[Doyle Lewis]

I agree with George those things should help with your overall color grading, but maybe use Cinestyle on your 60D so that you start with a very flat image to begin with. I think you should shoot 60 FPS instead of 30 because it will help with getting you the home video look because it will cut down on motion blur. Also Lighting I think was important with this video. It is all shot with overhead hard lighting. It has the illusion that it was shot in the sun with no additional lighting and that helps with making it look like a run and gun VHS movie. You will probably want to use some reflectors to help make shots not look too blown out or too dark, but be sure to make it subtle. Lastly I would say dont worry about setting blurs to mimic SD, instead do all you color grading and cropping (to 4:3) at full quality and then when your done just export to SD quality. Then bring it back into a 720 or 1080 project and stretch it so it fits top to bottom and has letterboxes on the sides. This should get you the blurry SD quality look you are talking about.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

To track separate flares onto separate lights all you have to do is change the “name starts with” feature under the track lights option to a letter like “A” then name all flares you want blue “A” or “A2” or whatever. Then duplicate your optical flares layer and change the name starts with to “B.” Change the flare that is loaded onto that new layer to the other red one you want, then all you have to do is change name of any light that you want to be red to “B” or “B2” and so on.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

I agree with Walter. I don’t exactly understand what you mean, a screenshot or something would help a lot.

I am going to guess though that you have a shot of the same person on opposite sides of the shot and the mask that you drew between them has a hard line because the light changed too much between takes. If this is the case adjust the brightness of the shots with either levels or curves to get them as close as you can. It probably still wont be prefect, but after you do that you will have to draw your mask strategically. When you are drawing your mask try to draw along natural lines in the background. If there is a corner of the room in the shot or around furniture or things like that. Hide the lines of the mask in places where someone would expect to see a line. Also exorbitant amounts of feathering… if the shot allows. lol

Without seeing it that is the only advice I could give. Hope that helps

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

It’s always hard to say what to do for a key without a screen capture or a clip but the suggestions are so far very good. I would say that things to consider that generally get overlooked are:

color grading– not to be confused with color correcting. The first step to making a key look good after keying it is to match the color of the keyed layer to that of the background (color correcting), but the part that is often overlooked is color grading everything after. If you add an adjustment layer on the very top the foreground and background footage and do your final color grading it does a whole lot to make both layers look like they exist in the same environment. Just be sure to get it rather close in the first correction.

Light wrap– There are keying plug-ins that do this with nothing more than a checkbox (e.g. Red Giant’s Keying suite) but in AE I just make my own using the inverse of the matte from the key with a softened choke and place that over the original matte and use that combined matte as the matte on a duplicate BG footage with a strong Gaussian blur. Place this over your foreground image and lower the opacity greatly and you should get a subtle color mix around the edges of your keyed subject that make it look like the light from the environment lightly reflects off the subjects edges

Shadows– Make them subtle! Using AE’s 3D you can use a shadow catcher to do this but I prefer duplicating my keyed footage placing it where the shadow would fall. Remove the lightness and saturation, add a Gaussian blur, lower the opacity greatly and then draw a mask to mask out the section farthest in z-depth and feather greatly.

Shadows on your keyed subject – if something in the BG you are trying to place the subject in would cast a shadow on your subject, then with a mask on a black solid draw how that shadow would land and feather and set the opacity to match the hardness of the light.

Background animation– If the background is a still picture do some subtle effects to make it animated. e.g If there is a window in the picture then you can animate the brightness of the light it projects subtly through the shot so that it looks like clouds are passing outside.

Those are the only things I can think of right now but hopefully if you take your time doing those then you will get a well integrated composite.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

Kush’s gauge suggests that you use a target bitrate of about 17.5 Mbps and a maximum bitrate of about 34.8 Mbps for full quality render at your frame size and rate, but you can probably get away with a target of 8.7 Mbps and 17.4 as your maximum. The point being that for the size of your comp i believe your bitrate is too low.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

So before this i wasn’t to familiar with loops, but i think that you found the correct solution. This would probably be the simplest expression to get the result you are wanting.

I agree with Darby that it has the downside of being a heft expression calculation wise the further you go on your timeline, and also agree with Walter that time remap would be a much easier way all the way around although If you are to do it that way i might create the animation in a higher frame rate than your final comp that way when you stretch out you time remap you have frames in between. (or use some sort of frame blending, but i don’t think that will get you the best results)

Anyway you said that you don’t understand the expression and i thought I might lay it out for you (as best I can, I am not too familiar with this kind of expression either. If I’m wrong about anything please someone correct me.)

the first line
slider = effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
is just houskeeping. It just makes the latter expression accum += slider.valueAtTime(t); easier to read instead of being accum += effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”).valueAtTime(t);

the next two lines
f1 = timeToFrames(inPoint);
f2 = timeToFrames(time);
Converts two time markers that will be used later in the expression into frames and defines them as variables once again just to keep the later expressions cleaner.

The next 5 lines are a loop expression.
accum = 0;
for (f = f1; f < f2; f++){
t = framesToTime(f);
accum += slider.valueAtTime(t);
}

A genaric loop expression is written as such
Variable 1 = A starting value;
for (Variable 2 = A starting value; a statement which if ever false ends the loop; Variable 2 increment){
a statement that will be executed every loop;
}

So to break down what he chose.
accum = 0;
His first variable he is setting to zero. This will be the value that changes in the loop dependent on the number of times the loop is run.

for (f = f1; f < f2; f++){
f is variable 2 and could have been named anything. There is no need to have defined f prior to this line of code. the f=f1; is saying that before any loops are ran f is equal to the number of frames it takes to get to the in point of the composition. This could just as easily be f=0 but he wrote it this way so that your animation doesn’t necessarily have to start at frame 0, it just starts at the inpoint. f < f2 is saying that the loop will continue to run until f is no longer less than the number of current frames. and finally f++ is saying to increment f by one every loop, which is why you do not need to define f before the “for” statement.

