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.

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