Chris Zwar
Forum Replies Created
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If you can afford to buy plug-ins, then Tinderbox 1 (by The Foundry) has a deflicker tool designed specifically for this purpose, and which I’ve used to fix this situation.
AE also has auto-levels, auto contrast & auto colour plug-ins; which if you enable the temporal smoothing should do a similar thing. I think the temporal smoothing setting is in seconds,
-Chris
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Hi,
As long as you have parallel layers with different Z positions you won’t have any problems. The project you’re referring to – Centrica – was fairly simple, and the layers were always well spaced out and not intersecting. Even when I did have lots of layers (for example the yellow rings were made up of hundreds of 5×5 solids, nothing you can’t do with Digital Anarchy’s 3D assistants) they weren’t overlapping in Z space and so I had no render problems.
The issues (ie. bugs) seem to arise when planes are very close together or overlapping, or intersecting. For example, if you construct a cube out of 6 solids you should have no trouble. But if you then duplicate one of those solids and replace it with a logo so it looks like the logo is on the cube, you’ll start seeing glitches.I don’t have any suggestions or solutions, just wait for Adobe to improve the renderer…
-Chris
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I’ve had the same problem and have reported it as a bug to Adobe. It’s been present in 6.5, version 7 is much better but still has the same problem.
As you have discovered it’s to do with shadows, and occurs when AE gets confused about which layer is supposed to be in front.
All I can suggest is that you render out several versions with different shadow map sizes, then edit together a “final” version from these as they’ll have different artefacts.
Apart from turning off “casts shadows” for any layers that you don’t need to cast shadows there’s nothing you can really do.
-Chris
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Yes, AE 7 incorporates Kronos from The Foundry.
-Chris
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I’m not aware of a limit to the number of layers in AE, but it’s certainly higher than 320. I’ve had thousands, it seems to depend on memory. Back with AE 5.5 on my old G3 with 384 meg ram, it would give up after about 700 layers, but with current machines and gigabytes of ram it will be much much higher.
Hopefully someone else will know what the error code is and how to fix it, sorry I can’t help with that side of things.
-Chris
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In addition to Steve’s advice, I thought it was worth mentioning that moire patterns generally result from scaling or moving things with a regular texture. Although the textbook example is a halftone newspaper photo, it can apply to anything with a regular repeating pattern including photos of grass, carpet, fencing, asphalt, etc etc. You generally notice it when you do subtle scales and moves, because the slight softening of sub-pixel positioning will emphasise different aspects of the texture as it moves between whole pixels and sub-pixels.
When you figure out what the problem layer is you can either blur it directly to lower the detail in the texture itself, or take Steve’s advice and blur with an adjustment layer. Steve’s advice is generally better, because it blurs after the layer has moved, while applying a blur directly to a moving layer will blur it before any transformations happen, and it’s the transformations which are causing the moire- so you may need more blur to get the same result. Don’t know if this makes sense, but I’ve got a few minutes to kill while rendering…
-Chris
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Not perfect, but may get you started:
-Chris
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https://www.totaltraining.net/gurulounge/aftereffects.asp
And if the video isn’t available there, here’s another link for the same thing:
https://www.mefeedia.com/entry/1062769/-Chris
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I thought it was worth emphasising Peter’s post, because he makes a very poignant point:
If you have AE 7, you can use the 32-bit mode to generate “true” lighting effects, so you can use text or strokes as your source to create neon effects with no 3rd-party plug-ins. I simply don’t have time to google and search for you, but when AE7 came out there was a tutorial on exactly that.
If you don’t want to use AE 7’s 32-bit mode (for whatever reason), then you are looking at plug-ins like Trapcodes’ Starglow or Tinderbox’s T_Starburst (Sapphire and Boris probably have their equivalents too). Again, if you do some googling of your own you will find out more about these products- don’t be fooled, they’re not just useful for making stars.
Finally, you can just stack up your layers with increasing levels of blur and make their transfer mode “add”. It’s surprisingly effective (and the basis for most light-saber tutorials) – and again, no 3rd party costs.
-Chris
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I worked on a conference where the main logo identity was a ring of fire.
I used stock footage of fire from Artbeats (the 1/6th screen size strip) , pre-comped it into a square composition, then applied the rect-to-polar coordinates filter. I enhanced it with a bit of Tinderbox Heathaze and possibly some glow.
Looked great.
-Chris