[David Bogie]

Depending on how well you planned the shooting, it’s terribly tedious.
Search the forums for the “Pleasantville Effect” for the major discussions and suggestions. It is a common question in many other online AE and effects forums, too.

You will need to figure out a way to isolate the pixels you do not wish to appy your effects to. This can be done many ways but the most common is creating a holdback or matte, rotoscoping by hand every frame.
There are other ways to create the matte or to address specific pixels but the rquire careful planning before shooting. They should turn up in your searching of the forum

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

I hope you get better advice. There are several really good network wonks here on the cow.

From many years of watching similar discussions, I’ve concluded the maintenance overhead usually outweighs the perceived or hoped for gains in productivity. The ability to have simultaneous read/write access to a set of files is the function of a server and it must be supported by a high speed RAID so you’ll need high speed streaming communications usually over dedicated high-gig ethernet or fiber.

I don’t have any of that junk cluttering up my life.

My partner and I sometimes end up working on the same project that involves many applications such as FCP, AE, PS, AI and several encoders. We decide early to establish a bucket on a remote server to which we move copies of everything at the end of each session. We end up with legacy versions on the server and we can delete the local media and project files that are no longer needed. It’s tedious but it has saved our butts a couple of times. We just create a folder inside the big bucket for each day’s work and dump it in there.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Nice stuff, Mark.

After ten years, I still loathe and despise Photoshop with a totally unreasonable passion.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

First question before we can offer much help: With what format have you shot your material?

If you shot conventional DV, your options are slim and none.

We see the topic of chromakeying often so you could spend a few hours cruising the forum archives using search.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

I have no patience with kids looking for speedier renders. You have no idea how good you have it these days. The path to improved render speeds is always planning but it’s not necessarily always hardware.

when After Effects was in v2, we learned to prerender everything and to carefully plan our workflows to use draft mode for everything until it was cleared for final.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Set the aperture to manual while shooting and you may need to change the shutter speed to something like 1/15. You’re screwed. You’re probably seeing only the portion of the frame that was illuminated when the strobe went off and your electronic shutter was open.

You can add light so it’s never dark or you can experiment with lots of stylization techniques but shooting under strobes is difficult at best unless you can control them to stay in synch with your shutter which is not possible with club equipment.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

It comes in that way because it’s larger than your sequence’s settings. Open the motion tab and adjust the scale so it fits.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Yar, modes are like that. You’ll need to render (or precomp/nest) them both and perform the dissolve between the nests or the movies.
I’ve only ever seen that Boris tools are capable of setting keyframes for the application of blend modes.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Drop by the Cycore site and download their particle world demonstration files. You will find exactly what you are asking about, flying through a stream of particles. it’s cool. No, you don’t need a camera but you will manipulate the camera that is in the Particle World system.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”

[David Bogie]

Alicia, you really do not need to post the same question in every AE forum on the Web. If you are new to After Effects, spend a few hours in the manuals. If CS4 is a recent update from CS3, please let us know your level of competency with the application so we don’t spend many wasted posts trying to tell you what you already know.

bogiesan

This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”