[Howard Matthews]

In case you don’t see it, Walter Soyka replied in the other thread:

“Frischluft’s “FL Out of Focus” effect (part of Lenscare) allows you to use a custom iris shape.

https://frischluft.com/lenscare/index.php
”

… just tested the demo, and it does exactly what you’d think. Bit expensive ($199) but you’ll know if you need it

h

[Howard Matthews]

That’s perfect. Bit expensive, but boy, does it add realism when you’re dealing with lots of bokeh

Thanks 🙂

[Howard Matthews]

Crikey, I’ve just posted an almost identical request. D’oh.

Can’t answer your question, but one thing you asked is already provided by the native AE effects; if you whack up the Hilight Diffraction parameter, it puts a brighter edge on the bokeh circles.

If its available to you, I understand Mental Ray lets you provide a bokeh bitmap it then maps to the CoC to do exactly what you describe, but that doesn’t help us in AE. I’ll report back if I come up with any answers…

[Howard Matthews]

Gah… the line toward the end reading
“if (relativeAngle & lt;= coneFeatherAngle) {”

should have a less-than sign instead of the & lt;

doh

[Howard Matthews]

Thanks Dan!

The finished expression is below. With a spotlight and a camera in a comp, if you apply this expression to a Lens Flare brightness parameter, then the flare will adjust its brightness automatically depending on whether the light is glaring into the camera or away. Just like a light house. And it respects the spotlight’s cone angle and feather parameters.

Many, many thanks 🙂

// AE expression to modulate a spotlight's flare brightness
// depending on whether the spot is facing into or away
// from the camera
// h 6/12/2016

// change these to reference your spotlight
// and camera as appropriate

L = thisComp.layer("Light 1");
C = thisComp.activeCamera;

// maximum and minimum brightness
// these are multiplied by the existing brightness
// parameter, so you can still tweak the overall
// flare brightness in the usual way

maxBrightness = 1;
minBrightness = 0.2;

// our calculations are based on 0 --> 180
// light pointing AT camera --> AWAY from cam
// so halve the light cone angle for simplicity

coneAngle = L.lightOption.coneAngle / 2;
coneFeatherAngle = coneAngle - (coneAngle * L.lightOption.coneFeather * 0.01);

// work out the angle between the light's direction
// and the vector between camera and light
// (all credit Dan Ebberts)

v1 = normalize(C.toWorld([0,0,0]) - L.toWorld([0,0,0]));
v2 = L.toWorldVec([0,0,1]);
relativeAngle = radiansToDegrees( Math.acos (dot(v1,v2)))

// map the angle to the brightness multipliers

if (relativeAngle <= coneFeatherAngle) {
output = maxBrightness;
} else {
if (relativeAngle >= coneAngle) {
output = minBrightness;
} else {
output = linear (relativeAngle, coneFeatherAngle, coneAngle, maxBrightness, minBrightness);
}
}

// multiply our final output multplier by
// the existing brightness parameter

output * value

[Howard Matthews]

Go to Edit > Templates > output templates to set the default file type for rendering. It’s not exactly the most intuitive dialog box, but that’s where you tell AE what format you want renders and still frames to default to.

[Howard Matthews]

Have you tried:

– rebooting
– reinstalling QuickTime
– reinstalling After Effects

…?

[Howard Matthews]

Yup, submitted this a few years ago, and again last night.

Incredibly frustrating on two counts.

1. A ripple edit in a comp isn’t always trivial (subcomps), but it often is, and even a simple implementation of the tool I suggest would save a ton of time.

2. Every time some poor newbie pops their head up on an AE forum and asks where the obvious tool for inserting time is, I’m horrified to see people I otherwise have an enormous amount of respect for saying, Oh, that’s just not how AE works, but you’ll learn. Man up and do it yourself manually with the mouse, like God intended.

Like it’s supposed to be difficult, and if you’re suggesting there’s a bit of obvious functionality missing from AE, you just haven’t understood how AE works.

I’d be willing to bet that anyone on these forums who does corporate work in AE faces this regularly, and finds themselves doing exactly the same tasks repeatedly: select all layers, reveal animated props (u), hilight all keys from now on, drag out by x frames. Now manually find and select all layers currently active, then collectively drag their end handles out by x frames. Now manually find and select all layers that start after now, drag them on by x frames.

Is that not automatable?! I sometimes have comps with nearly 100 layers in them that I then have to trawl through doing this tedious routine with, whether I need to insert a minute or a frame.

Ideally, holding a key combo and then dragging in the timebar would automatically select every event to the right of your mouse and start dragging them. Keyframes, layers, end-points. Simplicity itself. Of course there are exceptions and special cases and gotchas, but that’s no reason not to have the tool at all. Why am I the only one screaming?

Sorry for ranting again. Twice in two days. Not good, d’oh

[Howard Matthews]

Re. USB drives – I have to report that I’ve had no problems editing some pretty big and complex projects on my Mac Mini using only USB-2 drives.

I had problems originally trying to capture from a FW source (camcorder) to a FW drive, probably because there’s only one FW socket on the mini so you have to daisy-chain the devices. All the data has to come down and go up the same wire, not good.

So long as it’s a decent drive, USB-2 is perfectly usable for video.