LED and Casino light text effects in After Effects

LED and Casino light text effects in After Effects @ PVC is a collection of a few resources that share treatments on LED or light walls, casino lights, or Jumbotron-type looks using AE filters like CC Ball Action or Vegas.

Effects A-Z tip series: recent episodes

Note: see AE's CycoreFX CC filters inside Premiere Pro CS5 to see what works in Premiere. These filters were tested further and discussed in new Premiere training from Eran Stern, released in Feb 2011.

Here's the posts on entire Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks.

These are the recent ones, posted at PVC:

The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host Maltaannon demoing the 4-Color Gradient effect that ships with After Effects...  PVC

The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host James Zwadlo on the CC Bubbles effect that ships with After Effects...   PVC


The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host Eran Stern on the CC Blobbylize effect that ships with After Effects. Eran has two sections in this quicktip...   PVC


The After Effects: Effects A-Z tip series from Motionworks continues with guest host Adam Everett on the CC Ball Action effect that ships with After Effects. Beyond the basics he shows the Brightness Twist control, an old favorite that can make things interesting effects and how to create an easy but realistic displacement map for text...   PVC

Forms from video synthesizers

Via Video Circuits is some old school form, "LZX Visionary - Vector Rescanning Experiments," and for extra fun "Scan Processor Studies:"

Update: And for even more extra fun, something done in Trapcode Form:

Silver Black Cycle from Rhett Dashwood on Vimeo.

Create a Light Wall: tutorial & preset

Quba Michalski shows you how to create a Light Wall – an array of lights driven by an animated image map that can be used for either cool light/flare looks or for precise control over the particles. There's a free tutorial, project, and preset on his website; the preview is below.

Similar treatments can be found in Quba's previous tutorials and in Creating an LED sign in After Effects, Creating Automated Flashing Light Patterns by Chris Zwar, 3D Ball Dispersion with CC Ball Action, and Jumbotron in After Effects.


Light Wall Tutorial Preview from Quba Michalski on Vimeo.

_______________________________________________

UPDATE: Kevin P McAuliffe created a video wall in 3D space in Complex, Real-World Effects with BCC Wild Cards.

Creating an LED sign in After Effects

Update: 

LED and Casino light text effects in After Effects @ PVC is a collection of a few resources that share treatments on LED or light walls, casino lights, or Jumbotron-type looks.

AE's CycoreFX inside Premiere Pro CS5

An updated test using Creative Cloud 2014, Using CycoreFX plug-ins in Premiere Pro and After Effects, can be found on Pro Video Coalition.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Pierre Louis Beranek tested the 8-bit CycoreFX plug-ins built into After Effects in Premiere Pro CS5 to find out which ones work. He moved the Cycore folder to Adobe > Common ... > MediaCore (both AE and Premiere check the Common folder).

The results of his tests, which were scraped up from the ether, are subject to further testing on a user's part -- the results are provisional and unsupported by Adobe. Cycore's only supported host app for any product is After Effects, but the list may help you decide which filters would work in Premiere apart from Dynamic Link [see comments]. Testing here found that some effects work but not in every case. For example, CC Clylinder works fine in Premiere, even the Z space parameter, but it doesn't work when exported from AE & imported into Premiere in "desktop mode."

Pierre Louis adds his own usage notes at the bottom:

1. Ball Action N
2. Bend It Y (useful?) (ES)
3. Bender Y (useful?) (ES)
4. Blobbylize N
5. Bubbles N
6. Burn Film N
7. Color Offset N
8. Composite Y (useful?)
9. Cylinder Y (useful?) (ES)
10. Drizzle N
11. Flo Motion N
12. Force Motion Blur N
13. Glass N
14. Glass Wipe N
15. Glue Gun N
16. Grid Wipe Y (ES)
17. Griddler N
18. Hair N
19. Image Wipe Y (ES)
20. Jaws Y
21. Kaleida N
22. Lens N
23. Light Burst 2.5 N
24. Light Rays N
25. Light Sweep Y (very useful!) (ES)
26. Light Wipe Y
27. Mr. Mercury N
28. Page Turn Y (ES)
29. Particle Systems II Y (fully functional?) (ES)
30. Particle World N (crashes PP)
31. Pixel Polly Y (not fully functional)
32. Power Pin N
33. PS Classic (obsolete) Y (fully functional?)
34. PS LE Classic (obsolete) Y (fully functional?)
35. Radial Blur N
36. Radial Fast Blur Y (ES)
37. Radial ScaleWipe Y (ES)
38. Rain Y (ES)
39. RepeTile Y (ES)
40. Ripple Pulse N
41. Scale Wipe N
42. Scatterize Y (ES)
43. Simple Wire Removal Y (useful?)
44. Slant Y (ES)
45. Smear N
46. Snow Y (ES)
47. Sphere N
48. Split Y (useful?)
49. Spotlight Y (ES)
50. Star Burst N
51. Threshold RGB Y
52. Threshold Y
53. Tiler N
54. Toner Y (better version of PP’s Tint effect) (ES)
55. Twister Y (ES)
56. Vector Blur N
57. Wide Time Y

