Cory Petkovsek
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Your effect is desaturation (hsl effect) which goes from color to to black and white. Apply it to an adjustment layer over the whole film. At the end you animate a mask that blocks out the effect, thus sweeping away the desaturation effect.
Cory—
Cory Petkovsek
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After Effects can use just about anything as a matte, as long as it is prepared properly. Since your fish shape is a photoshop file, you’ve got to animate it somehow before you can use it as an animated matte.
It would probably be easier if it was a vector in illustrator, rather than raster in photoshop. Either way, bring it in to your compositor and animate it. Use that animation as a matte.
How you animate it depends on your program. You can create every frame. Or you can use a program that will allow you to set keys and it will interpolate the tweens based upon temporal and spatial curves you can set. AE is one such program.
Cory
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Cory Petkovsek
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Just looks like editing with the blur applied after the cut (not in camera), combined with the beat of the music. Do the editing in an NLE first, then bring it in to AE. Duplicating someone else’s work exactly is usually more difficult than creating something new.
Cory
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Cory Petkovsek
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Walter, my thought is that it will only cost you time (and staff time) to explore blender. And if it can even provide you one thing C4D can’t (like fluids, or character anim), then you can benefit by integrating it into your workflow. You can calculate and render fluids in blender and composite them in AE, or you could calculate fluids and import them into C4D. It doesn’t have to completely replace your licenses of C4D.
It will take a good bit of time to migrate completely to it though, ensuring all elements of your workflow can be duplicated in blender. You’re likely to run into some disappointments and some happy moments.
You’re right about the lack of structured learning for blender. Before we can have structured learning from top artists; we need blender to be used in studios by top artists. Before that we need the tools studios need like a decent interface, documentation, and solid import/export support. They are close, but they move at the speed of non-financially motivated, open source development. Eventually.
Creating the short films is the best thing they could have done. The demands of making an animated movie has given them motivating pressure and rigor in developing blender to meet their needs, has developed more artists, and given blender a lot of exposure.
Looking at a lot of the crap on youtube, my guess is that the percentage of good blender freelancers to poor ones is low mainly because blender is free, the number of non-serious users is high, and the built in renderer blows. It will require filtering for the right people; but that’s what we do to fulfill any role in business.
Although I produce and prefer to bring in shooters and editors, I enjoy doing motion graphics myself and have been gradually developing my ability. So… keep me in mind for freelance work! 😉
Cory
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Cory Petkovsek
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If you want the text to move with the whale you need to track the whale, create a null object, and apply the tracking data to the null. Parent the text to the null so it moves with the whale.
If you want the text to be behind the whale, you need some method to separate the whale from it’s background. Since the whale and water are probably both blue, it will be rather challenging. You’ll probably need to rotoscope it: create a mask and every frame reshape the mask to the outline of the whale. You can use the rotobrush to do some of this automatically for you, but results may vary.
You can learn more about tracking here:
https://www.videocopilot.net/basic/tutorials/05.Motiontracking/Here’s an advanced tutorial that uses roto and tracking:
https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorial/assisted_suicide/Cory
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I’d rather do it in AE for speed and control over the depth matte, and the ability to turn it off.
The lens blur effect should also give you more of a lens effect with the depth matte, then a fastblur adjustment layer.
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a9d3c597-7ba6a.html
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Cory Petkovsek
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So the only problem is that your depth matte is too sharp? Apply blur directly to the depth matte layer. Then use it as a depth matte.
Cory
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If your comp is 8-bit, then you are exporting 8-bit; even if it exports to a 10-bit codec. Use a 16-bit comp and export 10-bit. It’s not odd, 2^3=8, 2^4=16. 10-bit is “odd”.
Are you viewing on a 10-bit monitor (high end lcd, or broadcast crt)? If it’s a regular LCD, it’s probably 6-bit. If it’s a quality IPS panel, it may be 8-bit. So even though your colors may fit in 8-bit, if you have 6-bit, your monitor will be banding.
Yes you should be in rec709 working space or the color space of your calibrated monitor, and export with rec709. Otherwise your colors may be off.
If you have an 8-bit monitor or better and you fixed the above and it still bands, you may need to add grain to the whole comp, or “add” or “color” (layer mode) a very subtle gradient (4-color gradient) masked off where the lens flare is to give it more color to work with.
Cory
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Cory Petkovsek
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That’s how it’s supposed to work. One end of grey scale (white) blurry, the other end (black) in focus. If your depth matte is not accurate then your settings in C4D are incorrect.
Though you are not asking for it, I suspect you are wanting to know how to have a blurry background, and a blurry foreground and have only the middle in focus. If so, did you properly setup your camera in C4D with a front and back focus planes? Most likely your camera is far sighted, rather than setup with a narrow depth of field. This is evident by your far sighted depth matte. Reconfigure your camera, test it with C4Ds DOF filter to make sure you are getting a blurry front and back. Then you can run your depth pass and you’ll likely see white in front and back.
Cory
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Cory Petkovsek
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It looks like a low budget production. Which means it will be far cheaper in terms of your time, money (if there is any) and energy for you to reshoot it properly. You probably need to rotoscope it because the colors of her boots, pants and wall are pretty much the same.
Go down to some local fabric store and pick up some 6’x54″ strips of medium green fabric for $10. Pin them to the wall and let the lowest one hang down to the ground where she is walking. Have her step a few feet away from the wall (if there is room). Place a couple lights on the back wall to illuminate the wall evenly.
Now you have something that you can work with easily. That will be cheaper and faster than rotoing.
Cory