[Paul Conigliaro]

It’s hard to tell from that still, but would you be able to turn the floor more/less than 90° to match to the physical floor the talent is standing on? Try turning off your key and visually matching the 3D & physical floors.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Since you’re using FCP, you can still use transfer modes.

Render your lens flare on a black solid in AE (without a transfer mode) and bring the footage into FCP. Once it’s in your timeline, right click on the footage and select Composite Mode: Screen. That should do the trick.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Try placing the footage in a comp with the same frame rate. Ie, if the footage is actually 15fps, place it in a 15fps comp.

Another thing to check is that the footage is being interpreted properly. Select the footage in your project window and goto File: Interpret Footage: Main… and make sure the frame rate is set to what the footage should be at. This should be easy to check since there’s a timecode window burn.

Also, what issue are you having with preview not being real time. Are you just hitting the space bar, or are you using RAM Preview (‘0’ on the number pad)?

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

That’s going to be tough since there aren’t many good, trackable points on that plate.

If you have CS4, you can try using Mocha. It might be able to pull a good planar track from that, but without ever getting the full board in frame, it will be difficult. (You can also get Mocha separately for, I think, $299 if you don’t have CS4.)

Unfortunately, you may just have to do this by hand and continue to refine and refine until it looks alright. The other option would be to try a few different trackers (Syntheyes, PFHoe (not sure if it will work with AE), to name a couple) and see if they’ll work. If they do, you can purchase a license.

In all honesty, this could have been thought out a little better in pre-production. There should’ve been a few day-glow gaff tape marks on that board, which would’ve made this a lot easier. This is an example of a time where post-production really should’ve been more involved in pre-production.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Haha. Standard sig. Sorry. Should’ve mentioned it right away in the post.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Ha. Maybe I should just change that to “Trapcode?”

Not to go too far OT, but that sig was mainly in response to the numerous designs I’ve seen lately that seem like those effects were added as an after-thought. “I need this to be more awesome. Ah-ha! Particular!”

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Your best bet for something like this is to create a master “Control Layer” for all the other layers, and link them with expressions.

For example, create a null and apply your filter to it (let’s say, blur).
Then apply that same effect to your layer you actually want to affect.
Option click on the blur level (in this case) keyframe button in your footage layer, then use the pickwhip (little swirly icon) and select the blur level in your null control layer.
Copy and paste the effect to all the other layers.

This way, when you make changes to the control layer, you can affect all the layers. This can be extremely time-consuming for complicated effects with many options, though. In that case, I’ll just link the few controls I think I’ll need, not all of them.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

Off the top of my head, I’d say this looks like a job for Particular, but then again, I barely use 3D Stroke anymore.

To get smoother curves, you can pre-comp the Particular layer and up the FPS. It’s a bit more of a render-hog, but sometimes for fast-moving paths, it’s the only thing I can get to work. For tapering, I’m not sure what to do except maybe animate the particle size as you go.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

The AEP you uploaded didn’t have any animation on the camera, so I couldn’t tell exactly what you are doing.

However, consider using “Rove Across Time” on some of your camera keyframes. This allows you to reposition keyframes in space without affecting the speed of the camera to create much more smooth movement, if that makes sense.

Select your movement start and end keyframes, along with everything in between, right-click, Keyframe Assistant: Rove Across Time.

Good luck.

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]

[Paul Conigliaro]

I tried posting this yesterday. For some reason, it didn’t go through.

Keep in mind pieces like this aren’t thrown together in 5 minutes.

Looking at it again, there is some subtle gradation between the lights and darks. Try this:
• desaturate the image using either Color Balance (hls) or the Channel Mixer.
• use the Levels filter and squeeze the inputs together until you have strong contrast with a little subtle detail. Fiddle with it until it looks right.
• for the coloring of the image, try Tritone or CC Toner.

This end result will also largely depend on your footage. If you have really noisy DV footage, the image will flicker and be a bit aliased. You can try various blurs or the Dust & Scratches filter to smooth out some of the edges.

Using the above method, I ended up with this in a couple minutes:

CS3, FCS2
[Note: Using Particular, 3-D Stroke, and now Form do not instantly make your designs “teh awesome.”]