Track Motion to make Predator effect in Adobe After Effects?

[mojo2185]

I think what I want to do is to track motion using after effects, but i'm not sure. What I have is footage of someone walking down a hallway. I want to take that footage, and apply an affect to it to make it look like infra-red vision (IR Vision). This is done using the shine plugin. Anyway, back to my question. I would like to precisely "cut out" the shape of the person, so I can apply the effect to that layer (person) only, and not the background. I tried using masks to do this, but it's becoming too big of a hassle to deal with. Someone suggested using some sort of motion tracking that is available in after effects. Can someone please shed some light on this?

Thanks

[racer-x]

I can't understand why you would want to use infared affect on person only and not suroundings, it seems too fake to me.

Anyway you may want to download this video tutorial from Wriglyvideo.com:
http://www.wrigleyvideo.com/videotutorial/media/stopnglowtutorial.zip

It's a tutorial for Premiere, but it should help you with AE.

[mojo2185]

Well, the way the shine plugin works, it overly colors everything, so it looks really weird. What i'm trying to do is copy the effect used in the movie Predator, where only the "targets" are in IR, and the rest appears as a blue background.

Thanks for the info, i'll check out that tutorial.

[D_Knife]

Ok - that reason makes sense and sounds good!!
Please post a pic of the result - Love to see it!!!

[mojo2185]

I took a look at the tutorial, its pretty cool. Unfortunately, it can't be implemented with what I'm trying to do because that method uses a still picture, mine is moving video. Technically, I can go frame by frame, and edit the video like the tutorial suggests, but that would take more time than I have. If anyone else can suggest an easy way to "track" the motion, I'd appreciate it. Right now, I'm close. A while back, I went frame by frame and used the Vector Paint effect. This worked like i wanted it to, but the shape of the person is not very accurate and the IR vision sort of "wiggles." So basically I'm looking for a more accurate way to accomplish this.

I'll post a pic when I get something worth posting (hopefully soon).

Thanks

[tim6661234]

You could use motion tracking to help you keep your mask in the correct place but you still have the problem of changing the mask as the shape of the person changes.

Easiest way to do this if you can is re shoot the walk infrom of a green screen, shoot the hallway empty that way you can put the walk layer on top of the hallway after applying your effect.

I'm sure you can do what you want and without green screen but it will take a long time to achieve.

Saying that I'm no After Effects Expert.

[mojo2185]

Saying that I'm no After Effects Expert.

Actually, you've hit it right on the head. Apparently the "motion tracking" feature doesn't create a mask, and automatically change it (track it as I like to say), like I had previously thought. Shooting on a green screen would definately be the easiest way to do this, unfortunately, I'm actually taking the shots from one floor above the actor (I'm shooting down from an upstairs window in the library), so it's not so simple to use a green screen in my case. I'll probably have to do it the long way .

Thanks very much for the input!
(I'll be sure to stop by this post again when I have a picture to show).

[mojo2185]

Well, to anyone who was interested, here's a frame of my "Predator" vision effect.

and here's another


Opinions?

[D_Knife]

That looks pretty damm cool!
nice work

[mojo2185]

Thanks!

[racer-x]

Nice, very nice! Glad you made it work.

[hellfire104]

What was the name of the effect used to create the red on the person?

Also about the green screen......using a green screen inside of a building is fairly difficult to do, unless you have some sort of studio. This is because while you tell Premier or AE to search out the specific color of the green screen(being bright green) with whatever degree of similarity, if you have any shadows or different brightness of lighting on the screen, its going to fade over differently because not all of the screen is actually the same color. You would need many powerful lights, and careful stragegic placing of them to pull it off.

Nice job thought, I wouldn't mind an explanation of how you did that, but its not neccessary.

[DVO]

Another idea would be to dress the actor in green, that way would work too I think. Probebly any bright color would work.

[mojo2185]

Quick explanation of how I did it:
Basically I had the video of my actor running down a hallway at school. I imported the clip to after effects. Next, I traced my actor with the pen tool (using a ton of verticies). After that, I went through and adjusted the verticies to make sure they matched the motion of my actor in every frame (using keyframes). After that, I added the effect "Shine" (plugin by Trapcode). The shine effect has a ton of different lighting settings, one of them being IR (light colors red, darker colors blue/green). I adjusted the settings in the plugin so it looked good. After that, I took my now IR mask of my actor and placed it on top of another layer of the original video. I took the second layer of video and added some color effects, brightness effects, posterize, and noise to make it the background blue and distorted looking.
Thats about it. I'll be more than happy to answer any more questions about it.

Thanks for the input!

[hellfire104]

Wow, how long did resetting those verticies take?

[hellfire104]

Where did you get this shine plugin? Is it compatable with Premier? Or is there a different version for premier?

[mojo2185]

Wow, how long did resetting those verticies take?

Well, this is why I was trying to search for a different way
It took several hours, for about 5 seconds of video. I'm still relatively new to after effects, so a pro might be able to cut that time down. I'm also a perfectionist, so i made sure every vertex was in the RIGHT spot.

Where did you get this shine plugin? Is it compatable with Premier? Or is there a different version for premier?

You can purchase the shine plugin from trapcode (www.trapcode.com). They also have a fully functional demo to download (but it prints a watermark or something if you don't register it with a serial number). The plugin works in After Effects and Adobe Premiere Pro. I haven't used it in Premiere because I don't have Premiere Pro, I have version 6.5. I've seen some demos of it being used in premiere, and it can add some cool highlighting/flare lighting to a movie.