[William J. meyer]

Hello Michael,

You can get great results with fire over a black background and then apply the free filter called “Knoll Unmult” to the fire layer, available here:

https://toolfarm.com/plugins/index.php/Red_Giant_Software_Knoll_Unmult

The description on that page has more info about how the filter works. You may want to play with the fire layer’s transfer mode as well, but Unmult maintains the fire’s strength unlike just using transfer modes.

take care, wjm

Now in post-production
The House That Jack Built
https://thehousethatjackbuilt.wordpress.com

OS X.5.3 – AE CS3
MacPro 8-core (2X 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

[William J. meyer]

Hello Jag,

This may not be the type of blur you seek, but for similiar results instead of the AE camera’s lens blur,
I have used a pre-comped luminance map to drive an adjustment layer with the Lens Blur filter applied. The Lens Blur has controls for different iris shapes, radius, focal distance, etc. I have yet to try this method using a grayscale z-buffer render from a 3D app, but I thought that maybe it would work that way also.

Changes in blur based on distance from the AE camera are not handled automatically however, so it may not be a viable alternative for you, although perhaps some magic with expressions might tie the two together (I don’t have such experience).

At any rate, Andrew Kramer has a tutorial on this luminance map technique:

https://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials.html?id=45

take care, wjm

Now in post-production
The House That Jack Built
https://thehousethatjackbuilt.wordpress.com

OS X.5.3
AE CS3
MacPro 8-core (2X 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

[William J. meyer]

Hi.

What I have done in the past is to duplicate the TV layer and mask out the screen, and then sandwich the new footage between the TV layers. Now when you bulge or otherwise manipulate the new footage you can slip and slide your footage layer to re-compose the shot within the TV screen. Alternately you could use a track matte.

Within the Presets that ship with AE you can find some “Bad TV” settings inside the “Image-Special Effects” folder. Granted, these can look cheese-ball, but you can eliminate or reduce the grosser aspects of the presets until you get some decent, subtle scan lines.

For the reflection I take a photo (or footage) facing the other way on the set (or mock it up of an actor watching or really anything at all to suggest the environment of the TV). Laying this precomp over the new image but under the masked screen layer, you can mess with its opacity and transfer settings (overlay works for me) as well as position.

Besides color correcting the new footage, it’s a good bet to use the “Match Grain” filter in the Noise & Grain menu to add grain to your new TV footage, using the original TV layer as your guide.

Lastly, you may find your new image is a bit too sharp assuming it’s been scaled down to fit inside the TV frame, so you might want to soften it a bit.

Take care, wjm

Now in post-production
The House That Jack Built
https://thehousethatjackbuilt.wordpress.com

OS X.5.3 MacPro 8-core (2X 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

[William J. meyer]

Hi Mike,

Thanks for the direction.

I admit it looks a bit daunting, but I’ll take a crack at it this weekend.

Thanks again!
take care, wjm

Now in post-production

The House That Jack Built
https://thehousethatjackbuilt.wordpress.com

OS X.5.3

MacPro 8-core (2X 2.8GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5400)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT

[William J. meyer]

Hi.

This is less about the painting look and more about the texture.

After you have affected the footage, I would suggest adding a fabric layer on top with a transfer mode set to Overlay to give the “painted video” the notion it exists on a canvas of some kind. You can adjust the opacity or use other transfer modes depending on your tastes (Multiply and Overlay work best for me).

Image*After has some free fabric textures that might help:

https://www.imageafter.com/category.php?category=fabrics

If you choose one with color, you may want to either desaturate it or apply a Tint filter with the default black and white settings, unless you want the fabric layer’s color to affect your video. Also, playing with the fabric layer’s Curves and Contrast can control the density of the texture.

Textures scanned from Illuminated Manuscripts also wield interesting results.

take care,
-william

[William J. meyer]

Hi!
Just a few minutes ago I animated a logo emerging from a wall of glass. Maybe the process is similiar enough to assist you.

First I used Andrew Kramer’s quick reflection preset on my logo. The preset is available here. After I had positioned my logo in its final state over the glass, I duplicated my logo. I named one instance “the logo” and the other instance “the reflection.” Then I created two adjustment layers that I used to mask off the portions I wanted of the logo and the reflection layers, so I could animate them independently. I applied the masks on the adjustments layers using track mattes, so when I moved the layers, the mask stayed put. This allowed me to move the logo down on its Y-axis “into” the glass, and the reflection up on its Y-axis so it would appear in sync with the logo.

Being you’re using a liquid, I’d guess applying a displacement map to the reflection layer would help sell the effect.

Now, at the point of intersection you might want to feather the mask that affects the logo, if you don’t want a sharp line where the logo emerges from the milk. In my case I used another adjustment layer with the CC Light Rays filter to obscure my edge.

Hope some of this helps!

ciao,
wjm

[William J. meyer]

ibsmith,

This has been plaguing me also. One of my frustrations was not being able to correctly identify the source of the issue. Besides appearing in footage shot in-house, I would also see it in many high-end productions delivered to us as well in fantastic demo reels on the web (when it appeared in a collection of 20th Century Fox trailers I was even more perplexed).

Many of the deliverables at work tend to be web-only or computer-only, and we’ve had to do essentially the same as you (generally I’ve done the cropping in Compressor). My past attempts to discover the nature of this beast proved futile. But Tom provided me with the correct vocabulary! It made all the difference. From what I have just read and experimented with in FCP, blanking, in our case, is a function of our capture codec, DVCPRO50. Here’s a link to a Panasonic pdf document about the codec.

As Tom mentioned, they even refer to it as a “feature.” But as I understand from this Wikipedia entry, blanking is a hold-over from the early days of television.

So maybe if you change your capture codec the blanking will not be there. When I switched to 8-bit uncompressed, for example, it was gone.

ciao!
-wjm

[William J. meyer]

Hi!

The Shadow-Highlight filter in AE7 is found here:

Effect/Color Correction/Shadow-Highlight

ciao,
wjm

[William J. meyer]

A few years ago I was at Star Wars Celebration III and someone asked visual effects supervisor John Knoll this same question. He briefly mentioned that caucasian actors’ flesh tone responded better to blue screens, due to the slight green inherent in caucasian complexion.

Take care,
wjm