Anamorphic Lens–Flare Creation

Happy New Year to everyone! Sorry I'm a bit late on this, but so it goes... This is a follow–up on the Lens–Flare promise. As you know, it only uses the effects that are native to After Effects. In fact it only uses one effect: Glow.

This will work wonders for you if you want to just add a little more style on a certain shot for a client. Here's how:

1. After you have your comp ready, create a new adjustment layer (not necessary, but recomended). Apply Effect, Stylize, Glow. Duplicate the glow and turn off the second instance.

2. You need to create the core. Set the A and B colors both to a nice red color of your choosing. Change the Glow Colors to A & B Colors (the color looping doesn't matter since they're the same colors). Change the glow threshold to something very high (you'll have to eyeball this for your shot, every image will be different), usually the 80's or 90's does the trick. Change the Glow Radius to what ever looks good for a core; you'll find that somewhere around 20 works most of the time. Lastly you can change the Glow Intensity to whatever you desire.

3. Now we create the blue horizontal streaks. Turn on the second instance of Glow and change both of the red colors to blue (or any other color if you want). Here's the key: change the Glow Dimensions from "Horizontal and Vertical" to "Horizontal" only. Change the radius to someting very high, until it flares across the screen. Lastly bring up or down the glow intensity. Voilà!

4. If you used the adjustment layer, you can change the opacity of that to further sell the effect. RAM preview and you'll see that with no keyframes the glow will automatically follow the highlights and turn off (sort of) when there should be no flare.

Obviously this isn't perfect and shouldn't be substituted for the real thing. Not all highlights would create a flare, the shape and colors aren't entirely correct, etc... But for five minutes of work and no extra money spent, this is great. As you know from the original comparison, this technique can work better that some plugins that do it automatically for you. It's all a matter of adjusting the colors, the radius, the intensity, etc to come up with what looks good to you.

Hope you enjoy this!

Anamorphic Lens–Flares

It's amazing how little things can add a big difference to video when you're trying to make it look like film. Anything from color correction to proper shadows to lens flares can help.

Lately I've been playing around with ways to create lens flares in After Effects without using plug-ins or generators. I've used everything from solids to the glow plugin to motion tracking, etc. Here are two examples: one was created with a very popular plugin, and the other was created in after effects without any plugins; see if you can guess which is which:

Notice how only the top one has a core, the bottom one does not...the top is the one that I created in After Effects, the other was made using another popular plug-in. For three minutes of work it looks very good. What you can't tell by the pictures though, is that the top one has much more smooth movement than does the bottom when it's applied to video.

There may be a how-to post or maybe even a tutorial that deals with this sort of thing in the near future. Let me know what you guys think!

Exposure Control

Often during simple compositing operations, we find something that looks good on our monitor, but as soon as it's shown on film or certain television sets, the composite no longer holds together. Take this following example:

We have this nice background plate footage here:

And this garbage-masked green-screen footage ready to be keyed here:
So we pull the key with Keylight, and this is what we get:
Now obviously it's too bright and there is not enough contrast in the above image, so we add a grayscale adjustment layer, and play around with the keyed shot until we have something that we think looks good, like this:
Unfortunately, those shadows would pull apart from the background when displayed on many TV monitors, such as the one I have connected to my workstation. A great but little known tool for just this is called Exposure Control. As of CS3 you don't have to be in 32bpc in order to take advantage of it. It's located in the bottom right hand corner of the comp window, and is very useful in performing a slightly modified version of 'gamma slamming.' When we crank up the exposure, we can see that the shadows on his black shorts are much too bright compared to the black rails in the background, or even the shadows on the ground in the corner:

So now we can do some further adjustments, and notice that the shadows of the shorts match much more closely with the background than before, and they have a nice fade-off into the lighter shades, just as the darks on the floor do:The final composite (of just the shadows) can be seen here. Obviously we still have the highlights, shadows, midtones, and color to worry about...but that's a different post.

CS4...enough said

The people at Adobe have now released the details of the newest version of After Effects here. It now sports a stand-alone version of Mocha, three new effects (including an ever-sought-after Cartoon effect - no more sitting frame by frame in Illustrator), much easier navigation, and Photoshop 3D layers rendering, among an assortment of other new enhancements.

I've been getting several requests on doing both a Mocha tutorial and a video-to-cartoon tutorial, and now it looks like I'll have to! Although I'm a bit skeptical on how well the cartoon effect will work, at its defaults anyway.

Be sure to check it out and preorder your copy of After Effects CS4 for Windows here or Mac here.

Free Cinematic Presets!

After the release of my last tutorial, I thought I'd create a few (five) sneak peek free cinematic presets that will apply an overall look to any of your digital video. These are very high in quality, and will work on just about anything. They are a preview to a part of a collection that I'm currently producing.

I thought it would be fun to demonstrate these to you using the newly-released trailer for Quantum of Solace. Here we have a shot of Bond and Felix speaking in a pub (below), the first image is obviously our plain shot taken straight from the trailer, and the following five each have a look applied. Note that these are all at full strength though...when you use these I recommend applying them to an adjustment layer, and bringing the opacity down a bit, just to mix the look back in with the original image. I also suggest you correct the black and white points of your images before applying these as I demonstrated in my tutorial Creating Digital Cinema, although it's not necessary.

