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Forget the Add Transfer mode…I wasn’t thinking right. just try extracting black inverted, adjusting the softness to smooth the edges. Then add a matte choker effect and mess with the softness a little. I attached a quick project I made from your picture.
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Have you tried just using an add transfer mode? Or if that doesn’t I would try using the extract effect, setting the extract to the blackest blacks and invert it.
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What you are trying to do is matte or key fire and that is an extremely difficult thing to do(maybe impossible) if you want to completely remove the background. The fire is transparent and moving.
If you want to place fire into a scene seamlessly, you need it have an premade alpha channel or over a background that you can key perfectly. Stock footage sites will have what you need for a price that will be a lot easier to use. Either they will have an alpha channel already, or you can simply use a key affect or transfer mode to drop out the background.
If I were to attempt to work with the footage you show in that video. I would do it with multiple layers. I would cut out all the logs, they should be fairly static. Then I would either try to key- out the blue background, by making a junk matte around the fire I wanted to keep and use some keying effects. Or you could try to use the extract effect and isolate the fire that way.
Either way it’s going to take a lot of experimentation and to be blunt—a lot more than a few days experience with AE.
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If you want to maintain textures and scratches. I would do this by creating each brick in a separate precomp. This way you can have a finished brick per layer.
Create a composition and call it Brick 001. Add your brick wall. Make sure the brick wall layer is selected, now use the square shape tool(it’s the mask tool, when you don’t have a layer selected). and make a brick shape over the first brick you want to show up.
Now go to your project panel and duplicate this composition for as many individual bricks you need. Go back to comp Brick 001, select the Brick Wall layer and change it’s TrkMat mode to Alpha Matte(If you don’t see the TrkMat, press the “Toggle Switches/Modes” button below the layers). Now you have your first brick placed. Open up the all the other brick layers, move the shape layer over each new brick as you want them to appear and change the TRkMat. If you have odd shape bricks like I did in my example project, just double click the shape layer and rescale.
When you are finished, create a new composition called Brick Composite. Bring all your numbered brick layers into and just offset them in time by 1 frame(There are free scripts you can download that will automatically do this, I think video-copilot has one). Once all the bricks are displayed, you may see some holes between them. You will need to go back to your individual brick layers and adjust the shape layer to remove the hole. See “Brick 010” in my example about holes.
Now you can bring the “Brick Composite” into your final comp as one layer and add any effects.
Attached is a quick example project that should help, if anything above was confusing.
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I saw the animation you posted earlier. Honestly, if you are new to AE, just brute forcing it is probably the quickest way to do it.
Cut out one brick, put it where the first brick should go. Duplicate it(cntl+d), move 1 frames down the timeline. Place second brick where you need it to be. Do this until you finish a row. Now duplicate the entire row you just created.
Grab all the new bricks and move them up on top of the first row. Offset them so them left or right, add another brick to fill the extra space. Adjust the start time of each of bricks, so the row starts laying from the opposite direction.
Then just repeat the process with the first row by duplicating and position it above the 2nd row and moving the start time. Repeat with the 2nd row and so-on until you have finished your transition.
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You can create a matte, by selecting your text, go to layer and near the bottom of the list choose “Create masks from text”. You could also create shape layers from the text and use some of the tools there to create your fill in effect.
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If the goal is to fill it with the fill expanding from the stroke, I think you need to just use a second layer as matte. See attached file.
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You might just have to have another layer of the video above the keyed layer and add mask layers that cover the black spots.
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I made a precomp with a black bar that scales up on the x axis. Dropped that into a final, added an offset effect. For the position, I added an expression that moves it on the X axis by multiplying it by (time*time). Essentially, each frame it will be going faster and faster. Offset isn’t really moving, so I added a blur effect to the entire thing.
Sample project attached
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I messed around with a giant layer of text and some displacement mapping to create something close. Don’t have anymore time to mess with it today. Maybe it gives you a jumping off point.