[Kevin Camp]

Sorry Mohamamad, I had misread your original post, and was think you were using C4D Lite (that ships with recent versions of AE).

Since you are using C4D r17, updating the C4D lite (r16) probably won’t have any effect on your issue.

You might look at updating the Cineware plugin…

Since I don’t have the full version of C4D r17, i can’t really try anything to give you other suggestions.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

try updating you c4d lite (launch c4d lite, then help>check for updates). it doesn’t update automatically with the adobe cloud updates…

the latest version is r16.038

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

for this particular shot, i’d first stabilize the shot, duplicate the footage and draw a mask to rotoscope around the hand (animate the mask if needed, but the hand seems pretty still), then reverse the stabilization.

here’s a tutorial that describes this process: https://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/all-rotoscoping-wants-is-a-little-stability–ae-11389

then, on the roto’d hand, you could try adding colorama and start with one of the ‘gold’ palette presets from the output cycle and tweak the color cycle from there.

to wipe on the ‘gold’ as in the example, you could add the linear wipe effect after the colorama effect and animation the transition property to wipe it on.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

rgbToHsl()[2] returns the lightness component (the 3rd value of the HSL array).

rgbToHsl()[1] would return the saturation and rgbToHsl()[0] would return the hue… i’ve made that mistake more than a few times…

if you were going to drive color channels, then you probably don’t need to convert the RGB to HSL, you could just use the RGB values, unless you are using an effect that requires different values (most of ae uses RGB).

so if you reworked the expression, it would simply be:

driverLightness = lightnessSample;

at which point you might want to rename the variables 😉

but that’s up to you.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

this tutorial covers many aspects of creating a GUI panel for after effects with extend script:

https://www.provideocoalition.com/after-effects-extendscript-training-ep-11/

it’s for a floating panel, but I believe they also have one for a dockable panel.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

it seems like it should work for you… I don’t think sampleImage() will slow you down too much (it does disable multiprocessing, if you are using cc2014 and earlier)

if you have many expressions using sampleImage() that are all sampling the same layer, and you feel that it is slowing your renders down. you could apply a single sampleImage() expression to a color expression control (effects>expression control>color control) to sample the color, then use that sampled color in the other expressions.

i’d apply the color control to the movie layer and add this expression to the color control to sample each from oaf the movie:
sampleImage(anchorPoint,[width,height])
if you step through the timeline, you should see that color chip in the color control change color.

then you exposure expression could look something like this:
driverLayer = thisComp.layer("My Movie Layer");
multiplier = 2;

lightnessSample = driverLayer.effect("Color Control")("Color");
driverLightness = rgbToHsl(lightnessSample)[2];
driverLightness * multiplier;
but unless you have many expressions sampling the same layer, I don’t know that you’ll see a big change in performance.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

I’ll preface my suggestions with the fact that I have not tried this before…

but, for the film size, I’d try 35mm. it’s what the sensor is likely mimicking (if it’s not actually that size), and what the 50mm measurement on the lens should be in relationship to.

for the conversion of pixels to meters. in the shot that you have, create a solid that is 100 pixels high. scale that solid to match the height of the subject. the resulting scale is the subjects height in pixels (100px * X%/100%, simplifies to Xpx). so if the subjects height is 2m, then his heighten pixels is X/2, and your distance would be 5*X/2. and you could try this for the height of the camera too.

you might want to txt this set up before eat shoot, if you can…. just shoot a box that you know the dimensions for and do the process outlines above. then create 3D box in ae, and place it in the scene, where the box should be and see if the perspective and lens distortion looks correct. if not, i’d try adjusting the film size.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

an easy way to recreate the colored bands, is to take your image that you posted, drag that to the new comp icon in the project window, move the image off the right side of the comp and add cc repetile, setting the tiling to ‘slide’ and expanding the left edge to fill the comp.

then it would be fairly easy to draw rectangular masks around each stripe, and animate the masks to reveal each color.

if you need to smooth out any of the jpeg artifacts in the image, try adding smart blur before the cc repetile.

then take that comp into a new comp and add bezier warp to recreate the shape.

———edit———

sorry, rather than putting the masks in on the image in the stripes comp, add the masks to the stripes comp in the main comp. then add the bezier warp effect.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

i’d make the colored stripes in a separate comp that is roughly the height and width needed for just the colored bands, without any distortion (so it would look a bit like a flat flag).

then take the comp into a new normal sized comp and add the bezier warp effect. with that effect you should be able to pull the right-side corner together and adjust the sexier handles to pinch them to a point, then adjust the other handles and corner points to make that final shape.

once you have that, you can go back in to the bands comp and animate the bands revealing, possibly with simple position slides or linear wipe.

then when yu go back the other main comp, the colors should flow on with the shape that was created with bezier warp.

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW

[Kevin Camp]

or, if you’re on a tight deadline an don’t have access to the previous version, a quicker fix might be to use cc2014

Kevin Camp
Art Director
KCPQ, KZJO & KRCW