Notes: some of these effects work great in Premiere, especially ’Light Sweep’. TimeBlend, TimeBlendFX and Split2 don’t appear at all in Premiere and therefore don’t work. All of these effects were tested on a single 720P Sony XDCAM clip, therefore it’s possible that some effects that are marked as ’N’ (not working) could perhaps work on other media. ’Y’ doesn’t mean that all of the effect’s properties work properly, since I didn’t test each individual parameter for each effect.


Update: these filters were tested further and discussed in a New Premiere training from Eran Stern, released in Feb 2011 (added as ES above).

3D Ball Dispersion with CC Ball Action

Andrew Kramer has a new After Effects tutorial on Video Copilot, 3D Ball Dispersion:

"In this tutorial we will learn a technique to offset the animation of the CC Ball Action effect to create a cool transition. This effect uses only built-in plug-in and offers creative flexibility for a variety of looks. The project file also includes a script for offsetting the layers by 1 frame to make the process easier. The tutorial is about 25 minutes but the time will fly by!"

The built-in CC Ball Action filter "transforms the source layer into an array of balls. You can rotate and twist the array around a specified axis and scatter the array in all directions." Ball Action is a very old filter that hasn't been upgraded beyond support for the AE comp camera, but using the Brighten Twist control makes things interesting beyond the basics described by the intro by Brian Maffitt from an old Total Training video at Toolfarm.

Other tutorials can be found around the net, including Jumbotrons in After Effects, Harry Frank's Rippling Circles, Sound Reacting 3D Waveform without 3rd Party Plugins from Satya Meka, and Give Your Type Some Ball Action from Adam at AETuts.

Jumbotron in After Effects

Motionworks has a new tutorial, After Effects: Jumbotron Column:

"In this extended tutorial learn how to identify the field order of footage and interpret it collectly; create a realistic Jumbotron-style look using CC Ball Action, Glow, Levels and Curves; turn the jumbotron into a 3D column mounted on grungy wire mesh using Zaxwerks 3D Layer Warps; and fine tune the look by adding animated arrows plus a touch of Trapcode Shine and Magic Bullet Looks."

There were also a few other tutorials on creating a jumbotron look by Maltaannon and below by Aharon Rabinowitz.

Sound Reacting 3D Waveform without 3rd Party Plugins

Following up on his unique method for Ethereal Morphing Letters (Radio Waves of Autotraced text masks), Satya Meka has a new tutorial at AEtuts. In Create a Sound Reacting 3D Waveform Animation without 3rd Party Plugins, he uses audio data to control wave frequency of a Wave World height map and adds Ball Action with a Brighten Twist. Brute force alternatives for isolating audio frequencies may or may not be more time consuming, but you also get background on how Expression Controls can be implemented and how he created the preset.

See Satya's blog Gutsblow for additional thoughts on his tutorials (and Presets). Here's samples of sound reacting ball waves and ethereal morphing:




more ethereal morphing from gutsbl'w on Vimeo.

Maltaannon's House of Form

Red Giant is hosting a video tutorial from Motionworks training DVD 'Making it Look Great 5.' In "Form Face" Maltaannon creates a push pin toy effect as seen in the Radiohead “House of Cards” video using Trapcode’s Form plug-in -- which is being promoted with a 30% off sale.

While Trapcode Form is cool and deep, a poor man might approximate this effect by finessing built-in AE filters, easier said than done with Ball Action (with Brighten Twist) and some tinting & maybe displacement. On another tangent Toolfarm has a nice older tutorial by Harry Frank called "Rippling Circles" that uses Ball Action and other Cycore plug-ins.


Update 1: Form Face: Judgement Day… er… Part 2 is available.

Update 2: from India's Festival of Colors:

Update 3: the Maltaannon tutorials made it onto Adobe.TV, where you can see them in HD. Here's Episode 12: Form Face - Part 2.

Update: the blue must be doing a number on the senses, since this stuff doesn't seem that different from Ball Action plug-in stuff as in 3D Ball Dispersion with CC Ball Action, or Audio Analysis in After Effects by Satya Meka, done with built-in tools,