[Chris Brearley]

A simple rotation shouldn’t cause it to blur like that. Have you actually stablized the footage or just put a rotation on it?

[Chris Brearley]

I would personally greenscreen the guy who is to be hit then track him in, ideally with boujou or pftrack but a point tracker might do the job as the car will be heading straight toward the camera I presume, so there shouldn’t be too much (if any) shift in perspective. I ideally shoot the greenscreen footage at the same time as the car at the point where he gets hit. Lock the camera off and then the tracking should take care of the position and scale of him.

For the windscreen I would use Mocha to track around the edges of the windscreen and then corner pin a smashed windscreen over the top.

[Chris Brearley]

It might work if you do a fairly quick animation or actually put cc force motion blur on top of the footage. Go into the advanced composition settings and change the motion samples to about 8 or 10 and the shutter angle fairly high to get an exaggerated effect. The alpha will probably need to be boosted as well, you can do that with levels.

[Chris Brearley]

Would motion blur look similar to what you are after? Maybe if you animate the arms with motion blur on inside a precomp then freezeframe it to capture the blur then comp the still of the arm without the blur back on top?

[Chris Brearley]

Hi, it’s quite hard to tell you exactly how to do this just by reading your post! If you send me your original comp from photoshop and your AE comp with some low res proxies I ccan take a look for you if you want?

[Chris Brearley]

You are right in saying that the .ban files are are bojou animation files. In my experience, more accurate results can be achieved with these rather than importing maya projects.

The boujou plugin was downloaded from the vicon website inside a zipped file. I dropped it into the cs4/plugins folder as per the instructions. This should in theory enable AE to recognise the .ban file so it can be imported. This works all well and good on windows but not so on mac. There may be an issue with the mac plugin as it of course different from the windows one I downloaded from their site.

Cheers.

[Chris Brearley]

Unfortunately this ‘doohickey’ that accompanies this £2500 piece of software does not come with an installer, if it had, I would have used it. It is an After Afters plugin inside a .sit file.

And your point about macs liking things to be installed, half the programmes on my system were simply dropped into the apps folder, but thank you anyway for your constructiveness.

[Chris Brearley]

Thanks Dan, again this worked spot on. It was the variable in the ‘if’ statement that was throwing me. SLOWLY getting my head around around how these things work. Once again, thanks for all your help. Much kudos to you.

[Chris Brearley]

Well… I thought I had it…

Your rotation expression worked great Dan and I thought I could add it to my postion to get the albums to move forward and then back again slightly but I can’t seem to get it right.

I ammended the numbers to get this on the rotation which works great.

x = transform.position[0];
if (x < 450) {ease(x,250,450,-75,0)} else {ease(x,600,800,0,75);} then changed the postion to this a=(value[0]+thisComp.layer("Null 1").transform.position[0]); b=(value[1]+thisComp.layer("Null 1").transform.position[1]); c = thisComp.layer("Null 1").transform.position[0]; if (c < 450) {ease(c,250,450,0,300)} else {ease(c,600,800,300,0);} [a,b,c] I thought that this would make it move back and forth on the z by 300 pixels but it just adds 300 on to the value which comes from the null position. Anymore help would be great. I am determined to master these things!!

[Chris Brearley]

Perfect! Dan you a superstar!!! Thank you so much.