[Darby Edelen]

[Daniel Futerman] “1. The un-still image. i.e how the video always has a small wiggly movement like a time posterization or something..?
2. The a ‘bad tv reception’?
3. How many FPS do you think this video is?”

1. You could achieve something like this using some combination of Turbulent Displace and Roughen Edges. I’d recommend using an expression on the Evolution of these effects to generate random numbers at regular intervals (this will give it the jittery posterized time look). Something like:


repeat = 1;
seed = time % repeat;
posterizeTime(12);
seedRandom(seed, true);
random(0,360);

Which would give you random values 12 times every second and repeat those values every second (12 random values, repeated every second).

2. I didn’t see a real “bad TV reception” look, although I did skip some parts 🙂 It does look like they’ve overlaid some film grain and emulated some minor film damage. You can do this with similar expressions applied to solids (to modulate the brightness) and textures of film damage set to an overlay/soft light/hard light mode above the footage. Also add some grain.

3. I can’t say for sure but I believe that old fashioned hand drawn animation would most commonly be 8-18 frames per second depending on the amount of time available for the production. 12 seems like a good middle ground.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Collapse Transformations/Continuously Rasterize can really get weird when using transform effects such as corner pin. It’d be near impossible to figure out how to fix the problem without getting down into all the details.

Can you provide a simplified project file with proxy images/solids?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

It looks to me like the biggest issue with your footage are the cuts in it. You can’t solve a camera across an edit. You’ll have to solve each shot separately.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I regularly edit scene files after kicking off a render. It doesn’t impact the render at all.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Jerel Limayo] “I need multiple colors because I need to show different footages on each side of the cube,”

The color will allow you to key the side of the cube, but how are you planning to get the footage tracked to the cube? I’d recommend doing a couple of tests of different set ups to see what gets you there easiest.

For example, have you considered filming the cube, creating a camera in AE that roughly matches your source camera, creating a 3D cube in AE and animating it to follow the real world path of the cube?

Have you looked at putting tracker markers on the cube and attempting to get a clean track in Mocha or AE?

Both of the above methods would not necessarily require any keying as the footage will simply be tracked on top of the cube. As a matter of fact you could use an 18% gray cube in your real shoot and lay the footage on top in a Hard Light blend mode to preserve the real-world lighting/shadows.

Each method you look at for doing this may have some strong and weak points. It’s up to you to figure out which best line up with the problem you have to solve and your skill set. I’d recommend looking at the options instead of immediately restricting yourself to keying.

No matter what method you choose you’ll probably want to use a fast shutter speed on your camera to minimize motion blur (which plays havoc with keying and tracking).

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Sean Cramer] “Basic editing is unavailable when starting with the preset shapes (rectangle, ellipse, etc)?!”

Yup, you nailed it. As far as I know there’s no way to go from a parametric shape path to an editable path.

My workaround would be to add a new mask to a solid layer using the ellipse tool, copy the mask path property of the mask, add a new ‘path’ object to your shape layer and paste the path there. You can then edit the path as you would a standard mask path.

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

I believe you can just modify your seed slightly based on the layer index, something like:

seed = Math.floor(time/holdTime) + index;

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Jerel Limayo] “I’ll be shooting a cube with six sides, I already have Red, Green and Blue on the 3 other sides, now for the next three sides, what colors should I use that won’t affect the first three colors? Thanks in advanced!”

What are you shooting the cube against? What are you planning on doing with the cube? Why do you need multiple colors?

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

Cinema 4D has a render resolution limit of 128000×128000 pixels. However, several image formats don’t support resolutions this large. Most should support up to the resolution you’ve quoted here.

There is also a method for setting up tiled renders to get around the 128000×128000 limitation in case you ever need it 😉

Darby Edelen

[Darby Edelen]

[Nicholas Toth] “I can’t seem to figure out how to pipe in the values of two times (essentially start frame and end frame) and have them translate the rangemapper to control the values of various other objects in sync along that period of time.”

Not sure what this means exactly.

Do you want to input two different time values and force several objects to take on the animation of one object between those times? Or do you want to take several objects with already keyframed animations and make them occur between those times?

Can you give a specific example of what you’re trying to do?

Darby Edelen