[John Cuevas]

My approach would be:

1. Stablize, using Warp Stabilizer in AE
—Lock down your shot first. Stabalizing a shot becomes harder and harder the more you effect the shot.

The other 3 options really depend on the shot, but if I were doing everything in AE, after Stabilizing, I would garbage matte/keylight, pan/zoom then time remap.

Time Remapping adds/subtracts frames, do that last. My 2 cents.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

The answer is both.

Shine for instance can be recreated using a combination of effects that ship with AE. There are scripts and tricks to doing what Horizon does.

On the other hand, Trapcode Lux(as far as I know) can’t be easily recreated in AE. AE also has a few particular engines, that can come close to Trapcode Particular, but you can’t recreate Particular completely with the basic AE ship.

Nothing AE ships with can come close to Form, Zaxwerks, Mettle_Shapeshifter or FreeForm Pro or Plexis.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

I’m not sure why your anchor point is defaulting to [0,0,0] instead of the layer center, when I import my anchor point defaults to the layer center. So I can’t help you with that. But, there is a “name your price” script from AEScripts.com that repositions the anchor point of layer that you might find handy.

https://aescripts.com/repositionanchorpoint/

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

There looks like 2 main things going on there. And probably a few differnt ways to accomplish it, but here’s how I would do it.

First the text is being distored by the water layer. Apply a ‘Distort > Displacement Map to the text layer, and adjust the settings to taste.

One thing you can do is duplicate the video layer and precomp the video layer. Now you can add some blur and level effects to make the text distort a littler smoother.

For the color, that just looks like the video of the water was used below a text layer and the video’s track matte was set to alpha matte. Perhaps the video scale, position and time was offset a bit to make it a little different than the waves

I made a quick project using that video(I don’t have any good water footage at home) to show the techniques I would use to accomplish the project.

3536_displacedtextfolder.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

When you render, what kind of file are you creating and where are you watching this file.

For instance, I have a very capable computer for AE, but if I were to render a HD quicktime-animation and try to play it on my computer, it will stutter and stop…all the information will be there the CPU’s just can’t play it. Once I import the file into my NLE(Avid) it plays fine.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Create your text in precomp and make sure your you have seamless edge. Basically a reasonable amount of space on either side. Now just add an ‘Distort > Offset’ effect to your text. Animate the offet or add an expression to offset position, drop it into your main comp and you should be good to go.

Quick example project here:
3535_stockticker.aep.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Check out this tutorial at video copilot:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/old_film_look/

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

A QT_Animation when it gets to avid will lose something just being transcoded to an Avid format, so I’m suggesting to render to a QT-Avid DNxHD codec(preferably to what you will be using in the Avid).

It will definetely save space, I did a small test today and it was about 1/5 the size of animation and I can’t see any difference.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Let’s concentrate on the first idea, masking the video, to eliminate the hard edges.

First, press “cntl + 1”, this opens your tools window if it isn’t already open. One of the tools looks like a box, with a pulldown option, select the pulldown and choose the elipse tool(looks like an oval).

Click on your the homeless video layer and now draw draw a circle around your video, a circle that is almost as large as the video.

Now twirl down open your homeless video layer, twirl open “Masks” and “Mask 1” adjust the Mask Feather property. If the mask you made is too large, it may extend to the original video edges, you can shrink the mask by adjusting the “mask expansion” property to a negative number.

I created a quick example project to demostrate everything I did, hope this helps you finish your project.

3534_overlayingvideofolder.zip

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.

[John Cuevas]

Sorry about that, I looked at that quickly and thought you were adding an ink flow to the wall.

Few different solutions you could try. One would be to add a mask to your video. I would use select the round mask tool and select most of the video(not all) and then feather the mask significantly. That will remove the edges. If you are still seeing edges, adjust the mask exspansion to a negative number–if your feather is 48, a mask exspansion of -48 should do the trick .

Another approach would be to create organic looking mattes in precomps, perhaps a combination of fractal noise, solids and masks that give the edges some movement. Then you could take your video and create a new composition. Add the matte to your new video comp and change the videos track matte to luma matte.

Again, sorry about earlier suggestion, couldn’t see the picture on the other computer I was using.

Johnny Cuevas, Editor
Thinkck.com

“I have not failed 700 times. I have succeeded in proving that those 700 ways will not work. When I have eliminated the ways that will not work, I will find the way that will work.”
—THOMAS EDISON on inventing the light bulb.