Michael Szalapski
42
After Effects Coins
37
COW Coins
Forum Replies Created
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Honestly, you can’t avoid gate weave and you can’t avoid grain if you’re doing things optically, so just decide how high of a budget your project is supposed to have and go for it. (Higher budget = less grain and less gate weave.)
This is 80’s-themed, but it has a lot of good insight into the workflow (and links to full tutorials) on how the Stranger Things titles were done: https://maxonvfx.com/4vLAtNq
I made this piece for Maxon with optical concepts in mind. Even though I used modern tools like 3D Stroke from Red Giant, things are off-center, there are artifacts from the scraping process, and more little imperfections to hint at the analog-ness of the era. (Though, I did cheat and pick a stylized color for the fading of the titles instead of an optically accurate one.) Unfortunately, some of my work really gets lost in the re-encoding that social media platforms use.
On that piece, I made it thinking about how they would have made the original piece. A tinted piece of plastic with black coating scraped off. So, I made the initial design with some brush imperfections, set it ever so slight off center, and set it spinning with some motion blur. Then, I exposed the titles over top of it (with a slightly different gate weave).
But, seriously, my little thing is nothing compared to the love that went into the Stranger Things titles. Highly recommend watching everything linked from the article on the Making Of.
maxonvfx.com
Animating the Stranger Things Title Sequence
Eric Demeusy shares how he used Red Giant Shine to create the Emmy-winning titles for one of the most popular shows on Netflix.
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Trapcode Particular has changed a TON since that tutorial came out. There’s actual wind and air physics now. Motion Paths are now like a displacer (as is the old wind [now called Drift] and the old turbulence field) where they push off from wherever they would be naturally based on their physics settings.
Anyway, that doesn’t help you – it just explains why things may be a bit different now. If I were doing this, I’d make the lifespan of the particles be roughly as long as it takes them to move along the line and then have a new system spawn from the old system “at parent end of life”. (Spawning just one particle and inheriting the size, color, opacity, and particle type from the parent). It’ll look like the particle didn’t die, but just stopped moving.
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If you have things in the shot that are moving, that makes it hard too. Mask out the car, dust in the air, etc. in a precomp so that just the ground and maybe buildings and whatnot are in the shot and try tracking that.
If you have a wide angle lens on the camera, getting a solid camera track can be tricky. I usually use Red Giant’s Lens Distortion Matcher on shots and then track the undistorted footage – tends to be a more solid track that way. AND whatever you put in the undistorted comp gets redistorted back onto the footage for much more realism.
Any time I’m messing with a 3D camera track, I use the free Normalize Track script to bring things into a sensible space.
As far as plugins go to make the trail, you can do it by animating an AE light to follow the car and then using either Trapcode Particular or TAO (both from Red Giant) to create a trail based on the movement of the light.
If you want to do it natively, you could try CC Particle World or something, but I’ve never enjoyed working with that. You could actually do it with a regular mask on a solid and use the mask paths follow nulls script and make the nulls 3D and put them in the scene based on nulls you generate from the camera track. It wouldn’t really be 3D, but it would have the illusion in a way.
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There’s a new feature in After Effects that makes tying the source point of an effect to null objects really easy. This video shows it off. (When the video was made, the feature was in beta, but it’s in the “shipping” version now.)
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Did you upload the right video? I don’t see any ball.
Just based on your description, Trapcode Echospace lets you repeat a layer with offset animation and progressive transformation (that is, scale getting smaller), if you have Red Giant things.
If not, you could try Dan Ebberts’ https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/follow-the-leader.html
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It’s very likely your professor is using an older version of After Effects. The composition presets were significantly pared down and reorganized relatively recently.
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There isn’t a “simple” solution for this, but it is certainly doable.
The easiest solution would be Trapcode Particular which is a third-party 3D particle tool that I’ve been using for decades now. It’s the industry standard particle tool for AE users.
If you don’t have Red Giant things, you could probably do it with CC Particle World, but you’ll be a bit more limited.
Honestly, regardless of how you make your firework itself, your biggest issue is going to be making it look like you’re flying behind the trail and then moving to the side. Unless you have something else in the scene as a frame of reference, it’s hard for the eye to parse what’s happening in a black void with sparks.
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You can use the map with height information as a track matte for the snow layer. Animate, say, a Threshold effect (with some blurring and maybe Fractal Noise overlaid) to reveal the snow.
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It may be because you don’t have a graphics card. According to the requirements page, Magic Bullet Looks needs:
At least 2 GB GPU memory for HD resolution output and 4 GB GPU memory for 4K projects. GPU memory requirements are multiplied by the number of monitors attached
Since you only have the integrated graphics on your CPU, Looks might just not be able to be used.
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When you initially apply Magic Bullet Looks to your clip, you shouldn’t see anything change. You first need to go into the effect controls and hit the edit button to adjust your effect.
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