[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Probably a bit late for your purposes, but I would suggest that the actor drops a placeholder object that can be tracked easier (such as a tennis ball) instead of the real object and you compose the “dropped object” in post altogether, adding motion blur and depth of field in AE.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Element is a 3D effect on a 2D layer, you don’t make the layer itself a 3D layer.

One setting that affects the AE lights in Element is the “Lighting influence” in the Element environment settings. The default setting is 25%, if you want the lighting to affect the scene more (in relation to the Element environment), up this value.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Walter Soyka wrote: “It’s not restricted to the values in the list; you can also enter an arbitrary number of frames to skip in there directly.”

Thanks Walter, good to know.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Great – that works nicely indeed!

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I can’t save back to CS6, so the next best thing is to explain it. Here’s a grab of the precomp:

If you look at the top view, I added guides where I wanted the footage to wrap, then duplicated the layer 4 times. I added a mask to each layer to create the top, bottom, left and right edges, moved the anchor points to the edge of the front face and rotated the edge slices 90 degrees on the x or y axis. Finally parented the edge to the front face.

I precomped it for tidiness, but that is not a required step. Remember to turn on collapse transformations if you precomp and want to use the camera in the main comp.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

There may be an easier solution, but the first that comes to mind:

Make a copy of your transparency mask and use animated Levels on one of the layers to set the bottom cutoff and on the other one to set the top cutoff, then invert the top and compose with Minimum blend mode. You’ll have to precompose the two layers together to get it to work as a Track Matte.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Composition settings > background color

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I’ll toss an idea for your consideration:

IF the backgrounds are perfectly stationery so that only the particles move and the clips are relatively short, you might be able to do this with a difference blend and CC Time Blend. The idea is to use a still image grabbed from the beginning of the footage and blend the current frame with it in difference blending mode, maximize the result so that you get clear dots. Then Time Blend this for the entire length of the footage. If everything goes as per theory, the result would be the actual tracks of the particles as lines which you can then overlay on the footage itself-

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

There’s a “Skip” pop-up menu in the Preview panel, allows you to skip 1,2 or 5 frames.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

Possibly like this.

9136_3drectangle.aep.zip

You’ll need to load some 1920×1080 footage to replace the missing one.

I didn’t spend much time on it, so the edges don’t line up that good, but you get the idea.