The next line as said before is the statement.
t = framesToTime(f);
accum += slider.valueAtTime(t);
There are actually 2 lines in this statement and thats because t = framesToTime(f); is just converting f back from frames into time and defining it as t. This is because the second line ( accum += slider.valueAtTime(t);) needs a value of time in the unit of time, not frames. the accum += slider.valueAtTime(t); part is saying the every loop take the value of accum from one loop ago and add the current value of the slider. the part where it is asking to add the accum from 1 loop ago isn’t naturally apparent, but exists in the operator +=. += mean take the last value and add the following. So x+=y means x= x+y it must know what the old value of x is so it can add it to y and give you the new x. What this statment is calculating is the combined value of the slider sampled at every frame. At frame 1 the slider might be 2 so accum for frame 1 is 2. at frame two the slider is still at two so the accum is 4 and so on.

Finally the last line
accum*thisComp.frameDuration
This is saying that the total rotation is equal to the accum at the current frame * the number of frames there are to the current.

Sorry for the long post, but when I was hashing out this code I wished someone had laid it out for me.

As a side note I suggest this improvement to the expression for your specific use. Instead of the slider controlling the degrees of rotation it controls the number of rotations per second

slider = effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”);
f1 = timeToFrames(inPoint);
f2 = timeToFrames(time);
accum = 0;
for (f = f1; f < f2; f++){
t = framesToTime(f);
accum += (slider.valueAtTime(t)*360);
}

accum*thisComp.frameDuration

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

I actually just had the same problem two days ago. I did a full restart of my computer and then AE started recognizing QuickTime again. I had done a disk repair and cleared out a ton of temp files the day before that so I don’t know if that had anything to do with it. Have you used Mac’s disk utility recently?

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

This is how I would do it.

Create a null. Attach a slider control effect to that null then use the expression below.

time*(360*effect(“Slider Control”)(“Slider”))

The slider will now control the number of rotations per second. Now all you have to do is parent all the animated parts of your cog to the null (if the cog is only one part then you can forego a null if you like, I just like to use nulls for my workflow) and then keyframe your slider to change the rate of rotation.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

6974_autowriteonexpression.aep.zip

Hey Emmet,

Ok so attached above is something I put together that can do, at least to my understanding, what you are trying to do. This is how it works. You make a new text layer in the letters comp and type a letter. You set this layer to a guide layer so that you have control of it but it doesn’t show up in the above comp. Loaded underneath your guide layer is an exact duplicate of the letter you typed except it has a write on animation pre-made to it. Because of the way it is built the letter wont show up behind the guide layer until you copy the slider onto your guide text layer from the guide layer labeled accordingly. Then you use this slider called “end” to set a keyframe at value 0 where you want the write on to start and another keyframe at value 100 where you want the write on to end. Now if you go to the “render this comp” composition and ram preview, you see that letter animate its write on.

Notes:

The font i used is Coronet and this project as is only works with that font. you can download it free here- https://www.fontspace.com/category/coronet.

Every letter must have it’s own layer

You can use your own font, but you will have to make the write on animations from scratch, but the expressions at least will have been done for you. Just unhide the layers in the “Letters” comp and you will find layers called “the letter A,” “the letter B” and so on. then just change the font and adjust the mask that guides the write on. you will not be able to make these letters visible without creating a corresponding letter in a layer above

If you have two of the same letter (say it is letter “t”)then unhide the layers in the “Letters” comp and find the corresponding layer (in this case the layer would be named “the letter t.”) then duplicate that layer and open up the expressions. Change every instance of the layer name from just the letter to the letter space 2. (in this instance you would change things like thisComp.layer(“T”) to thisComp.layer(“T 2”) ) caps are important! Also each property with an expression only caries one instance of the layer name. I wrote it that way to try to minimize the number of changes you have to make in a single layer.

Also there is no ability for lowercase, but the expressions differentiate between upper and lower case so you can use my expressions as groundwork for building lower case capabilities.

So play around with it and see what you think. There is a bit of work to do to set up your work, but once you set it all up it is relatively procedural. let me know if you have questions. I know i didn’t do a great job explaining it.

If anyone likes what I have done and has ideas to improve it please let me know what you would do. I don’t know much about writing scripts, but I feel like a script could somehow solve some of the clumsier parts of the project , like the fact that every letter needs its own layer and such.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com

[Doyle Lewis]

I don’t know if I would do an effect at all. I think i would go WS of family with iPad. cut to CU of iPad, push “order” and then the picture of the guy on the webpage disappears. Cut to MCU of girl and father (or mother) looking at each other confused about where the man had gone, hand with tape measure pushes into frame next to the girls head. cut to WS of family still holding iPad except now the man from the webpage is in the room measuring the girls height. Family maybe started by his abrupt appearance.

I like this better than him leaping out of the ipad for a couple reasons. For one it is simpler, and I believe that it dramatically reveals his appearance as opposed to actually watching him step out. This is just how I would do it. Hope that helps.

Doyle Lewis, Assistant Videographer

thinkck.com