Darby Edelen
Forum Replies Created
-
Here’s an example of an AEP where I used a light to limit the amount of the plane that is visible. If you look closely you can still see a bit of a seam mostly due to the rotating lights. I could have made the plane a little larger or used more glow from the lights or depth of field to obscure it.
I turned most of the bells and whistles off for this example (depth of field, motion blur) and removed the box art, as I’m sure I don’t have the right to include it. The ‘texture’ of the table was also higher res at one point.
https://www.mediafire.com/?3dynyeudzu5
-
I’ve never used Magic Bullet, but I hear it’s pretty good. Personally I would rather go through the steps manually in AE to make my video look more like film.
You can examine some of the ‘looks’ available with Magic Bullet here:
https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/lookguide.html
Frankly, you’d be amazed at what you can do by hand with Levels, Curves, Hue/Saturation, Gradient Solids, Blurs and Channel effects. Especially in 32bpc/linear.
If you have the money, Magic Bullet might be more sensible as it will do the heavy lifting for you, but I like exploring how to do this stuff myself =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Alex Kuzelicki] “For broadcast, it’s great that you can have these ‘whiter than whites’ and ‘blacker than blacks’but, in the end, aren’t you going to have to scale all the values back anyway to make them broadcast safe?”
You’re correct in that the 32bpc/floating point color won’t be carried into the rendered file. However, you’re never explicitly seeing the overbrights in the composition anyway, anything above 1.0 (white) gets clipped to 1.0 for display. The difference is that if a pixel has a value over 1.0 it will change the way that pixel is composited in the scene. A bright light (say a value of 5.0) when blurred or motion blurred will give a much ‘hotter’ more realistic result, all of the pixels displayed will still reside between 0.0 (black) and 1.0 (white), but the compositing will be more natural. To summarize, 32bpc is color range used for compositing, not display.
The final render will be an 8bpc file (or maybe slightly more depending on the codec you use) with all of the values ranging between 0 and 255. If you need the final render at 16-235, I believe you can get away with dropping your 32bpc comp into an 8bpc render comp with a Broadcast Safe (or Levels) filter, I can’t test that right now as I don’t have access to AE.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Rob Wolf] “Earlier in the thread, someone pointed out that these don’t exist in nature. Isn’t that why we use After Effects in the first place?”
The sentiment I was trying to express was that compositing & effects in AE is often based on natural phenomena. Of course, there are those times when you want to do something entirely stylistic.
The Matrix’s armory comes to mind, but even then the movie usually concerns itself with providing a heightened ‘virtual’ reality that is still obviously connected/related to our own… I don’t want to get too theoretical on this whole thing, I’d rather help you find a solution for your problem, could you explain what you hope to do with an infinite plane?
An infinite plane in AE isn’t possible (it’s not really a 3D package), but the impression of one can be cheated if you know what you’re trying to accomplish. I usually use lighting, or a wall, or a feathered mask or a combination of all of these to obscure the edges of planes as I need it.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
I still don’t understand why my original suggestion wouldn’t work.
However if you’re just looking to deal with colors you can use a Generate>Fill effect. If you’re actually looking at putting more complex things (other video/compositions) in the shape then a Track Matte or the Channel > Set Matte effect are probably your best bets… or I’ve entirely missed the point =O
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
[Virtual Light] “There’s no question that this IS a series of walls. Every other approach I utilized just plain wouldn’t work in AE’s 3D space.”
Indeed, I wasn’t criticizing your technique, it’s actually a very good one and I think a lot of people will find it useful.
I was just pointing out that the original poster asked about a floor, and I can’t be sure what he means by floor but I assumed it was the generally accepted sort of floor =)
Basically, your technique is fantastic for what you were accomplishing, but I’m not sure that it’s what the original poster was trying to accomplish… but we won’t know until we get more details =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Just to be nitpicky, that’s not so much a floor as a series of walls 😉
But in answer to the original question, you will probably need to use some sort of ‘wall’ to fake the horizon. If you look out at the real world, for example, there is rarely… no, I’m going to say it… never an infinite plane =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Trapcode’s Particular has some pretty good presets you can look at, and if one looks close, apply it and see what they did. Then either base your work off of it, or start from scratch keeping in mind what you learned from the preset. This is a decent way to familiarize yourself with the plug-in.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
The function you’re looking for is the Render Queue, this holds a list of compositions that you want to render to a file as well as settings for the render (Output Module and Render Settings) and the location to which the file will be rendered.
To add a composition to the Render Queue select it and press cmd-\ (Mac) or ctrl-\ (PC). For more information on the render queue go here:
https://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/8.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103a4f2dff7-79f0.html
After Effects will not allow you to replace your source footage with a render, you will create an entirely new AVI. Furthermore, you should not want to replace your source footage, as you may want to make other changes (or decide the AE render isn’t want you wanted after all) and keeping the source AVI will allow you to make those changes in AE.
If you replace your original footage you lose the ability to non-destructively change it in AE. You can still non-destructively change the file you replaced your source footage with, but if you constantly delete the source footage you are backing yourself into a corner that you’ll one day want to get out of (and you won’t be able to). And that is my rant on that =)
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA -
Can you expand on what it is you want exactly? Can you put this in more specific context? I’m not sure if you’ll get much other helpful advice without clarifying exactly what it is you mean.
Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA