[Simon Bonner]

Hi Kurt,

This is probably a job for After Effects. You can either spring for VideoCopilot’s Optical Flares (the dynamic triggering will allow you to flash colours into frame momentarily), or experiment with masked and heavily feathered solids, possibly with gradients applied along with the glow effect. Set the transfer mode to add and animate the opacity on and off.

If you’ve not got access to AE and have to make do with Prem, you might try overexposing a few frames at a time to give a ‘bleached’ effect. Won’t look the same, but probably the closest you can get without a compositing programme.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

OK, it looks like you have twirled down your render options. See the little triangles at the very left? Click on the downwards-pointing ones to ‘twirl’ everything back up and you should see the default view.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

To get a closer look at the transition, I would suggest downloading the trailer from iTunes or apple.com/trailers, then viewing it frame by frame. You’ll probably find that it’s just 3-4 frames of grungy texture. Whack a swooshy sound over it and you’re done.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

Could be a common issue with QT.

Open your video in QT and select Window, Show Movie Properties. In the dialogue, select Video Track, then the Visual Settings tab. Right down at the bottom left you will see the Transparency dropdown. select Blend and push it up to 100%. Then select Straight Alpha. Close the dialogue with the X button in the top right hand corner (or whatever the Mac alternative is).

You might not see any change right away, but scrub the playhead a bit and you should notice that the contrast comes back and you have rich blacks again.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

Hi Anna,

There is no other way to get the text to stick to the wall than tracking. Some shots just don’t work, for whatever reason, so you may have to resign yourself to ditching the idea for this particular project: nothing looks worse than a bad track.

However, you might try doing a bit of manual tracking, nudging the track point by hand when the automated track gets bad. This doesn’t always work, but if you turn on motion blur for the text layer you can disguise a bit of bad tracking. You aren’t limited to one track point either. If another point looks more ‘trackable’ at a certain part of the video, do another track for that point. Apply all your results to multiple nulls, then parent the nulls together in a sequence (e.g. null 1 has good track data up until 5 seconds, null 2 has good track data after 5 seconds, so delete any overlapping keyframes and parent null 1 to null 2).

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

Hi Lillian,

I too have had this problem when the talent held up a yellow legal pad against a green background. It didn’t look like it would be a problem because, to my eye, the yellow was very different to the green. To Keylight, though, the RGB values were just too similar, and I had to rotoscope it in the end. Not the advice you want to hear, I guess, but could be the only option.

One other possibility could be to get a good key for the rest of the footage, then place an additional copy of the footage on top, mask out the yellow object (animating the mask if necessary), and figure out a key for this object alone.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

Hi Joey,

You might want to experiment with the CC Sphere effect to create a spherical ‘molecule’ that looks genuinely 3D. Then bring that comp into a new comp and animate it moving about, perhaps in 3D space (along X, Y and Z). You could use the Wiggler to make the motion random. For the solid, you could parent all the molecules to a null object and then animate the null: that way they will move in unison.

You might also find Dan Ebbert’s expression guide useful for this kind of animation: https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/looping-wiggle.html

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

Andrew talks about his Sure Target presets here: https://videocopilot.net/presets/

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

AE has never been great with compressed audio. Try using a WAV instead of an MP3.

Not sure about the comp length problem.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx

[Simon Bonner]

Hi Darren,

I think you meant to link to a tutorial, but I don’t see any link.

Anyway, it sounds like you’re talking about the pickwhip, so if you search for more info on that it should be useful. This pickwhip is used to link one property to another using expressions, and you enable the expression options by ALT clicking on the stopwatch. It sounds like you might be clicking without the ALT, which just adds a keyframe.

Simon Bonner

youtube.com/simonsaysfx