?