Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
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[ahli] “got a problem with my HD material in AE version 8”
We need more information about your HD material than this to really give you an applicable answer.
What codec is your HD footage using? How was it captured?
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
AE CS3 offers the same Layer Styles that are available in Photoshop. The Bevel & Emboss style can give you very cool looking (although not necessarily physically correct) shiny effects. I would advise creating your glossy/shiny look in Photoshop and then importing it as a composition into AE to preserve the layer styles.
Alternatively you can use an effect such as CC Glass to get some specular highlighting, the challenge here is creating an effective ‘bump’ map of the text, which I like to do by duplicating the text layer, giving it an outer stroke in black and an inner fill in white then applying a Blur>Channel Blur and blurring every channel except Alpha the same amount. This should give you a gradient from black at the edges of the text to white at the center. You then need to pre-comp this in order to use it as the “Bump Map” for the CC Glass effect (use either Lightness or Luminance as the property).
As you can see, there are some options, but they’re not entirely intuitive if you’re not familiar with them.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
You’ll save yourself a headache if you apply your mask to a solid layer and use it as an Alpha Track Matte for your footage.
Alternatively you could pre-compose your footage, apply the mask to the pre-comp and scale the footage inside the pre-comp. This would leave you with fewer layers in the final comp, but be more of a pain to adjust accurately.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[olly] “If you set the background solid layer colour to white and change the layer transfer mode to multiply then the effect will be achieved, but I wonder if there is another way to do it?”
That’s the way to do it. If Adobe were to implement an “Accepts Shadows Only” option it would undoubtedly give you exactly the same result as this method, but for some reason they aren’t interested in making it (slightly) easier to achieve.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
You should really consider parenting your layers to a Null object to either control the position of the circular paths or to control the rotation itself (as Dave first suggested). If you have specific questions about Parenting and it’s amazing usefulness, please inquire =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Here’s a faster solution, which worked beautifully on your sample section of skin, but will probably wreak havoc with colors in the other parts of your footage.
You’ll still need to create a decent matte of the skin, but then try using the Color Correction>Channel Mixer effect and changing the Blue-Green property to 75 and the Blue property to 25.
I can’t really give you advice as to how to pull a matte for the skin without knowing what else is in your footage.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Here’s a rough fix I attempted making adjustments to both the Green & Blue channels.
I evened out the Blue channel by increasing the levels in the darker areas and evened out the Green Channel by decreasing the levels in the brighter areas.
It’s not perfect, but it should give you an idea of what can be accomplished using mattes from the source’s channels and adjustment layers.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I looked at your posted jpeg in AE and it looks like it’s actually blotchiness in the Blue channel (the Blue levels are lower in the yellow areas) that’s causing this.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[jochem] “can I do something about it?
some sort of channel blur? (but there’s no yellow channel!)”Well, if you look at your 3 color channels (opt-1 through opt-3, or alt on a PC) you’ll probably notice some blotchiness in the Green channel (I’m guessing). Skin tones are mostly Red with some Green and little Blue. Yellow is a combination of Red & Green, so I would guess that in those blotchy areas you have Green levels that are higher than you’d like.
I can think of all sorts of creative ways to try and minimize this. You might be satisfied with a Channel Blur but I wouldn’t be =O
You could, for example, try creating a matte from your Green channel and, using this matte to limit the effect, reduce the Green Levels only in the blotchy areas.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
You should be able to do this pretty quickly with a text animator.
Try typing out a few 0s in a text layer. Select this layer and go to Animation>Animate Text>Character Offset.
Now, change the Character Offset property to 1 and delete the default Range Selector. Add a new Wiggly Selector (use the drop down menu to the right of “Animator 1”) and reveal this selector’s properties. Change the Min Amount property to 0% (otherwise you’ll end up with 0s, 1s and 9s) and leave all other properties the same.
This should give you a random sequence of 0s and 1s. You can change the Wiggly Selector’s properties to have the numbers change more quickly (Wiggles/Second).
Let me know if you need more details.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA
