[William Allum]

It definitely is the polygon lines as if I turn on wire frames, then the lines match up.

So, why are these lines showing at all when it is not selected as an option, and why does it only show up when using an illumination texture. Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

[William Allum]

Hi Graham, thanks for the reply. I am using a custom diffuse texture too.

Would it be better to load one of these as an external texture, rather than a custom texture / composition?

[William Allum]

Ah awesome guys… got it to work, thanks so much! Made my day. 🙂

[William Allum]

Thanks for the replies Dan and Kalle,

Kalle, you basically summed up my problem with the below:

Test = 02;

to
Test = “02”;

Without the “” I get an error, but with them the expression works fine. The problem is that where the value 02 is I want to add a link to a slider, 02 is a bad example in this case. But say if the slider was set to any number between 1 and 10, the expression would be looking at any layer from TITLE_1 to TTILE_10 based on this value.

[William Allum]

Hey, no I haven’t put the wiggle on blur. I haven’t used blur at all, I have put the wiggle on the position. Only a tiny bit, but old VHS often travel a bit, or if they’re really chewed up, a lot (up and down). Using the wiggle expression I’m not really sure how you single out each axis, or just apply the effect less to one?

Sorry I didn’t mean Magic Bullet, led you astray there. I’m using Film Magic Pro, and only for the colour effect. I haven’t used any AE noise, or any other plug in noise. I’m only using the noise from the blank VHS footage I captured, and it works very well. I even have that static at the bottom that your talking about. I will try and post and example sometime, but I have haven’t got a lot of time at the moment.

Yeah I love all that stuff. Really want to get the Grindhouse Blu-ray when it comes out 🙂

Of course, the project I’m working on is a very low budget/no budget spoof health and safety video. Basically about working on a building site. Starts off pretty sober, but gradually becomes more and more over the top, lots of gore, and ends with a zombie apocalypse. Pretty standard stuff. We’re trying to do it in the vein of South Park/Naked Gun films (the sense of humour at least). Hopefully we’ll be able to pull it off!

What is your project for if you don’t mind me asking?

[William Allum]

Sorry for the late reply Eric Schuran, I’ll break down what I have done so far.

First off I am working in HD. So even though I wanted a VHS look, I didn’t want to loose detail, so everything I did was with this in mind.

1) First off I’m not sure if this is the best way to do this, but I really wanted to capture some real VHS noise off an old VCR. Unfortunately if I recoded a blank channel on my machine, it just came out as blue which wouldn’t be very good for compositing over the top of my footage. So this is where I probably went a little out of my way from what I really needed to do. Basically I burned off a DVD which was just a blank black screen, 20 minutes of black to be precise. I then hooked the DVD player up to my VCR, started the DVD and set the VCR to record the DVD. This recorded over the top of all the old programs I had on a VHS tape. I then rewound, and connected my old camera to my VCR. Set it to play and started recording. After this I then captured this to my computer, giving me around 20 minutes of VHS noise to play with.

As you can see I went though quite a long complicated process just to get that video, and there are probably easier ways.

I imported into AE, and overlayed the footage on my sequence. At first it didn’t do mum, as the noise on the footage was so slight. So what I had to do was apply curves I think and bring the white (right hand side) all the way down to black on the left, until it was only 10. After I did this I got some really nice noise, including the colours.

I cant remember what transfer mode I used, but I can find out if you want.

2) After all this I was pretty happy, but it still seemed a little static. So I also added a slight wiggle to my sequence below, just like on a VHS. The the only thing I have a problem with after this that wiggle seems to effect horizontal and vertical positions the same, does anyone know how to make one of them effected more/less? Would really appreciate advice on that.

3) Then as I have mentioned above on the posts before, I applied the time remapping and the wiggle effect and I got really nice wobbly VHS sound.

As with all the wiggle effects you can apply a slider to it, and then you can key how much of a wiggle you want. So for example at certain parts in the video I want it to get really damaged, so I plan to cut up my VHS noise Overlay and find some very messy parts. Then I can overlay these on the parts where I need them, and key the audio to get really bad, and the footage to jiggle more.

I should also say that after colour correcting I used magic bullet on the sequence underneath, applying the 70’s cinema filter (at 30%) to my footage.

Hope this helps/

[William Allum]

Well I tried it guys, and it worked pretty well. I applied time remapping, and set the first key frames expression to “wiggle(5,1/300)”, this seemed to give quite a subtle wobble and didn’t seem to effect the video too much. I would then probably go ahead and set the one to a slider or something, then I can key how bad the wobble gets at certain places.

Really excited now, I have quite a lot of effects going on in the project. So I’m planning to add them, and some basic colour correction. Export it as a PNG or something, and then import this into AE as one thing and apply all VHS and damage effects. What should be great about this is that I can key how bad the effects get when I want them too!

Fingers crossed all should go well 🙂 Many thanks again guys, made my day! If you have any other ideas, or think there’s a better way to do the wiggle than what I have described please let me know.

[William Allum]

Thanks for the reply guys, I will also have a go at testing out each of your ideas after work today. I’ll report back, hopefully with something good.

[William Allum]

Ok, I really don’t get this guys…I’ve been trying to import my premier project into ae and via the dynamic link it wont let me. However if I copy and paste the sequence from premier to ae it will, along with importing all the other media files along with it. However all the ae effects on my premier time line appear as unlinked media files. Even though the ae project is exactly the same one….

Also the premier sequence looks a bit of a mess, as each cut is its own individual layer. Is this meant to happen??? I thought each track from premier would appear as a layer? Is this really the best work flow???

I thought it would make things a lot easier if I could convert what ever clips need special effects in the premier time line to ae comps, and then do all the levels in premier. After this I could then import the sequence into AE, do final colour correcting, including the video tape effect I want and export it from AE…

Can I do this, or is it going to be easier to render I lossless video file from premier, and then import it to ae to do the finishing touches?

Many thanks…

[William Allum]

Thanks for the reply guys. Are the levels in premier as good as in AE, because from what I saw they weren’t as good. I am also adding a blurred vignette to many of the clips along, with a dark vignette to every shot. I am also using film magic pro for colour correction, which you can use in premier.

The video effect I am applying is a video overlay with a selective transfer. I don’t think AE has this?

I will check what you mentioned though.