Posted on by oconnelll

After Effects Plugins

A few notes and information on After Effects plugins from the San Diego Premiere Pro User’s Group Meeting 2020 March 18 meeting presented by DJ Summit.

After Effects plugins meeting members.
After Effects plugins at the San Diego Premier Pro Users Group meeting 2020 March 18.

Trackmats

Set Matte

  • Applies it to the size of the layer
  • Allows you to set using hue, saturation, lightness, and more chanel (not just alpha or luma)

EXtractoR – allows remapping of red, green, blue and alpha channels to another layer

Color Correction

Levels vs Curves After Effects plugins for color correction
Levels vs Curves for color correction.

Levels

Go into single channel in plugin and use grayscale in color window = make it look like a good grayscale image = dial it in that way then eyeball it from there

Curves

Same thing as Levels but different interface
Use grayscale colorspace
Single color channel on Curves, and pull the line to match the greyscale

Fast Box Blur

Can be used to degrade the foreground footage = 1 to 3 px
* Can control with a mask, check setting in plugin

Optics Compensation – Can help place a figure in a scene

After Effects plugin meeting screen
The meeting was held online due to the Coronavirus health recommendations.

Keying

Keylight

  1. Garbage matt
  2. Eyedropper
  3. Screen balance 50/50, 5 or 95 (balances screen between red or blue)
  4. View: Check status (black = transparent, white = opaque)
  5. Clip Black: keep as far apart as you can
  6. Clip White
  7. View: Intermediate result (not doing cc and other stuff)

Advanced Spill Suppressor – Get rid of the green

Key Cleaner – Can get chunky

Simple Choker – Fastest and cleanest way to get rid of outline

Levels (See above to CC figure to scene)

Note: FX Console from Video Copilot = help access plugins from layer https://www.videocopilot.net/blog/2018/05/fx-console-updated-to-v1-0-3/

Roto

Rotobrush

Good for fur and hair, and high contrast
Control click resizes the brush, pink is in th shot
Alt+w – refine brush, go over the edge (white is alpha, all detail comes across)
Blue box on window timeline with arrows, modifications only go one direction from there.
Add Advanced Spill Suppressor
Freeze will recalculate whole piece

New Plugins

Red Giant VFX Toolkit $999 or $599/yr https://www.redgiant.com/products/vfx-suite/
Good, makes a lot of things more straight forward

  • SuperComp – takes all the assets on one layer (light and atmospheric effects interact with all of your layers and the elements of a scene in a far more natural way than can be modeled with a simple stack of 2D layers
  • KingPin Tracker – Mocha alternative
  • Optical Glow – Inverse falloff (more like a neon light)
  • Shadow – Physically accurate shadow with a plane, animate-able to follow a lightsource
  • Chromatic Displacement – 
  • Primatte Keyer
  • Spot Clone Tracker – 
  • Knoll Light Factory – photo-realistic lens flares that render fast
  • Reflection – 

Lockdown ($249 AE Scripts) https://aescripts.com/lockdown/
Script and plugin (follow directions in the plugin)

O’Connell Design is a consultancy offering creative services in Production Design, Animation, and Visual Effects for film and television.