[Filip Vandueren]

There’s a snow filter in AE6.5 but that’s just some blurrydots falling down.

To get something icy’ try a fractal noise with an emboss on top of it with some curves to give it a hint of color:

you can download my project-file, it’s for ae 6.5 pro

instead of a simple Emboss you can also try the CC Glass-filter to get some hightlights and such.
That also has refraction, so it can help to create a look as though you’re looking through ice/glass.

[Filip Vandueren]

I’ve also done something like this with some DVD menus I created last year.
More or less the exact same workflow using MacOSaix, but with Card-wipe with some jitter in it’s parameters.

MacOsaix is great, but it needs a lot of images to get a good result. I created a few thousand by turning video into 4 fps pict-sequences.
Then I let it sort some mosaic out for a few hours (it can do multiple mosaics at once) but as said: it does tend to crash (there is an ato-save feature though) and it uses Metric tons of Ram

The other nice feature is that it can search on Google to find pictures in a certain theme (just make sure there are no nude pictures flying by per mistake 😉

[Filip Vandueren]

If the Flash-animation relies solely on keyframing, you can export it to Tiffs from Flash, and it might even import OK as is in After Effects via Quicktime.
However, if some of the animation uses clever Action-script programming to move around: you’re pretty much stuck.
Exporting inn Flash will totally ignore the programmed effects.

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Ian,

The recipe that would work best is to have the moving around layers in 3d,
but the lines (beam-filter) that connect them need to be applied to a 2D layer that is as big as the comp and is drawn on top of the 3d-layers.

The expression trick is that the 2d-layer needs to know what the equivalent position of the 3d-positions is in 2D.
(this is what’s called: a layer space transformation.)

Dan Ebberts has the theory all explained on his wonderful site ‘motionscript.com’:
https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/lst-lens-flare.html

basically where in 2D you normally would wind up with an expression like this:
thisComp.layer(“object 1”).position

you now need something like this:
thisComp.layer(“object 1”).toComp(thisComp.layer(“object 1”).anchorPoint);

Check out Dan’s Site
He can explain it best 😎

[Filip Vandueren]

Hi Ian,

The recipe that would work best is to have the moving around layers in 3d,
but the lines (beam-filter) that connect them need to be applied to a 2D layer that is as big as the comp and is drawn on top of the 3d-layers.

The expression trick is that the 2d-layer needs to know what the equivalent position of the 3d-positions is in 2D.
(this is what’s called: a layer space transformation.)

Dan Ebberts has the theory all explained on his wonderful site ‘motionscript.com’:
https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/lst-lens-flare.html

basically where in 2D you normally would wind up with an expression like this:
thisComp.layer(“object 1”).position

you now need something like this:
thisComp.layer(“object 1”).toComp(thisComp.layer(“object 1”).anchorPoint);

Check out Dan’s Site
He can explain it best 😎

[Filip Vandueren]

Alien Skin Eye candy is a collection of effects that IMHO were allready out of style in 1999 🙂

The only thing it’s still got going for it is the Bevel and Carve effects, if you need them.
Kind-of okay are swirl, smoke and fire,
And Squint is still pretty cool IMO.

All the other filters are either very ugly (chrome, Fur, star, weave),
or can be done with effects in Ae 6.5 pro if you have it.
(Gaussian Blur, Antimatter, Cut-out, Glass, Glow, HSB Noise, Jiggle, perspective shadow)

So take a good look at the Bevels and see if they’re worth it :
there are some examples still on the site @
https://www.alienskin.com/ecae/ecae_effects.html

[Filip Vandueren]

Well, I only watched the stills, now I watched the animated version, and indeed , you can just animate the evolution to get what they did.

You also might want to fine-tune the brightness & contrast settings of the fractal noise to get another balance, fe. contrast 200%, brightness -50 also give snice results etc.

All this being said, it looks to me like everything Layerlab are selling is just based on different fractal noise settings, I hope I didn’t put them out of business by recreating one effect here in about 5 minutes time 😉

[Filip Vandueren]

for feBiomass:

1. Create a solid layer
2. give it a Fractal noise effect
   

   Settings:
   Fractal Type: Dynamic
   Noise Type: Spline
   Contrast: 160

3. Precompose that layer, moving all attributes into the new comp, name it “Blob”
4. on the Blob Layer: add a colorama effect
   

   Twirl open the Output cycle and choose use Preset palette: “Ramp red”
   Double-click on the red triangle and change the red color to rgb (255/128/125) pink
   click on the opposite side of the (now pink) triangle to add another triangle and choose rgb (128/0/0) dark red

5. add a CC Glass effect
   

   Settings:
   Surface->softness: 1,0
   Surface->height: 20,0
   Surface->Displacement: 0,0
   Shading->Ambient: 100
   Shading->Specular: 66
   Shading->Diffuse: 0
   Shading->Metal: 0

parameters that are not mentioned can be left to their default values.
Here’s my result:

If you now animate the evolution-option of the noise in your pre-comp you get some pretty yucky stuff 😉

The Green one is just another noise-preset, with a different colorama, even without any other effects applied after that I believe.

[Filip Vandueren]

Rendering to MPEG-2 and MPEG-2 DVD is a 6.5 Windows only feature

[Filip Vandueren]

If you don’t need it still and want it to animate like an oscilloscope,
Find yourself some audio of a very deep sine wave or maybe one that is changes tune a little bit and then use the “Render->Audio Waveform” Filter.