[Jon Bagge]

Is there any way you can add a glow/flash or something as you fade between the animation and the photo? That may hide the difference if you can’t get it to match.

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https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

I don’t quite understand how you’ve set things up, but here are some pointers:

If you have a main comp with a 3D camera and a 3D subcomp WITHOUT collapse transformations (cont.rast), the subcomp will behave as a flat layer in 3D space, regardless of whether it has 3D layers/camera/whatever inside.

If you have a main comp with a 3D camera and a 3D subcomp WITH coll.trans, AE will ignore any camera/lights inside the subcomp and instead use camera/lights in the main comp. But otherwise your 3D layers inside the subcomp will behave as if they were inside the main comp.

Basically if a subcomp has camera/lights and you want to use them, you can’t enable coll.trans on that subcomp when you put it in a main comp.

Also beware that if your subcomp contains a mix of 2D and 3D layers things can get very weird if you enable 3D and coll.trans. on that subcomp.

Effects on a 3D comp with coll.trans. will cause it to not interact in 3D space with other objects in your main comp.

And two last points which has caught me out a few times: layer styles will break 3D as if there was a 2D layer above and below the layer. And ‘3D on 2D’ layers like layers with Particular, Element and other ‘3D’ plugins will act as a 2D layer for the purpose of interacting with other layers.

3D in after effects can be very interesting..

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https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

Off the top of my head I wonder if tracking might work. Temporarily modify your strokes to draw a line rather than reveal the underlying image. If you’re animating the ‘start’ property, link the ‘end’ property to the start with a small offset (expression pick-whip the other property and add +1 or something).

This should make the stroke effect draw a dot (or very short line) that moves around the path where the writing would happen.

Now track this and use the track for your greenscren hand.

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https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

You can only have one project open at a time. But you can import a project into another project. This will create a folder in your project containing the second project.
You can then copy stuff over, or do whatever.

Doing this won’t change the imported project. The contents of the imported project will simply be added to your project.

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https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

Yes the sparkles are Particular. And lots of Trapcode Starglow for that… starglow look!

————–
https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

It’s weird. When I posted it yesterday it looked fine to me, but now my post has code instead of the embedded video.

You’re quote of my post though has the embed working..

???

————–
https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

If you use the convert vertex tool (G) in the comp window you should be able to get bezier handles so you can shape the path of the pin.

If you’re doing complicated animation with puppet pin I’d recommend you link your pins to nulls and animate nulls instead. It’s much more flexible, and allows parenting as well.

if you google ‘linking puppet pins to nulls’ there are quite a few threads around about how to do it.
There is also a few scripts that do this for you, including DUIK tools ( https://ik.duduf.com/ ) which I’ve used myself.

————–
https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

Generally you should have the displacement layer the same size as the image. As others have mentioned there are center/stretch options in the displace effect.

One possibility is that you’ve imported the photoshop image as a composition with ‘retain layer size’. This will crop each layer to it’s bounding box, thus can make your displace map and your image different size even if they’re the same in photoshop.

I did quite a big project recently using these techniques. Using displacement you can’t ‘rotate’ around very far, but adding other layers can help sell the effect.

Here are some examples from my project. Most of them use flat layers, but the two portraits use displacement:

3D still animation WIP from Jon Bagge on Vimeo.

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https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

There are two problems here. One is rolling shutter which you can see in the original clip. As Ted suggested it might be worth trying to get rid of it first if Warp Stabilizer can’t fix it.

The other problem is that camera moving around will introduce perspective changes. When you stabilize you remove the movement, but the perspective changes remain. This is the extreme weirdness you see in your stabilized clip. The warp stabilizer is meant to fix this using either subpixel warp or perspective warp.

However in my experience it doesn’t always work that well. In your footage because you are moving close to a wall it makes it worse.

Two things I’ve used when I had similar problems:

– Turn the smoothness in Warp Stabilizer way down. Try 15% and see how it looks.

– Mask out the man character in the frame. As he’s moving, you’ll need to keyframe the mask. It can be very rough. Pre-compose, and Warp Stabilize the precomp. When the calculation is done, remove the mask.
The idea is not to confuse Warp Stabilizer with the moving character and hope it will focus on the back wall instead.

————–
https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects

[Jon Bagge]

I use both. PC at home, usually Mac at client. This works fine either way.
I haven’t used the XML workflow so I don’t know what trouble that may be causing.

But the basic idea is to import a file with Rec.709 16-235 (or whatever your editing app would call that, and then interpret it in AE as Rec. 709. You have to deliberately misinterpret it in other words.

I almost always work in 16-bit by the way, not 32-bit. That shouldn’t actually matter for this to work.

Another option is to use a levels effect in Premiere/FCP and take the superbrights down to 235 first. As long as you’re working in 10-bit this should be fine. In 8-bit you’d be losing some information.

————–
https://www.jonbagge.net
Jon Bagge – Editor – London, UK
Avid – FCP – After Effects