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After Effects for Shooters

Jan 1, 2004 12:00 PM, By Barry Braverman

Desktop solutions for in-camera problems.

It's certainly a sign of the times that, as a veteran shooter, I am here to discuss the world's most popular compositing tool. After all, the oxide has been on the wall for the last several years: Image creation is no longer the exclusive province of the shooter and camera. Indeed, the competent shooter/craftsman today must have knowledge of the entire digital workflow if he wants to work and prosper in the current convergence-gone-mad marketplace.

One quick pan around tells the story. A single individual is increasingly doing it all, from image creation and capture, through editorial, compositing, and final output to DVD. Even if you never intend to work with a compositing tool like Adobe After Effects, it behooves every shooter to understand what is possible and practical in the today's digital environment — and at what cost.

For most folks, the cost of the software is not really the issue. At $699, the After Effects standard edition (or $999 for the Professional) is roughly the price of a few months' lattes at Starbucks. Of course, the high you get from AE is considerably longer lasting and better for you (perhaps), but that's not the point. The real cost of working with the compositing tool is a matter of time: your time to learn and properly exploit the software and time to execute and render the desired effects.

Render what's due

Adobe After Effects and Photoshop are the indisputable workhorses of the digital media industry, and they are indispensable tools in every craftsman's toolbox. Chances are if you're making a living in digital media today, you already know these two programs to a considerable extent.

For the shooter, it's important to realize, however, that it is not necessary to know every aspect of both programs. It is impossible, in any case, given their expansive, almost limitless capabilities. One simply has to know what is necessary for one's particular niche. A video artist adept in Photoshop need not know the nuances of CMYK printing, for example.

The same is true with respect to shooters and Adobe After Effects. It is not necessary to become fully versed in parenting and scripts, render cues, and 3D. Of course, it may be helpful to add such capabilities to your arsenal, but it is certainly not essential from the shooter's perspective.

Indeed, the shooter should not be blindsided in software by a dizzying array of quasi-useful features; the DV cinematographer in particular should be looking at ease of workflow as a number one consideration. A compositing tool offering sensational features but poor workflow is not likely to find much use given the stress and reality of our tight work schedules. Important to say: AE has superb workflow and is beautifully integrated into the digital media tools you likely already use, most notably Photoshop, Illustrator, and increasingly, Premiere Pro. (For more on the integrated these programs and the Adobe Creative Suite, see Frank McMahon's review on page 73 of this issue.)

An extension of your camera

A shooter employing Adobe After Effects to enhance his or her images is not a new concept. I recall screening the film dailies from a project I shot in Portugal when a large hair suddenly appeared at the edge of frame and intruded a third of the way into a critical scene. Blowing up and repositioning the image inside AE eliminated the interloper without ever leaving the Avid/After Effects environment. That was impressive.

Figure 2. To affect diffusion on the AE timeline, simply duplicate the video source in a second track and apply blur. You can experiment with the type of blur and amount of opacity in the overlaying track. The Unsharp Mask in Photoshop works in a similar way, combining in- and out-of-focus elements in the same composition.

Today, the role of AE extends far beyond such basic manipulation as scaling and cropping. Film preservationists, for example, typically work at extreme 4000×4000 pixel resolutions to remove dirt and grunge from deteriorated movie reels. The shooter can use AE to gain similar advantage — and more.

Distracted and diffused

For today's shooters, one can't underestimate the importance of proper diffusion control. Extreme hard edges in an image will typically produce thick line artifacts, as the camera attempts to compress then overcorrect at these absolute transition points. Applying some diffusion (or “dither”) as a matter of course increases the apparent redundancy along such boundaries, assuring that the camera compressor will be able to fulfill its task and find something relatively benign to compress without producing an artifact. (See figure 2.)

With the encoding to DVD now all but certain, your MPEG-2 file will look a thousand percent better when some diffusion is applied to the source video. This can be done in the lighting of the original scene, through an actual glass filter placed on the camera lens, or via software as I do from time to time in After Effects. It is ironic that some diffusion is necessary to increase apparent resolution in the encoded file, but this indeed does seem to be the case as most noxious artifacts may be suppressed in this way.

The diffusion achievable in AE may be the only viable solution when source footage, amateur in quality, has been amassed from various parties. AE's built-in capabilities can help salvage critical scenes shot with low-end DV gear, where severe clipping is seen in the brightest highlights, for example, when shooting against a hot window. Low-end gear will also tend to crush blacks, so some application of diffusion would help at the low end as well.

Of course, such a strategy in software will never match perfectly the delicate interplay of light rays dancing in, through and off a traditional glass camera filter. Over the years, shooters have gained considerable experience in this regard, so it would be nice if AE were somehow able to take a veteran shooter's substantial prior experience into consideration.

