[Ryan Hill]

It seems straight forward enough to me. Put you first shot on, make it shrink until it disappears, put you next shot below it and parent it to the first shot. Repeat. Am I missing anything?

You will have some resolution problems unless you optically zoomed duing the shoot. Is that why you don’t want to “scale footage?” I’ve done similar things with still images by zooming in with the camera, breaking the footage into a few images, and then layering them ontop of one another. This wouldn’t work with moving images, so you’ll need to get the timing on the zoom right while shooting.

[Ryan Hill]

1. One other option: cropping.

You could crop the videos to be square, and then when zooming into the centre video, uncrop it.

[Ryan Hill]

I do most editing in Premiere, FX in AE.

What brought up this question:
I want to make an overlay for a couple POV shots of someone looking through some futuristic binoculars. To look futuristic, I wanted some random numbers and wiggling lines on the sides, which is why it’s not just a still image.

I figured it would be nice if I could just make one clip of the overlay and then re-use it for all the POV shots in Premiere.

[Ryan Hill]

When I try it that way, I get “function smooth is undefined.”

But I got it to work by applying the wiggle to a slider control and then apply the smooth to another expression pick-whipped to that.

[Ryan Hill]

When I try it that way, I get “function smooth is undefined.”

But I got it to work by applying the wiggle to a slider control and then apply the smooth to another expression pick-whipped to that.

[Ryan Hill]

Which version did you have an answer for?

[Ryan Hill]

When I said it could have been done with shatter, I was talking about the cutting-out portion.

Now that I look more closely, that would mean they are imitating the stop-motion jiggling on the computer. Which is still possible, but I don’t know if that’s more reasonable than just saying it’s stop motion.

[Ryan Hill]

I’d say it looks a little too clean to be stop motion.

If I were to try to emulate the cutting snowflake effect, I’d probably use shatter to make the pieces fall off.

Then fold it open by duplicating the layer and rotating it along the folding edge. Precomp the two layers together and repeat. (Though I’ll admit this approach is asking for trouble if you don’t get the rotation axis lined up absolutely perfect. There may be an easier way to handle folding that I haven’t thought of.)

[Ryan Hill]

There is an auto trace, and it does create masks, so it looks like that will be a good approach.

[Ryan Hill]

Is there an auto-trace? Because then I could apply the masks to a solid, pre-compose the layer, and then auto-trace that. Which I think would acheive what I was hoping for.