I was careful not to clip any values - white, black, red, green, or blue, which is why many are accomplished using a curves effect, and the rest use levels, pulled in the opposite direction, so they don't clip.

Here's the link to download them, simply unzip the file and place them in your presets folder of the After Effects directory on your hard drive:

Grant_Swanson_Presets.zip

Here's an example of the looks:

Notice how skin tones stay relatively normal on all of these. Here's a little hint for you: if you are out looking to purchase a preset collection or maybe even a plugin, check to be sure that the looks you are buying don't destroy skin tones. Here is an extremely popular preset applied to the same image as mine, except skin tones weren't taken into consideration, and, well, you can see for yourself...
Not to mention we've carelessly clipped both white and black values, creating an amateur and accidental look.

Have fun!

NOTE: If you cannot see all of the images try refreshing your page.

New Reel

In the past we (Video Apex) have only worked on effects shots, motion graphics, etc... for private companies and as such are not allowed to place any material we work on in a demo reel. We are now trying to move beyond this and are striving to assemble a new, professional reel that will demonstrate our team's great talent and ability.

For the next few months we will be accepting compositing, titling, color grading, and effects jobs from clients world-wide. Since we are doing this project for the sole purpose of creating and enhancing the reel, all jobs that we choose to take will be be accepted for under $100, which will cover operational expenses.

We have a system in place that will allow us to work with clients worldwide, so please do not consider distance to be an obstacle. Everything submitted to us will be considered.

If interested please contact me at alecschwandt@gmail.com.

Thank-you!

Alec Schwandt
Marketing Director
Video Apex

Stabilizing Motion

Since I am currently working on the next tutorial entitled Creating Digital Cinema, I decided to come up with a quick and useful tutorial in the mean time. This is for all you who filmed something hand-held either because you didn't have the time to set up a dolly or simply couldn't afford it, and crossed your fingers hoping it wouldn't turn out too bad...

The techniques in this lesson can be performed both automatically with an expression and manually with keyframes.

Here's the description from Creative Cow:

In this video tutorial, Creative Cow contributing editor Grant Swanson will explain how to use the After Effects Motion Tracker to remove unwanted jitter and movement while still retaining the original motion of the sequence through the use of an expression or manual keyframes.

UPDATE: If you decide to set keyframes manually, try selecting them all and hitting "F9" to smooth the motion even further. You may or may not like the way this looks, but give it a try.

Sin City Effect Part 2

It's finally here!In this video tutorial, Creative Cow contributing editor Grant Swanson will cover important and useful techniques for working with alpha channels that are specifically derived from certain color luminance values. He will explain how to extract the color of a certain area of the image, turn it into an alpha channel, and use it to manipulate the image.

This has been a while in the making. I've tried several different techniques for this, and finally I came across what I teach in the tutorial. I hope it satisfies those of you who have been anxiously waiting for a part 2!

Don't forget to stay tuned for the next tutorial - improving your DV (especially SDDV) footage!

DV to Film Techniques

Right now I'm in the process of creating a new tutorial that's all about improving your DV footage. I'm going to cover how to be sure you are staying at maximum quality throughout your workflow, and several tips and techniques on how to add some style to make your shot look more cinematic. This will go over everything from basic color correction to adding in-camera lens effects, such as realistic gradients, filters, etc...

Here's a sneak peak of what's to come, although I don't have it all planned out yet. Notice how much more cinematic the second image is compared to the first one.

Original Image from the DVX100B
Even by just cropping the image to a 2.40:1 aspect ratio, we are already adding some punch that wasn't there before. Add only three of the many techniques discussed in the tutorial to that, and we've got a professional-looking image.

Stay tuned for this tutorial, it's a good one!

Sin City Effect & Mystic Text

Since this blog started after the release of these two tutorials, I'll just combine them into one post. Feel free to leave comments on your thoughts, or any questions you may have.

Sin City
In this video tutorial, Creative Cow contributing editor Grant Swanson will take you step-by-step through the easiest and fastest (and extremely effective) way of creating the popular Sin City effect - colorized objects in a black and white world. You will learn basic techniques when working with color, and some useful masking/rotoscoping techniques.

Mystic Text
In this video tutorial, Creative Cow contributing editor Grant Swanson will take you through an effective way of tracking "Mystic Text" onto a wall or screen. This technique can be used in horror films, commercials, or promos. He will cover the basics of the After Effects paint tools, some basic "2.5D" motion tracking, and some simple yet effective compositing techniques.

UPDATE:
I was planning to mention this, but forgot to in the tutorial.

Another, and perhaps simpler option to recording the paint strokes, is to use the "write-on" selection for the "Duration" property in the Paint menu, rather than "Constant". This is especially useful if you have a Wacom tablet, since it will record your exact motion and timing.

The only downside is that it is difficult to edit should you make a mistake, whereas with the technique I demonstrated, you have complete control.