[Graham Macfarlane]

Thanks for your comments guys!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

You need to rotoscope the actor on a duplicate layer (without clone stamp) and move it above the layer with the clone stamp.

How come you are using clone stamp on the window instead of colour/brightness correction tools with a mask? Is it that the brightness from the window is clipping in the whites?

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

In that case:
Have you tried using the grid emitter whilst adding turbulance to break up the uniform positioning?

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Try setting emitter type to Point and Direction to disc. Then if your velocity random % = 0 you might get some particles close to each other but you shouldn’t get any particles passing over each other.
Beyond this you might want to try something like particle flow in 3D studio max to get more control.

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Precomp your vector layer and on the precomp add a paint effect. With “paint on transparent” = off (so you can see what your painting on) set the paint mode to Normal, Channels need only be RGB and the Duration to Write on. Set paint foreground colour to black.

Then Paint where and with the speed that you want the reveal to occur. Once you finish the paint operation the line you draw will vanish. Press play and you should see the line you drew appear at the rate you drew it.

Copy this effect from your precomp layer to a white solid of the same size so your black line appears on white. Then put this solid layer above your vector layer or the precomped vector layer if you wish and use it as a luma inverted Track matte.

Let me know how it goes!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

The only way I know that to happen would be if you have no comps in your project to insert the footage into. In this situation both the ripple insert edit and overlay edit buttons in the footage panel are greyed out.

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

People crossing past each other from the cameras point of view should not present a major problem unless you’re using one roto mask for more than one head or shoulders at a time.
Just as Roland suggested, you must break up each person to be rotoscoped into its simplest shapes.

My approach would be to go into Mocha and boost the gamma on your footage to see if there is some surface details on heads and backs of people.
If there is then start by choosing one head closest to camera that is never occluded by anything and create a very simple circular X-Spline (name it HeadA-track for example) WITHIN the boundary of the head at roughly half way along the time line. Track forward and back. If it tracked well, turn off tracking for that layer. Now go back to half way on time line and create another X-Spline for the same head (name it HeadA-roto for example) and this time roto the head carefully for that frame. Turn off tracking for this layer too and link it to HeadA-track. You might need to make some minor tweaks to HeadA-roto in “AdjustTrack” to fix drift.

Now continue the process for all heads and shoulders separately. Remember layer order in Mocha is vital whilst tracking since occluding shapes already tracked need to sit at the top of the layer stack. Work from objects closest to camera first ending with the train last.

If a head crosses in front of someone you might need to help mocha a bit during the tracking but once you get into the swing of it, it shouldn’t be too painful!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

If the people don’t turn their heads and shoulders much (eg. torso/head silhouettes get smaller but more or less maintain overall shape as people walk to train) You should be able to roto each individual very fast in Mocha if you have it.

Make sure you roto the people before the train since you can use the people rotos to mask out those areas when tracking the train.

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

By second node do you mean the camera target?
If so, you should see it as a clickable cross hair that lacks xyz handles.

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK

[Graham Macfarlane]

Hi Christian,
For both the position and rotation codes:

The web site has formatted the – (minus) characters so that AE doesn’t understand them. Just replace them with a normal – (minus) within AE

Also on line 5, I think that code should read as

n = n-1;

I tried them with these adjustments and it works great!
Very neat bit of code by Lester Banks! Thanks Roland for the link!

Graham Macfarlane
3D animator and VFX specialist
London UK