A Different Light: Gamma-Corrected Compositing

Chris and Trish Meyer | 11/30- 08:56 AM

The image on the left is a normal computer crossfade; the image on the right uses linear blending - note how the bright areas are emphasized. Footage courtesy Artbeats.

Most of us have been navigating the waters of computer graphics with the assumption that the world is flat. And it’s remarkable how well we’ve done with this fundamentally flawed assumption. However, some of you may have heard whisperings that the world is actually round - often couched in terms of how important it is to understand the subject of gamma, and to composite within a “linear light” model.

Managing Moving Masks

Chris and Trish Meyer | 11/04- 04:30 PM

In After Effects, each mask vertex (the yellow squares) interpolates in a straight line from old to new positions. The red lines illustrate some of these paths. The First Vertex is the largest box – in this case, the one in the upper left corner of the M and I.

Masking is one of the core features of After Effects. Most know how to create and edit Mask Shapes; fewer how to control the way these shapes animate – which is important, especially with the popularity of creating cel or Flash type animations these days.

After Effects can seem to have a twisted mind of its own when interpolating between two different Mask Shapes. In reality, it has a very narrow, simple mind. However, there are some tricks you can employ to coax it down a path closer to the one you want. When you need even more precise control, you can employ the Smart Mask Interpolation keyframe assistant, included in the Professional edition of After Effects (including CS3 Professional).

A Track of the Clones

Chris and Trish Meyer | 09/04- 09:06 PM

One of the most significant but underused sections of After Effects has to be its vector-based painting engine, introduced back in version 6. One of the capabilities of this engine is the ability to clone one area of a piece of footage onto another area, including cloning from different points in time. As sexy as that sounds, in the real world cloning can quickly become tedious, especially when the object you are trying to replicate (or eliminate) is moving. Fortunately, other features in After Effects – including Expressions and its Motion Tracker - can greatly ease the pain. In this column, we’ll walk through such a task. These same general techniques can probably be applied to other compositing/motion graphics programs as well.

Between Dimensions: 3D Into AE

Chris and Trish Meyer | 07/27- 07:52 PM

The logo was rendered in a 3D program; the walls were created in After Effects. Both use the same camera data, so their perspective shifts match as the camera moves.

Many 3D artists use After Effects as a finishing tool: tweaking colors, improving the composite, and blending other layers such as greenscreen footage into the final scene, with the goal of creating a realistic image. By contrast, our primary focus is creating abstract motion graphics, so for us the tables are turned: We use 3D programs (most often Maxon Cinema 4D plus Zaxwerks Invigorator and ProAnimator) almost as utilities, to create elements to integrate into our purely graphical worlds.

In the old days, this process was somewhat separated, limiting what we could do: For example, a dramatic camera move in 3D would often look silly composited over a stationary 2D scene unless you did a lot of work to approximate the shifts in perspective. However, ever since After Effects gained its own concept of 3D space back in version 5, it has become much easier to tie these two worlds together, keeping the same shifts in perspective for both 3D and After Effects elements. For example, we might create, texture, and animate a logo in 3D, and then composite other 2D elements around it in After Effects.

More Motion, Less Control

Chris and Trish Meyer | 12/16- 08:59 PM

Most of you are probably familiar with the concept of using a camera to pan and zoom around still images. Popularized by Ken Burns in his documentary on the Civil War, it is a great trick for any occasion when you don’t have moving video for a scene. You can simulate this by simply animating the position of a still image in virtually any compositing or video editing program. However, there are a number of refinements that can make your life easier, and the end result more realistic.

Pulse Rays

Chris and Trish Meyer | 11/28- 10:02 AM

Ordinary light ray effects can often look too solid or static (upper left). To add more life to them, matte them with an animated noise texture (above). This looks particularly nice when composited back on top of the original effect (left). You can click on any of these to see them full size. Light rays created with Trapcode’s Shine plug-in; radiation symbol from P22’s Atomica font. Click here to download a project file for this technique.

Light ray treatments, where streaks of color extend from type, a logo, or image, are popping up everywhere these days. But you’ve no doubt heard the saying “familiarity breeds contempt” - and we have to admit, many of those treatments are starting to look a bit...familiar.

At their stock settings, most light ray effects look too solid or static to our eyes. The excellent Shine light ray plug-in from Trapcode has an animateable Shimmer parameter that adds some animation to its rays, but it seems few are taking advantage of this feature. Even with Shimmer, we’ve been interested in finding ways to make rays seem more ghostly and animated.

As it so happens, we recently had a client approach us asking if we could make light rays look as if an energy pulse was flowing out from the center. After some experimenting, we hit upon a formula using stock After Effects Professional plug-ins in conjunction with Shine which we think did the trick - see the figures at the top of this page.

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