Jason Jantzen
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AE Expressions Coin
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COW Coin
Forum Replies Created
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This is actually news to me as I bring most of my artwork from Illustrator and that converts to shape layers pretty well as long as you know what your doing. Sometimes it doesn’t convert very well, but I at least get my shape paths and can rebuild from there. Sounds like you might have to just rebuild it in AE. What do you mean by line weighting? Like brush shape thickness?
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
You don’t have any expressions applied to your mask do you? That’s what it sounds like. If you do, you have to disable the expression to modify the mask.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
That’s a pretty basic drawing over the top of your video technique. It’s a frame by frame animation, so technically you could take it into Photoshop and then draw on the frames there. In fact, that’s how I’d do it I’d I had to. I’d also reduce the frame rate before drawing on it, which you can do on import into Photoshop. Just make sure you export the section of video frames you need so that you know what the start frame is. It’s also easier to work on chunks of video in Photoshop instead of the whole clip.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
There are probably 18 different ways you could color it in After Effects, but it looks like only the stripes are affected, so maybe a change to color effect?
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
So it’s basically using Echo and setting the composite mode to the appropriate setting for blending. Another way to do it is to duplicate your video layer for as many copies as you need and set the blending mode to darken or lighten depending on what your subject is. You notice in those examples that the opacity seems to be less than 100% except for the first subject? That’s because of the blending that’s going on.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
Looks like Echo but with color on each instance…Alternatively, you could create the same look by duplicating the layer 2 times and colorizing each one how you want it then reducing opacity and offsetting the time to manually create that Echo effect.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
I would create some random blobby shape and then play with turbulent displace. Duplicate the shape a couple of times, offset it here and there, add an adjustment layer on top of the whole thing and add a blur then a simple matte choker so that the shapes “stick” to each other. That would at least get you your fluid shape. For the amoeba jellyfish texture look, you might try playing with gradients in the shape along with some luma keying and even overlaying a texture over the whole thing as well.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
I agree with Mike. If you can build it in Photoshop, and the shot is static or even not moving around too much, just bring in a Photoshop layer and play with the blending modes. If you need to track it, then there’s help for that on the cow too.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
I may just have gotten used to what AE has become with the global cache and it’s effects on the GUI. I don’t really feel like it’s sped up with 12.1 or even 12.2, but nobody has talked about this or shown any evidence of improvement. I feel like there may be some driver issues since I work on a Wacom, but a LOT of people work on tablets so wondering if we’ve all just been conditioned to a slower interface.
Part of me thinks they haven’t been able to really nail it down since Steve Forde’s poll about working on just speed for 2014.
In the meantime, I just adapt and learn to work with it.
BTW, CS6 and CC behave very much the same on my machine (global cache introduced in CS6).
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj -
As far as I’m aware, with the introduction of the global cache feature, effects and expressions that do complex calculations especially where they look ahead in the timeline, cause everything to slow way down. The best workaround for that is to precomp the the layer that’s slowing things down and cache it. Beware that caching a large comp will be lost once your cache drive is full and starts throwing away the older cache files so it would be wise to only cache what you need. One thing that helps in that regard is freeze framing a precomp where no animation occurs.
This feature request just occurred to me – what if it were possible to disable the global cache for expressions or a particular layer or something like that? I bet it would be super complicated and impossible to implement, but that would be better than the cumbersome workaround I described.
Jason Jantzen
vimeo.com/jasonj