[David Franklin]

Chris, there’s nothing here that you shouldn’t be able to do directly in any NLE, whether it’s Vegas or Premiere or Final Cut Pro or Avid.

Since I’m an editor by training, I say when you CAN stay in an edit program for something like this, I think you’re better off doing it in an edit program. Real time playback is key for music videos, and once you render each effect once in Premiere, it should stay rendered.

There are plenty of three minute pieces in the world that have to be made in AE for every shot. But this probably isn’t one of them. You just likely need to learn how to do directional blurs and save presets Premiere (which I don’t know how to do, though I’d be happy to show you how to do it on an Avid).

Hope this helps.

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[David Franklin]

I see:
Glow
A second layer of video that’s been blown up, offset, and superimposed on the first.
A directional blur that comes in and out quickly in a vertical direction.
More glow.
More superimposed second layer.
More directional blur.
More glow.

I think the sentence you wrote in your post that worried me was: “Seems like there should be an easier way.”

To me, this doesn’t look very complicated, even if you did it all by hand. And setting animation presets to bring the glows in and out, or to ramp directional blurs in and out should be pretty straightforward as well, if you did want to make it go a little quicker.

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[David Franklin]

Well, I think radio waves is certainly a good place to start. But it might be might be more striking if used in combination with a displacement map effect.

Try making a comp with the map of the earthquake zone and a plain solid. Then apply Effect > Generate > Radio Waves to the solid layer. Adjust the settings until you get a propagation pattern you like, then precompose that solid layer, being sure to click the radio box for “move all attributes into the new composition.”

Then go back to your original comp, select your hero map layer, and use Effect > Distort > Displacement Map. Select the precomp layer as your “Displacement Map Layer,” select “stretch map to fit,” and try a RAM preview. You’ll see the effect the waves are having on your map layer. You can then go into the precomp to adjust the settings on the wave to suit your taste.

Hope that works for you.

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[David Franklin]

Below the video you linked to is this text: “Greatest Super Stars, made in Maya and AE.” So that kind of answers your question.

The geometric shape made out of dots and lines looks to have been constructed in Maya, which is a 3D app. I think that because the vertices all retain rock-solid connections even as the camera moves and rotates around within the space.

If you made the simple geometry in Maya, you could export the white lines and dots AND the camera into After Effects, and then place your text, etc. in 3D space using AE.

Or you could experiment with trying to get a similar effect that didn’t include the lines connecting the dots. I think you could do that in AE alone by making small white solids, and masking them with the elipse tool. You could then make them mimic spheres by making each white circle a 3D layer, and making it “Orient Towards Camera” with the radio button that can be found in the Layer > Transform > Auto-Orient menu selection.

Distribute them in 3D space, put up your text next to each dot, and make an AE camera fly around the space. I just tried it, and it’s actually pretty cool looking even without the lines.

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[David Franklin]

Huh. You sure did. Not sure how I missed that.

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[David Franklin]

If it turns out that you DO know what Dave is referring to, then here’s a suggestion to go one step further:

You could create a simple expression to fill the value of your number effect with the current time.

Twirl down the “Numbers” effect, then twirl down the “Format” tab. Alt click on the stopwatch next to Value/Offset/Random Max and type the word “time” in the expression field that opens on the right.

Then set the “Decimal Places” value to “2” and away you go!

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[David Franklin]

It’s difficult to say for sure, because the compression on that video is pretty harsh, but I might suggest doing a test where you slow the song down by a factor of two, then film the band performing playback live to the slowed-down song.

When you bring that footage into after effects, use the interpret footage tab to double the frame rate. The result may or may not be exactly like what you see with the red suits, but it will definitely be jerky and unnatural.

And because the performance was filmed at half speed, the 200% playback should sync with the original track. (At least for the short shot durations that Music Videos generally use.)

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[David Franklin]

You won’t see your texture on the “side” of the fake 3D text because by duplicating a bunch of 1 pixel deep copies to create “depth,” you don’t actually have a real surface there. To the software, it’s just a bunch of edges. But the suggestion to precompose your text with a texture for the front should work just fine.

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[David Franklin]

If there is a way to do what you’re asking, I don’t know about it, but I’d love to hear it.

I just got done doing a music video with about 180 greenscreen shots and used the methods Dave refers to in his response.

This isn’t the first question I’ve seen, by the way, where someone new to the software is trying to get out of using multiple layers of the same footage in After Effects. Although this may seem like a crazy workflow, it actually works perfectly well.

If you have a trouble spot in the footage where your general key settings don’t work well, use a mask to isolate the area, duplicate the footage on a second layer, and make adjustments.

Also, let me recommend Red Giant’s KeyCorrect Pro. Its light wrap function alone is tremendous.

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[David Franklin]

Might I also suggest using the “Character” window to set the color of your text to a luminous green and use “OCR A Std” font?

And if you want a blinking box to do the revealing, you could do worse than animating the reveal using the text animator property, then creating a solid the size of a single character and animating it to move position as the line of text reveals.

Animate the opacity of the solid to turn on and off repeatedly and voila!

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