[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Are you trying to add texture to the whole comp or to individual elements? Either or, you can use the effects in AE to add texture to any element or to the whole comp without having to leave AE.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Use Venetian Blinds (Transitions) while animating the layer position.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Another thing that can help you is to write down the camera distance to the subject, height, lens angle and sensor/film size. Helps in post when you build your 3d set.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

For easy 3d camera tracking use matte black (or a darker shade of chroma color) markers on the screen and not on the actor.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Lens Flare – besides Optical Flares you can use Knoll Light Factory.
For a quick and dirty way of doing this, you can buy stock images of lens flares, cut them using Photoshop in layers with alpha channels and animate them or simply comp them in using various transfer modes.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

If there’s no re-shoot option, here’s what i would do:

Get stills of just the wheel, cut a nice matte for it in PSD and then roto out the wheels together with the hands from the shot. Build the wheels back in (with the fork in the front)and animate the wheels to spin matching the movement of the background (use motion blur).
Then try to find some sort of effect- a glow maybe- to “enhance” the moment when the kid gets ready to fly and after.. this can hide some of the imperfections.
In the end I would color grade the shot – this will blend in the imperfections even more and make it more believable… but this is tricky, because if you do not have color grading on the rest of the movie it’s hard to justify just this one… maybe you can sell it as an “enhancement” as well.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

What I would use it’s FreeForm Pro or ShapeShifter AE to create the 3d shapes. Basically you need to animate a mesh warp and distort the geometric displacement map, while animating the height for the map as well (expand grey values to white). Play with material properties and with the reflection map to get an interesting surface. Also Lights will help define the shapes better.
Here’s an example of something I did using the method mentioned above:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ncIbQhySa0

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

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[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

I think it’s a question of finances as well as much as it is a question of software. Cloud seems the better option, although it’s still a unusual way of dealing with software purchasing and upgrading. For the company I work in, it is actually a better solution, since budgets are done way in advance and getting approval for an upgrade takes eons sometimes. So I love the fact that I can put down a monthly amount that will keep my software up to date and I do not have to jump through hoops every time a new version comes out.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

Premiere is the best integrated editing software with AE- with CS6 you get also audio editing and color correction/grading, plus asset management in Bridge and compression with Encoder.
I use them on all of my projects for years now and have had great results. I did use Avid, Media 100, Edit and Fire before and no workflow was as tight as Premiere – AE, except maybe the one between Flame and Fire.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist

[Tudor “ted” jelescu]

422 means you loose color information- for best results use a 444 format.

Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
Senior VFX Artist