Figure 3. The 55mm product from Digital Film Tools is an After Effects plug-in that mimics the look and feel of commonly used glass camera filters. The shooter must recognize the plug-in's limitations, however, that the complext physics of light passing through an actual glass filter cannot be 100% quantified in software. Nor is the tasteless error correction in many cameras ameliorated by such an after-the-fact solution. Nevertheless, 55mm does offer shooters a practical and convenient way to affect some filtration after-camera. In some cases, this may be your only option.

Fortunately, Digital Film Tools' 55mm plug-in for Adobe After Effects 6 does exactly this (figure 3), offering shooters a quantifiable measure to apply camera filtration on the AE timeline. The tool is meant to simulate most popular glass filters used by cinematographers, including color-graduated and infrared types.

Steady as she goes

The motion tracker in AE 6 is vastly improved and much easier to implement than in previous versions (figure 4). In this respect, shooters will find AE's image-stabilization capability a welcome and trusted friend. I used the motion tracker to stabilize footage shot aboard a catamaran buffeted by 35mph winds. You might find the feature useful to remove the excessive shake in some handheld shots or even to remove a sudden jerk to the camera, after falling asleep, for example, in the middle of a critical take. If you're shooting MTV, you might be able to get away with it. Otherwise, you may well be fishing around for a solution. AE 6 provides that solution.

Paint and clone

It used to be when a shooter needed a motorcycle gang or herd of elephants, he or she had to locate such an assembly, pay their room and board, arrange for craft services, and choreograph the shot. Now, in AE 6, this level of commitment is no longer necessary because the cloning tool from Photoshop has migrated to the AE workspace (figure 5). The shooter simply has to paint in the additional rider, elephant, or lines of Union soldiers. Wow. Where will this stuff end? It's awesome, yes, and a bit scary, to be perfectly frank.

The depth-of-field morass

For we film shooters who have turned relatively recently to small-format video, no greater issue has more negatively impacted the aesthetic of our images than depth of field. For decades, the skilled shooter has used selective focus to properly direct viewer's attention, and the fact that so much of our DV frame is in hard sharp focus all the time has contributed mightily to the offensive “look” that I refer to frequently as the DV Curse.

Figure 4. FOr the itinerant shooter, AE's improved motion tracker will undoubtedly find myriad uses: to stabilize action footage shot with a long lens; level a seasick camera bobbing at sea; or remove the annoying breathing of the camera iris in footage recorded with auto-exposure. Previously, this footage often had to be discarded. But thanks to AE 6, the white point in a scene can now be tracked and continuously corrected to offset the gyrations of a camera iris attempting to render the world and everything in it as 18% gray.

It's largely a matter of physics. Working with tiny chipsets 1/3in. to 2/3in. in diameter simply produces too much depth of field, and this unfortunate reality impacts every small-format shooter regardless of format — the smaller the chipset, the worse the problem. Various efforts have been made and continue to be made to address the depth-of-field conundrum. The P & S Technik Mini35 Adapter (www.zgc.com) is one solution that works well, allowing DV shooters to mount 35mm cine lenses on the Canon XL1, Sony DSR-PD170, and most 2/3in. CCD cameras. Focusing on a wide-diameter ground glass, rather than a miniscule CCD, preserves the shallow focus we shooters desperately need to properly exercise our craft.

With respect to AE, however, there is an alternative solution to the excessive depth-of-field challenge. Lenscare (figure 6) is an AE 6 plug-in from Frischluft of Aachen, Germany (www.frischluft.com) that permits the shooter to move depth-of-field control to the compositing environment. The effect can be at times something less than photographically salient, so good judgment and good taste (as always) should be your guide. In my evaluation, the plug-in added a compelling look to cursed DV footage, and I heartily recommend it as a core tool in every digital shooter's toolbox.

Figure 5. Painting is as easy now in AE as it has been for years in Photoshop. You want a motorcycle gang? You got a motorcycle gang!

Conclusion

Many of the functions and control that were once the exclusive province of shooters and their cameras are now possible to a large extent in After Effects 6. But, as in everything else we do in this digital-crazed world, the shooter must be aware of the software limitations, in both an aesthetic and practical sense. Camera filtration, depth-of-field control, and precise motion and color tracking is not the same when applied in an after-camera environment.

Figure 6. The Lenscare plug-in for AE6 can help shooters mitigate the negative impace of excessive depth-of-field in DV cameras. A series of keyframes indicating focus over time permit the shooter to effectively follow-focus in the post environment.

How far you can go in AE 6 to create the desired look is really the essence of the new shooter's craft. One thing is for sure: With the advent of DVD and its requisite MPEG-2 compression, some understanding of software-imaging tools like Adobe After Effects is essential. How much or how little of one's craft can ultimately be applied in the AE environment is really up to you. It will depend, of course, on the project and the story you're trying to tell, but as a skilled shooter-craftsman, you will be expected to have this sensibility. Your clients will insist on nothing less.

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