[Kevin Dearing]

I’m thinking about playing around with the ExtendScript Toolkit and trying to create a script that will do this – but, as I’ve been a programmer for 15 or so years this is new to me so, it may take a while and I may not have the time.. I’m guessing though, that someone else may have already created a script for such a thing..

Either way, this is a feature that would really be useful if it were included!!!

If / when I get the script done (or if I find someone else’s) I’ll come back and post what I’ve found or created!

— Kevin Dearing

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Hi Adam,
Not sure if this will give you quite what you are looking for but it may be close..

Check out this caustics tutorial:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/tierney_jim/caustics.php

Apply the caustics / wave world to your 2-D grid. Pre compose this then rotate it as needed.. Depending on your angle it may look ok… It may also help to have a tighter grid (more lines)….

Hopefully this is helpful?

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Hi Kieran,
I’m not sure if this will help you or not as your situation is a bit different but it may put you onto the right track (no pun intended)…

Andrew Kramer did a tutorial using Boujou and After Effects. In this tutorial he shows how he used Boujou, though he did have specific tracking points… Anyway, if you haven’t already viewed it, like I said, maybe it’ll help??

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_crater_p1

Another thing, I recently went through a similar situation and was able to use AE’s tracking but only by going frame by frame at points.. What I mean is, I picked my tracking points, let it run and stopped it when I saw it was getting off. On the first frame where my tracking points were off I readjusted the tracking points then tracked forward (or backward) one frame… That worked fairly well, but, as you can imagine, took a good bit of time. My main problem with AE’s tracking was in the fact that my footage was purposely shaky and zoomed in.

One more observation about your footage.. AE’s tracker seems to work best with good contrast.. Therefore, your Chimney is not a good tracking point. A better tracking point would probably be a tree against the sky.

I’m afraid that’s all I’ve got – I hope it is helpful in some way!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks Grin, Larry,
Based on what you said, I think I’m fine – the white board is completely in the background and I’ve already blurred it a bit to match the camera’s depth of field – the board is still legible but the blur helps. The lighting and action in the shot shoudl draw the eye away from the board and, the two times this show will appear are both less than 2 seconds each.

Once again, I thank you for your time and experience / knowledge in this area…

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Not having seen your footage I’m not sure if this will help or not but I’ve used the technique in Maltaannon’s
“Simple Object Removal”
tutorial a LOT! It works great.. Hopefully it’ll be helpful to you!

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks Mike,
That’s what I wound up having to do – though due to – move the text layer below the back sky picture – but that was kind of a pain because I had a bunch of other things going on too – particles dripping off of the text, etc..

If anyone knows the reason for this, I’d sure be interested in understanding what causes this..

Thanks again all

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Hi Steve,
I’d give a lot more weight to what Darby says as I’m an AE newbie and am not even doing this stuff for a living anymore (I did 12 + years ago but not now.)

Anyway, for chroma keying green or blue and replacing with white I’ve found that as long as there is a good distance between the screen and the subject (and the lighting is good and even on the screen) you will get little to no color casting.

The other thing that I tried a while ago in response to a similar post was to use the Color Keyer.. I selected the white from the background and it turned out ok.. Not great but my test footage was horribly lit.

But again, Darby is the pro so I’m sure that what he says is a better way..

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

You can use luma key but you would need to make sure that the white background is brighter than the brightest hilight in your subject.

Alternatively, you can use green (or blue) and key that out, replacing it with a white solid..

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Well, I’ve tried vector paint on my P4 with 1 GB ram, and a tiny, super slow HD (running XP pro). No problems so I’m convinced that I’ve got my settings on my desktop incorrectly set or, perhaps it’s a vista issue.

My apologies for this post, I’ve just been reading through all of the stuff that was returned when I did a search for RAM / Disk Cache and there’s a lot of good stuff but I recall reading something that one of you guru’s posted not too long ago about how AE uses the Ram settings and the disk cache and it was excellently explained – my memory just isn’t .. what was I saying?

Thanks again for any help in this matter! Once I get to my desktop (I’m out of town now..) I’ll post my settings..

–KTFA

[Kevin Dearing]

Thanks Matthew. Turns out that while I believed the footage to be locked off on a tripod, there were three short and very subtle places where the camera moved ever so slightly. I tried to track it but couldn’t get a clean track so I wound up using a combination of still frame and live action in different spots. It was tough to get blend the still in because there were a lot of leaves blowing around in the live action which I wanted to keep but it’s looking alright now.

As far as the text goes, I went a different route as I have to get an approval pretty soon. But I’ll go back and try your suggestion for the sake of learning. Thanks for your time in this – I really appreciate you and the rest of the COW that always take a lot of time to help others out..

–KTFA