[David Bogie]

See the online manual for PRECOMPOSE and NEST. Visit adobe.coma nd look for the After Effects tutorials and help sections, they’re HUGE.

Create a new comp that is the same size as your main comp, we’ll call it SHATTER_THIS. Put your small layer into this comp. Do NOT scale it up to fill the comp.

Back to your main comp, bring in SHATTER_THIS and apply Shatter to the nested comp. Now you are shattering the entire frame, not just the small layer within the comp.

If you are new to AE, you simply must spend a few hundred hours either doing the hundreds of free tutorials here and all over the Net or buy a few books and invest in the time required to slog through them. AE is like no other applicatio you have ver used.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[John Hunter] “(used the pen tool to trace the logo area).”

That’s probably more detail than you need, John. You just need a rough rectangle or ellipse that covers the green in the logo. You’re just holding it back from processing, it doesn’t need to be pretty or even accurate. The mask layer doesn’t need chroma keying at all.

You’ll see what I mean as soon as you start messing with this.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

After Effects.

I do not know if there’s a similar function in Motion. Might be.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Emailing for proof is a disaster. You must set the controls for Flip very low to obtain a small file. The quality is so bad your clients cannot make intelligent decisions. I fight this all the time with people in my own building who too freakin’ busy to come down to my shop and view their projects on a decent display.

If you can educate them or they’re already hip enough to understand the differences between real and stupidly compressed video, Flip might work for you. It’s cheap and it can be really fast if you set up Qmaster to use all of your Intel’s cores.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

[Steve Price] “I offer these comments in good faith – I trust there are folk present here who share my frustration and don’t take offence at the slightest constructive criticism of Apple.
“

I’m not an apologist for Apple. You can search here and on other tutorial sources for help in using optical flow but I gotta say it’s more or less fabulous.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Make a copy of your footage and mask around the area so the keyer is not processing it. You will need to move the mask around and keyframe it manually or just apply motion tracking to it.

The best chroma keying always requires several copies of the same footage stacked in layers with different filters and effects applied to each. You may need to apply masks, more or less chroma keying, matte choke, or light wraps to any of them.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Your approach depends on your ability to use After Effects multiplied by your budget and divided by your ability to plan your shooting so you end up with footage to which you can apply your proposed effects. This requires that you know what you’re talking about and that you can communicate it to your performers and your photographer.

Spend a few hours investigating the “Pleasantville Effect” and then decide if that’s what you want to do.
Spend a few hours investigating “rotoscoping” and decide if that’s something you’d like to try.
these investigations will lead you to several other viable approaches.

WARNING: What you want to do is easy, cheap, or good. You get to pick one, not two.

You must then decide on a technical approach within the confines of your special effects application. You plan your photography to provide what AE needs. You experiment. You toss out your original silly concept because it was based on ignorance and you recreate based on what you now know. You then shoot your experiments again and be prepared to rework your ideas yet again.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

Precompose.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

I’d get in and tweak the three dimensional spatial Beziers of the path taken by the camera/null so the camera travels along an elegantly curved path.
Better yet, fix the glitch in your poster artwork so you don’t have to compensate by shifting your camera.

bogiesan

[David Bogie]

If I remember the discussions after Jurassic Park hit the screens, the tennis balls were needed for two purposes. they gave the actors something to deal with on the set and they provided the animators with reference targets. The ball markers were individually and painstakingly tracked, frame by frame for x-y-z values, and each of these separate tracks was used to conduct a single member of the flock.

that kind of stuff just makes my head hurt and I’m glad someone else has to think it up and make it work.

bogiesan