[Mike Park]

If you want the comp, i would be happy to supply. Just let me know where to send it.

Best of luck

[Mike Park]

I am not sure what exact effect you are looking for, but you might be on the right track with ball effect.

Make a new comp. Put a new comp size solid layer in with the solid set to a mid grey. apply the ball effect and play with the grid spacing and ball size until you get the look you want. Next apply a hue/saturation effect and animate this setting to manipulate the ball colors. Finally either apply a mask to the ball layer and add control points until you have the outline you want or import your psd and use one of the track matte options (alpha, Luminence…) to mask out the balls you want lit up. This assumes that you want the balls all of the same color. If you want the buildings to light up independantly, you will have to either make multiple layers of the balls or apply your color footage overtop the balls as an overlay, or make the balls white and use the ball layer as a luminence track matte for your color.

I hope this helps. If you need any further explaination or help, let me know.

Best of luck

[Mike Park]

From the looks of it, it appears to be nothing more than a combination of quick zooms, with random white frames mixed in for the transitions and sometimes, some close up shots.

I am not sure which part of the video you are specifically referring to, but if you want to recreate this look, you could use a wiggle control on the scale setting for the transitions and then either hand animate or use an expression control to turn on the opacity of a white layer overtop of the footage to give you the flashes.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you need any further assistance.

[Mike Park]

I would apply the tracking data to a null object. Then I would create a seperate composition for the head and parent it to the null object. Finally, either hand animate the head in the head composition or use an expression or the wiggler to generate random up and down motion in the subcomp. That way, the head comp would track the body motion and then the actual head could bobble independant of the motion tracking. Just a suggestion

[Mike Park]

There are so many ways to do this effect. I don’t know how the news station did theirs. I will walk you through on way to accomplish this effect using only standard afx tools.

1. Open a new comp in whatever size you want your final product. Name it main or something.
2. Create another new comp and make it 1/12 or so the height of your main comp. Name this tagline. The tagline comp will house the gradient background for the text and the red stripe.
3. Create another two new comps the same size as tagline and nest them into tagline. You will see why in a moment.
4. Call one Gradient ramp and the other red stripe.
5. In the gradient ramp comp, create a new solid layer – color doesnt matter, and make it comp size. Then add a gradient ramp effect from white to black and make it diagonal.
6. In the redstripe comp, make 2 new solid layers, one black and one red. change the opacity of the black layer to about 30%. Mask the red layer and move the top 2 mask corner pins to turn the layer into a stripe at the bottom.
7. Back in the tagline comp, there should be the two nested comps – redstripe (hooray beer) and gradient ramp. Now, you need to create a new mask in each and move the bottom right corner pin to get the diagonal edge effect. For the Gradient ramp, you also need to move the corner points around so that the red stripe shows up at the bottom and the semitransparent black shows up a little on the right side.
8. Back up in the main comp, make sure the tagline comp is in the comp and set the anchor point to the left side. We will use this to animate later. Now create a new text layer to say whatever you want. Make the text white and then add a drop shadow from the blending mode. Position the text over the tagline.
9. Now the earth – search the web for a earth projection texture. I found one at https://www.celestiamotherlode.net/catalog/earth.php Make a new squre comp and call it earth – mine was 500 x 500 and place the image into it. Now apply CC sphere effect – if you don’t have it installed, it should be on your afx install disk.
10. Animate the y rotation so that the earth rotates around the proper axis. Now apply a hue/saturation effect and colorize the earth to blue.
11. Place the earth comp into your main comp and rotate the earth diagonally. Now apply a new layer mask. Mask out the portion of the earth that you dont want to see. Now feather the mask to create a blurred edge on the right. Make the mask a little larger than the main comp on the left and bottom so as to allow for the feather.
12. Finally, animate the text opacity to come in when you want and animate the scale of the tagline comp so that it scales in to the right – remember moving the anchor point – this is why.
13. Drop your footage in behind all the layers and there you go.

If you want a completed comp to reverse engineer, I quickly did one and can email it to you if you are interested.

[Mike Park]

No real template. I just took one of the standard emitters and modified it to look like the effect you are after. I think wondertouch has a limited time demo you can check out. I tried to make the effect using standard afx filters and plugins but ran into a wall when animating it. I tried to use the liquify tool to make the trail, but it did not look as convincing. Let me see what I can do. Thanks for the footage.

[Mike Park]

I threw this together using your footage. See what you think. It uses wondertouch particle illusion and afx.

https://parkmike.angelfire.com/Hadoken_new_fx.mov

[Mike Park]

Can you upload the raw footage, I have something I would like to try. I think it might work.

[Mike Park]

I am in the market for building a new dedicated video machine for premiere, afx and some 3d apps. From my research, the most performance bang for your buck is a quad core processor, as all of the new adobe vidoe programs make use of these for rendering. Ram is another place you should not skimp. The more the better. Also, I have seen some information which suggests that running 64 bit vs. 32 bit make a substantial difference in rendering times in some graphic intensive programs. Another benefit of 64 bit is the ability to utilize more ram than 32 bit. This also speeds up rendering time. For the most part, video cards do nothing for rendering times. Take this post with a grain of salt, as I am only conveying information second hand from a variety of sources. But I have spent several months looking at this very issue and plan on building my machine sometime before the end of the year. Best of luck!

[Mike Park]

I have done a bit of green screening and in my experience, the shot you want to pull off would be much easier and believeable if it were shot with actual walls. The problem with greenscreening in the shot you are talking about is the interaction with the actor and the wall. If not done exactly right, the wall will look very fake. (bad, unless this is the look you are going for) If the room you plan on shooting the scene in is not too large, you could construct 4 temp walls in the field and shoot both shots on site. That way the scene in which the actor and his mom interact matches perfectly with the walls falling, as the walls are the same. The other problem you may have with green screening the shot is that lighting will be inconsistent across the room and when the walls fall away. In order to pull a good key without too much manipulation, the lighting should be as even as possible. I don’t know what programs you have available for motion tracking, but since this is an afx forum, I imagine you want to use afx. The program is capable of such effects, but like I said earlier, It would be much easier and time efficient to simply build the set in the field.
Just my 2 cents.