[Steve Bentley]

Form is a plug in from the Trapcode set of plug ins – it is available separately but does cost.
Its a particle system that’s based on a mesh.
Its available from Red Giant and Tool Farm and others.

[Steve Bentley]

You might be right Richard. I was thinking there was a growing shard element in there (keeping with the show’s icy theme) that was adding to the displacement, but it could be the glitch effect.
However I don’t know if that’s allowed – I don’t think a show caller “Terror” can use a VC effect – it would have to be retitled “Very Exciting!”

[Steve Bentley]

I wouldn’t call wanting smooth artifact-less gradients “fancy”. There aren’t even enough colors in the 8bit gamut to do a smooth blue gradient from one side of a 1920 frame to the other. 8 bit was fine back in the 640×480 days but when you combine the increase in fidelity we have now, with the rampant codec use/misuse, and then add in the dumbing down of how stuff is shot, you need all the head room you can get to “fix it in post”; instead of your client shooting it right the first time and providing you with a high quality master.

On the other hand, in TV land at least, by the time it gets to air and sent to TV (or burned to a disk), its been so crushed, footage is often a ghost of its original, so going the extra mile, er… bits, may not amount to a hill of beans.

But back to the original topic – EXR also has the advantage of holding multiple channels beyond the normal RGBA. What I don’t know though is if Davinci will pass those channels or just cuts them off.
And speaking of Davinci – doesn’t Black Magic own them now? What about the Black Magic codec. Its pretty clean, 10bit and provides nice compact files that play in real time (with a card). They must have an effortless work flow for DR by now.

[Steve Bentley]

Hi Andy,
What version of AE do you have (and Cinema for that matter) there are different techiques depending on the version.

[Steve Bentley]

Usually you have to crush a copy of the source footage (the live action) with levels or curves otherwise the effect happens everywhere. Then we usually add the displacement map effect and feed the flowing ink layer into it as the displacement channel. It looks like that opener also used a bit of turbulent displace on the effect layer as well. Then you can overlay the effected stuff over top of the original and use one of the blending modes to layer it in.
Depending on the look you are after you could also use one of the original source footage channels, blurred, as the matte to over lay the effect (luma, hue, red, green , blue etc) to keep the effect from showing up everywhere or reveal the background, and if the motion is right, a time offset of the source with the echo filter – that way the effect is confined to the actor’s motion by the motion of the actor himself.
If I was doing this I might have revealed/ghosted in (ha!) skull footage under the effect every so subtly (especially given the subject matter). They’ve done a nice job with it because they haven’t just overlayed it they have used the effect to reveal through to something else.

To direct the flow a bit you can use the liquify effect to literally draw on sweeps to distort the flow even more.

Finally, you if you have particular you could have the source emit particles from one its channels and use that “flow” as your distorting layer. It really depends on the feel you are going for.

Every scene is going to be different and I find that trying to force one technique on a series of shots is usually more frustrating that finding a unique combo of techniques for each scenario.

Looking back the comp we used that stock footage on I’m not sure if it was ink now – I think it was something similar to using a heat gun on a stretched piece of cut-up balloon. I think we added an extra layer of ink stock to enhance it.

I love the “through ice” effect in the spot (again just displacement). Or maybe I’m still hallucinating from the fumes of the heat gun on the cut-up balloon.

[Steve Bentley]

I think PNG is only 8 bit though and these days, especially for grading, you need that extra head room with 10 bit linear being the bare minimum.

[Steve Bentley]

Actually 2018 hasn’t been too bad. Once we got used to the Purge requirement to fix little gremlins it wasn’t too much to sacrifice.
I much preferred having more control over the memory management than previous versions that wouldn’t release the ram even after app exit or worse, wouldn’t release the app even after exit. Having more control in this area more than made up for the occasional (ok, ok… frequent) purging of the ram.

[Steve Bentley]

Ohhhhh, you mean during scripting run? Let the system check for 3rd party or native fx?

[Steve Bentley]

What about checking the manual – if its in the manual its built in.

[Steve Bentley]

We’re partial to QT animation Best. Its uncompressed but run length encoded so it ends up generating a smaller file (in MB) than say an AVI uncompressed. The down side is that its only 8bit.
There used to be a format of EXR that was RLE but gave you all the color head room you like. But if size isn’t an issue then EXR, Cineon or ACES should fit the bill – its what they were designed for. Just make sure to check the flavour of each as there are different modes.