[Steve Bentley]

For flames that don’t have a high temperature element (the blue near the lighter) we use blue screen or shoot on black. Even then we can add that blue element back in with some color correction, to what was a light yellow flame.
Yellow on a green screen is like pink on a blue screen – its not the best to key.

Distance from the screen is a huge factor for either blue or green screen (you can see the lighter flame is changing the color of the green screen).

Dont be afraid to use two approaches – perhaps a luma matte for the flame and a green/blue screen matte for the hand (from the same source footage). Or even just “screen” the flame over the background footage. A sure sign of a matted flame is the dark fringe around the edges because they used a matte instead of a more appropriate transfer function. And remember that out in the daylight you often can’t see a flame, so the sure sign of an effects shot (and not a very good one) is a flame comped in that would normally be invisible – its kind of like a lightsaber where the core is dark and edges are bright – it just never looks right.

While this footage may be “raw” and therefore showing washed out in an 8bit jpg, if they aren’t raw, both the black and green are pretty washed out and will not provide a good clean key in either luma or green.

You can also change the chemistry of your fuel in the lighter. Butane burns very clean and therefore has a high-temp blue flame component (the yellow flame indicates a lower temperature and incomplete combustion). Ironically what we’re going for is a more incomplete combustion so you get an oranger flame which keys better on blue. But changing the fuel can be dangerous if you don’t know what you are doing.

[Steve Bentley]

Because the cam pin is always a fixed distance away from the center of your circle and because the cam slot is aligned with the arc of that circle there are ways of testing a position along the cam slot and its distance from the center of the rig. An invisible spline childed to the cam could be used to get a point along the cam slot and then test that point’s distance from the center, then position the angle of the cam appropriately (the angle of the main arm with the cam pin at the end would determine the “point” you are looking for along the cam spline). You would have to change from arc math to sinusoidal math once you get into the squiggly bit (thats a technical term isn’t it?).

You might also be able to do this with an inverse kinematic rig similar to how a foot is anchored to the ground but also (via the leg) to the hips, with the bending knee joint being your cam pin.

However, with the time to get that working right, would it make more sense to position the anchor points of each part at their natural pivot points and then keyframe rotation attribute at the extreme positions, add more rotation keyframes at important other positions and then tweak keyframes between those keyframes until it runs smoothly. Once that is done you could precompose all of that and the with time warp (or enable time remapping) run it at any speed you want over and over, even backwards.

[Steve Bentley]

First you need to fracture the object so all the little triangles are there. Then you can use a plane effector to reveal the fracture and if you want all the triangles to fall you can add some dynamics.

[Steve Bentley]

That may be an actual 3D edge you are seeing that doesn’t have as much light on it as others. Try turning off the lighting in the material settings of each layer. The look will be a little flatter but this way any lights you have won’t affect the layers and won’t “gleam” off the edges and you won’t have darkness in crevasses.

[Steve Bentley]

It also softens the key so in effect removes information that could be useful for things like fine hair.
Every key is different (even from the same shoot) so to do film quality keys you need to consider each shot on its own.

[Steve Bentley]

Hey Hunter,
AE may be seeing the “made up” frames that are part of many Mp4 codecs. To cut down on size many of the codecs don’t contain every frame but instead have frames that only contain the parts that have changed from the previous few frames. But AE needs to see every single frame in a discreet way.
Can you convert the mp4 outside of AE to something that is continuous (like an AVI or Quicktime).
Then bring that into AE and see if that helps.

[Steve Bentley]

You mean before icons became two pixels across on our super hi rez screens?

[Steve Bentley]

So if you are rotating a masked shape layer, why not just rotate the image you want to show up as your blind texture. Wont you still have to use a mask on the shape layer to get a single blind leaf? Isn’t that the same as putting a mask on multiples of the texture layer?

There is a 2D Venetian blind effect under transitions. If you did that on ten texture planes and then made the planes 3d and positioned them in space is that a good enough hack?

[Steve Bentley]

The simplest is to make all shapes children of a null and scale the null. You can do an inverse scale on the squares if you want them to stay a constant size as their parent scales down.

or

If your trapezoid has perfectly flat tops and bottoms (the y position of the left top point is the same as the y position of the right top point) you could just get the values of the mask shape in the mask attributes and those four “positions” would be the x and y’s of the extreme top right and extreme bottom left corners. An expression using those values would always position your squares at those comers. You could then alter the anchor of each square so that it “centers” the way you want it.. This would not work if you wanted the squares at the other corners.

or

If you are using AE2017 or later you could convert the mask path to nulls and scale the converted path and mask at the same time. Parent the nulls to the squares and the squares will follow along as the points of that path move as they are scaled. (converting the path to nulls is near the bottom of the windows menu – “Create nulls from path”. Choose the “nulls follow points” option.

[Steve Bentley]

To keep sharpness of the texture overall you can do our polar trick and then just reveal the unpinched polar part on top of the the original 2:1 image in pshop so only the stuff that is at the extreme poles gets soft due to the back and forth with the polar effect.