[Darby Edelen]

I’m going to cover the basic pitfalls of such a project:

1. Make sure you have a camera layer in the comp (obvious, but sometimes forgotten)

2. Make sure your composition view is on ‘Active Camera’ and not something like ‘Front’

3. Try selecting the Orbit Tool from the tools palette (or hit ‘c’ until you get to it)

4. Make sure all of the layers you want changing in perspective are 3D layers (if the background is a 2D layer the camera and its properties will have no effect on its appearance)

Sorry for all the basic suggestions, but I just wanted a starting point for us to work on figuring out what’s wrong =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

I could’ve sworn I replied to this yesterday, but as I look at the thread again that doesn’t seem to be the case, so here’s the just of what I said:

A great plug-in for light glows, lens flares and other lighting effects is Knoll Light Factory:

https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/knolllightfactory.html

Unlike other plug-ins that offer Lens Flares, Knoll Light Factory offers you the ability to create custom stylistic lens flares. In addition, there are many presets based on real world equipment, but for the look you’re after I think you’d only use those as a starting point.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

You can link the Source Text property via an expression:

comp("TheSourceComp").layer("TextLayer").sourceText;

However, as far as I know this only changes the actual letters and has no effect on formatting or color.

Note, I haven’t checked that .sourceText is the right property, but I’m pretty sure it is =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

Your solution will involve distorting the image, whether you use a simple Distort>Bulge effect or a Distort>Mesh Warp effect. I recommend the latter. Since a spoon is a relatively simple shape, you can probably get away with using only 2 rows and columns for the effect in order to keep it simple.

Also you must consider the way a reflective surface alters the light hitting it, you will need to use blending modes to try and achieve this look and you might want to put some specular highlights above the reflection layer (they tend to obscure reflections).

Those are my suggestions =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[_Peter_] “But such big nested compositions are really impractical for a simple despilling. So all in all, I guess there is no simple way in AE.”

This is pretty much true, but note that with the pre-composition method all you need to do is replace the footage in the source composition and everything else updates in the final composition.

It’s a more legwork to setup, but once the framework is there it’s drag and drop.

You can save that .aep I uploaded as a .aet if you want and load it for despilling, just replace the footage… Or use keylight (;

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

I went ahead and uploaded an AEP to a file sharing service.

Things to look at while playing with the Despill Controller are the areas in the hair and shadows that have a green tint to them in the source footage.

You can replace the image in the alex-gs composition (random image I found online) with any footage and it should update throughout all of the pre-comps.

https://www.mediafire.com/?2nsdyfxitdo

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[Dave LaRonde] “Syntheyes may create data suitable for an AE camera as well. I’m not all that familiar with the details of the software, only the generalities.”

Although I haven’t used it myself, my understanding is that Syntheyes creates a Maya .ma file (or other 3D app) that can be imported into After Effects and used as camera data. It also populates the scene with 3D Null objects at the points where it was tracking which is very useful for easily placing an object into your scene, just parent the object to a null and set your transform values.

There is a demo version available, you can export the .ma files for AE but you can’t save the work you’ve done in Syntheyes. There may be other limitations as well:

https://www.ssontech.com/regis.htm

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

I think I have a pretty decent result using a combination of the Levels, Shift Channels, Arithmetic and Compound Arithmetic effects. My sample requires 2 pre-comps, one has the green channel only and the other has the red & blue channels shifted to the green channel (the Compound Arithmetic effect is limited to comparing Red to Red, Green to Green, Blue to Blue, and must use all three channels during the operation).

I then subtracted the red & blue channel values from the green channel values, so any areas that have more green than red & blue will become green, then I shifted the green channel to RGB giving me a matte of the channel subtraction. On this matte layer I applied a Levels effect at the top of the effects stack to control the intensity of the despill (higher gamma values = more despill).

I then used this matte layer as a luma matte for an adjustment layer where I applied an Arithmetic effect to subtract 255 from the Green values.

I know, it’s not quite what you wanted as it doesn’t set the green value explicitly to the value of red, but it does give you control over the amount of despill via the levels effect or an optional Null Controller (and isn’t that enough?!) =)

If you want the AEP, I can e-mail it to you.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

DV tends to have very low color resolution, if you look at your image in YUV color (use Channel>Channel Combiner effect to do this) channel by channel you’ll notice that the ‘green’ channel (Y, luma) has good resolution and the ‘red’ & ‘blue’ channels (U & V, chroma) have about 1/4 the resolution. This might explain some of the difference. I can’t suggest an elegant solution except perhaps applying a mosaic effect and very slight box blur to just the UV channels of the CGI footage. Of course, this is trashing your CGI footage to make it look more like DV, which may not be ideal.

You should also consider possible noise introduced by the recording of the DV footage and try to match this.

Then you should try to color correct the CGI footage to match the DV footage using a Levels effect looking at both sources simultaneously channel by channel.

I don’t necessarily like recommending procedures for dirtying up footage, but when trying to match DV it’s pretty much essential =)

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA

[Darby Edelen]

[_Peter_] “Every pixels green value keeps it’s value UNTIL is is equal or more than the red value for that pixel. If it is more, then limit that green value to the same value than red.”

I haven’t tried this yet, but I will soon. I think one way you could go about this is by using a Compound Arithmetic effect to pull a ‘matte’ for the areas in which there is more green than red or blue and then use this as a matte for a duplicate layer that reduces the green values in those areas to that of the red… Sounds simple on paper, not sure what it will involve yet in AE.

Darby Edelen
DVD Menu Artist
Left Coast Digital
Aptos, CA