David Franklin
Forum Replies Created
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I agree with Yikesmikes. That tutorial will get you set up.
And if you’re thinking “do I really have to track the footage?” sadly, even at a beginner level, the tracking is necessary.
But if you follow the steps in that tutorial to get your face first tracked, then put in a separate comp, then reverse-tracked so that you can work stationary elements into your footage as is demonstrated, the eyes are going to be easy.
Essentially, I would create a new adjustment layer, draw masks around the eyes, parent it back to your main layer, then experiment with the Effect > Stylize > Glow effect.
You could also add an Effect > Color Correction > Exposure. Or Curves, or any number of color correction effects.
Finally, I would also play around with the blending mode of the adjustment layer. Overlay, Soft Light, and Color Dodge may produce some interesting results.
Hope this helps.
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I have not had this particular problem, but I continue to struggle with the multiprocessing function in CS3.
I tried your trick of installing Nucleo Pro 2 (okay, I installed the free trial version). But not only did it seem to make no difference to the speed of my RAM previews when I tried to use it, but when I disabled it, installing it didn’t seem to have the effect you described of also getting rid of the pesky tendency of CS3 to keep repeatedly initializing background processes every time I RAM preview using the native Multiprocessing mode.
I’ve been working on deadline on my current project and so have just been living with this stuff, but it’s starting to get very tiring.
Anybody else experiencing these delays at the beginning and end of RAM previews in Multiprocessing mode using CS3 on a MacPro tower?
I’ve got 120% of 3GB in my RAM allocation, and 45% of 1.5GB in my RAM Cache. (That’s to give enough memory from my 4 Gigs of RAM to engage all four processors independently).
When I up the RAM cache I get error messages about fragmentation. I also tried turning on the Disk cache, but that doesn’t seem to make a difference.
Maybe I just need more RAM altogether before I’ll see a benefit? But seriously, do I need 8GB? Or 16? Just to do a moderately complex AE project? It seems like I must be doing something wrong.
Any wisdom would be much appreciated.
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Yikes indeed! I just reread everything and saw that Yikesmikes is right, you didn’t have a second variable in your initial expression. Not sure how I missed that. But on second read, my suggestion that “it would be less confusing” sounds like gibberish!
But certainly, you need first to link to the slider info (that would be the first variable, what you were calling “x” in your initial post). Then you need to do the linear function on that value “x”. Then you need a second variable, which Yikesmikes suggests calling “zBounce” to pick up the output of the linear function so that you can stick it into your position expression.
And of course, Yikesmike’s solution of [Position[0],Position[1],zBounce]; is ever so much more elegant than just plugging in the raw position coordinates as I suggested.
Still, glad you got it working to your satisfaction…
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I think I’m supposed to tell you to post this in the expressions forum. But now that I have, let me try to answer.
The key is understanding that the 3D position of any layer is an array of three numbers which can be expressed as:
[x,y,z];
Where x is the x coordinate, y is the y coordinate, and z is your z coordinate. So if you want to take what you wrote, and apply it to an object living in a 720×540 comp, you’d simply copy the expression you already wrote, alt-click the stopwatch of the position perameter of your layer, and paste your expression, followed by a semicolon.
On the next line, you’d just write [360,270,x];
It might be less confusing if you used “z” as your variable instead of “x”, as it would then be clear that this is going into z space.
But it will work either way.
Oh, and if you want to change the x and y positions, go ahead, I just defaulted to having it in the middle of the screen.
Good luck…
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MikeP WOW!
That would totally improve my life — I think we discussed this about a week and a half ago, and I’ve been too busy to do the benchmarks that were discussed at that point.
I’m interested in why it works, of course. But the bottom line is, you solved a serious problem that at least five of us reported having.
Thank you, thank you. Now I just have to go buy Nucleo Pro…
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Arranging the logos around the center point sounds a lot like what was done in the “ring of cows” tutorial:
The only issue is that you want an oval, not a ring. And if the logos are just sitting in an oval in z-space, you have a problem when you rotate them: some points of the oval wind up closer or farther from the camera, making the logos varying sizes.
A completely different approach I just tried very quickly would be to define your oval path using a mask, then copy the “mask shape” property and paste that info into the “position” property of a null object. This creates a null object that is moving along an oval path. The default on my machine created a 2 second round-trip, but you can alt-click the keyframes and drag the right keyframe out to however long you want the round-trip to take.
Then for each logo in the comp, option click the stopwatch and insert the following simple expression into the position value: thisComp.layer(“Null 1”).position.valueAtTime(time+index);
This spaces the logos out at 1 second increments along the path.
Now select all the logos, go to Layer > Transform > Auto-Orient, and click “Orient Along Path”. (If you orient to camera, all the logos keep re-orienting as they spin around the oval).
Of course now everything is happing in the wrong axis. Since I can’t get the null’s path to rotate in z space, I used the camera tool to rotate the camera 90 degrees so it’s pointing up at the ring, and finally selected all the logo layers and rotated them +90 in both x rotation and z rotation.
What I got was a smooth moving 3-D oval ring of logos which are pointed at the camera as they pass, but not when they are on the back side of the loop. All you’d have to do from there is use Hold keyframes to stop the null as each logo reaches the point in front of the camera, then let it resume its path.
Having written all that out, I’m sure there must be a more elegant solution, but it’s apparently above my skill level!
Anyone else?
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Point taken. I hope my post didn’t seem rude.
Thanks for the heads up on the behind the scenes thing — now I’ll go looking for that…
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It has been discussed, but not exhaustively.
Reading the previous thread, I agree with whoever suggested that they used “Mokey” from Imagineering Systems. We saw a demo from them at the AENY user group last week where they took an orange cone out of moving camera footage where it crossed in front of a guy riding a tractor.
It would, of course, involve lots of cash as I understand this product is in the MANY thousands of dollars range. But the demo lasted 5 minutes and even drawing quick and dirty splines, the finished effect looked superb.
So if you had time, gave the guys green boards to ride, and then used this heavy technology, you wouldn’t need motion control cameras, and it would wind up looking pretty similar to what’s here.
Love the video, though. Thanks for posting the question so I got to see it…
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Probably an obvious thing, but is your solid twice as wide as it is tall? That seems to be the shape this effect prefers. Otherwise, I’m not sure what could be causing the wobble.
I’ve used this effect with great success and no wobble. Hmmmm.
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Indeed the Caustics effect (in conjunction with Wave World) will do it. But it will also render at a heart-stoppingly slow pace.
If you’re working on a “film,” that implies you might have shot some live action, and Aharon made a pretty sweet use of live action water footage as a displacement map in his third displacement map tutorial:
Having just recently spent about 10 hours working on a 5 sec. shot using the wave world / caustics combo, I highly recommend working at least a little of this displacement map technique into the mix — if only to make your project more doable…