[Joshua Russell]

I needed to replicate this in a project I was working on today. The issue is that you are pulling your 3d layer’s position, which is an array containing 3 numbers, and putting it into a function that can only accept 2 numbers. Check out the attached expression code for a workaround.

Notice we are filling “samplePoint” with the x and y position values. This may not be the best way to do it but it works.

sourceLayer = thisComp.layer("control")
sampleSize = [1,1];
samplePoint = [transform.position[0], transform.position[1]];
colour= sourceLayer.sampleImage(samplePoint, sampleSize);
x=colour[0]*360;
[x]

[Joshua Russell]

Refer to this article.
This is also do-able with flash, but as far as I know you’re not going to find a completely responsive all-platform solution for this trick yet.

[Joshua Russell]

@Michael A: I don’t need to re-arrange tracks, I was looking more for a composite mode or something that would make the picture appear in front of a picture on the layer above it. Cutting the pictures part way through leaving only the overlapping bits of the clip on track 2 does work, but it is impractical and confusing, because although the new pictures are appearing every second or so, the old pictures take a longer time to fade out. So really you end up having three overlapping tracks. If I cut the end off of v2 and drop it down to v1, then cut the end off of v3 and drop it down to v1, I end up with 6 clips spread across 3 tracks, representing 3 pictures. Remember I’m dealing with 30 pictures… If I have to go back and change out one of the pictures, it would get confusing and I would be adding a lot of extra steps. I’m willing to add the inconvenience of adding something like a composite mode to every other picture for the sake of being able to see my whole timeline without having to re-size all my windows, but not willing to deal with that kind of confusion. Not to mention other editors coming along after me, trying to figure out what in the world I was doing…

@Mark S: I would rather do this sort of spot in motion, although honestly I don’t think the interface is that much simpler than FC in this situation, you still have to scroll through 30 different tracks, plus their transitions (don’t get me wrong I love motion’s interface)… It is much quicker to animate this sort of thing in Motion, I prefer Motion overall for animation, but on this old outdated editor using motion for this spot wasn’t an option, it just doesn’t run well enough on this machine. Believe me, it’s an unfair trade-off between faster animation and a super slow editor – I’ve produced a ton of spots with this editor in both FC and Motion, and for this particular spot with the turnaround deadline motion just wouldn’t cut it. I didn’t want to use After Effects either.

@Gus S: No, each picture has to appear in front of the last picture… If one picture is on a track below another picture, it will not appear in front of it… And as I mentioned above there are at the most three pictures overlapping, so even if there was a way to have v1 display above v2, I would still have to use three tracks.

And @Mark S again: the crop tools idea would actually work but it would be way more work than it was worth. This is really just me being picky about the way my timeline looks. There’s no reason I can’t leave it how it is, but it drives me crazy to have to scroll up and down through so many tracks when any given picture is only using a few seconds on each track… My timeline looks like a big giant Z. I wish I could’ve just made this in motion in the first place, but since they haven’t sent me my fancy new editor yet, I’m just going to have to slog it out in final cut.

[Joshua Russell]

Although I don’t know the exact method the artist used to achieve this effect – it would help if I could see the original anime – I am going to assume they either keyed out the background, or used an animated mask to cut out around the characters. If in the original video the anime characters were walking in front of a solid color, the artist could have keyed that color out, leaving the characters walking on a transparent background, and then dropped the music video footage underneath. More likely, the artist made a mask that fit tightly to the characters, and then motion tracked it to follow their movement. Then they would have animated the mask to any changes in the characters shapes. It is also possible that the artist simply Photoshopped the characters out of their background from a series of stills, and played them back in sequence… the motion of the characters in front of the video is only a few frames. Other than the chroma keying process, these animated mask techniques can all loosely be considered rotoscoping techniques. Drawing (in this case a mask) frame by frame over existing video.. although if any motion tracking was employed from a rotoscoper’s perspective the artist was cheating.. Don’t get me wrong, motion tracking still takes skill… Anyway, i hope this helps.