[Dirk De jong]

[Greg Sage] “Resulting cubist comp may or may not be recognized as a face by facial tracking softwares,”

yeah that’d probably be a huge problem for the social media filter authoring software face tracking (the cubist face)

[Dirk De jong]

[Greg Sage] “Some other hybrid workflow including Lens, Spark, Crazytalk, or similar?”

here’s a kluge (which believe it or not I’ve actually used before)…

It’s possible in Spark AR to show only the flag texture (as mapped to the face mesh) over a flat solid color (maybe black, white, bright green) without actually showing the source video at all (but the source video is still being used for the tracking data) – and then screen cap that, then take the screen cap video into AE (position and scale as needed) and then composite it with the original talking head shot using blend mode and/or key – can actually look OK depending on the context

in Spark AR the way I made the solid color was to create a 3D plane (with a flat color material on it) and had it facing the camera and pushed back in 3D space so it was behind the face mesh – this obscures/hides the source video since I seem to remember that there is no built in way to simply disable the visibility of the source video

what’s the duration of the shot you need to do ?

[Dirk De jong]

[Greg Sage] “I need to paint a flag on thier face so it moves with their facial motions”

I don’t know of a good way to do it in AE. The way the tools from Facebook (for authoring Facebook and Instagram filters) or Snapchat (for authoring Snapchat filters) do it is that they have a face mesh (a default built in mesh or you can load your own) that follows the face and deforms along with the face based on face tracking. And you can map your own texture to that mesh and use transparency and blend modes etc. to make it look like the texture is “painted on” to the original face. I’ve done some of this and recently posted a screencap to show someone what it looks like and what some of the capabilities are. [ https://kingluma.com/augmented.mp4 ] starting at about the 40 second mark this video shows the Facebook standalone (called Spark AR Studio) – The Snapchat app is called “Lens Studio”. AFAIK these apps don’t have export functionality so they’re not ideal for use as a post processing tool on a video file… but their tracking algorithms seem pretty good : )

[Dirk De jong]

[Julie Turner] “Why Doesn’t Compound Clip With Effects in One Project Still Have Effects When Placed in Another Project?”

I think (if I understand correctly) the answer is because it (a compound clip) behaves like a source clip. You wouldn’t expect a source clip with an effect applied to it in one project to appear with the effect applied in another project. If however the effect was nested WITHIN a compound clip then it would be there in all instances of the compound clip. It’s possible to make a compound clip out of a compound clip (so it’s 2 levels deep). Maybe that would work in your current situation. I think the same would be true for audio adjustments – if the adjustments are made WITHIN the compound clip they are part of the compound clip, if they are made to an instance of the compound clip within a specific project they are part of that specific instance.

[Dirk De jong]

I think that’s an old discontinued plugin distributed through FxFactory. So if you launch the FxFactory app you should be able to find the plugin listed there under “Installed” and if you hold down the option key you should see the button next to the plugin icon show as “Uninstall”, and if you click that button and do it that way it will correctly uninstall and avoid FxFactory thinking there are missing files and restoring it.

[Dirk De jong]

I haven’t tested this exhaustively yet, but getting back to this issue just now it just occurred to me to try putting a Motion “Project Loop end” marker at the end of the template – and so far this seems to work to avoid the strobe/stutter problem

[Dirk De jong]

I’m reporting my findings so future explorers lost among the obscure time related issues of Apple Motion template building might find them…

Looking at Bret’s smooth strobe template I noticed the duration (of his template Motion project) was precisely 1 hour. I made mine 1 hour and that avoided the glitchiness I was seeing with the strobe on the source video but it introduced a new problem with some parameters I was auto-animating with the “Rate” behavior (the Rate behavior seemed to not work all the way through the effect if the template duration was so long) – so I made my template project precisely 1 minute duration and it still seems to solve the problem and my rate behavior is still functional. “Ordinarily” the duration of the template project shouldn’t be relevant but for some reason it seems to be in this case…

[Dirk De jong]

I googled it and found this direct link works FWIW (so I was able to access it) ;
https://bretfx.com/product/smooth_strobe/

[Dirk De jong]

I can’t currently seem to connect to bretfx.com… can anyone point me to anywhere else that I can download Bret’s smooth strobe files ?

[Dirk De jong]

I might have already found the answer in an old cow post here… I’ll look more at this when I’m back at the Mac…

https://forums.creativecow.net/docs/forums/post.php?forumid=344&postid=44072