[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

That certainly looks like a timing error, either as per above response or a frame rate difference between original and tracking data.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

In general, such effects are done with (Red Giant) Trapcode Particular, but you can get something resembling this with the AE built-in particle systems and some distortion effects.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Your tool of choice is the Pathfinder. Use it to first unite all white shapes into a single white shape (doesn’t matter if it is made out of separate parts, as long they’re all united. Then cut out the white shape from the blue shape. This way you will end up with just the blue shape with holes where the white was.

One complication you may run into is if you have blue shapes on top of the white shape that are supposed to be holes in the white shapes. In that case you’ll have to unite those blue shapes and cut them out of the white shape first.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

That certainly is some terrible green screen footage.

Personally I would first mask the windows exactly, as if the people were not there at all. If there is any camera movement or jitter, track it and apply it to that mask. (This way you have less concern with accidentally including the green spill into the key.)

Then I would try and key just the people moving in front of the windows, one window at a time.

In other words, I would build the mask from four layers, the clean windows, masked by hand, then left, back and right (people in front of the) windows separately with some rather extreme keying to get just the silhouettes of the people, wouldn’t care that much if the key eats some into the people (using choke). The result of this would be a black and white mask, which is then used as a track matte for the original footage.

Change color or perhaps Selective color for the green spill on the original footage. Or even an HLS selector in Color Finesse if that doesn’t do it.

If you want some detail back in the windows, fake it and put whole new layers there to replace the glasses.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

In addition the the Smoother, there is the smooth expression, which does a slightly different thing. The Smoother deletes keyframes while the smooth expression averages them within a given time range and number of samples.

So, if you haven’t tried the smooth expression, it’s definitely worth testing on this issue.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

So what is it that you want to have?

Shadows from objects inside the light from the window? Something else?

Picture of the end result would clarify.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

That sure is looking good. You wouldn’t happen to have a spare one of those just hanging around? 😀

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

After Effects keyframe data are text-based. You can copy and paste them in a text file.

For instance, the keyframe data for a Slider Effect looks like this (10 frames):

Adobe After Effects 8.0 Keyframe Data

Units Per Second 25
Source Width 100
Source Height 100
Source Pixel Aspect Ratio 1
Comp Pixel Aspect Ratio 1

Effects Slider Control #1 Slider #2
Frame
0 0
1 0.0399893
2 0.0799147
3 0.119712
4 0.159318
5 0.198669
6 0.237703
7 0.276356
8 0.314567
9 0.352274
10 0.389418

End of Keyframe Data

Thus, you can format your Excel to a suitable format, save it as a text file and copy and paste into AE. For two columns of information you could use two sliders, but probably a better option is to use the position keyframe data of a single 2D null.

Then you can extract the values of the keyframes to your text layer. You can simply pick-whip the position x or y for the text layer source text.

Then there is the matter of converting from 200 frames per second to your comp speed… valueAtTime expression will handle that. If I’m thinking straight at this hour, you’ll just have to divide 200 by your frame rate for the Time value.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I didn’t have a problem doing this in particular. Try the attached. If it is problematic, it is likely a computer-related issue.

9223_words.aep.zip

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Perhaps like this?

9222_window2.aep.zip