In Fairytale Lighting in After Effects (below), the prolific Harry Frank shows you how to "how to take a regular, run-of-the-mill shot and turn it into something beautiful and moody, straight out of a fairytale. You'll learn how to set up a down-and-dirty 3D track, add volumetric light and dust to a live action shot, and then finish it with some simulated camera lens blur."
Harry generously notes some alternatives to Red Giant and Trapcode effects he used. But wait, there's more:
Tilt-shift blurring alternatives to MB Looks can be found at AE Portal.
Replacing Shine will require a bit of extra work with the built-in Light Burst effect; Harry's previous tip and an alternative can be found in 3D volumetric lights with Shine or Lightburst.
Dust particles can be generated with AE's built-in tools; Eran Stern offers a free project that creates floating dust using CC Particle World. Additional perspective can be found in 'Light Transmission' + 'Natural Light Effects' by Trish and Chris Meyer.
James Zanoni posted a Tilt Shift effect tutorialand project file, using the ramp effect, expressions, and the Lens Blur effect. The expression used in this tutorial is: thisComp.layer(“top”).effect(“Ramp”)(“End of Ramp”). This follows up his earlier Vintage 8-mm Film Effect Tutorial.
Motion Theory social media outreach mentioned their work on March Madness ad spots that feature digital head replacement (for John Wooden) and a nice touch of a tilt-shift like effect to create miniatures (below).
CrumplePop and Toolfarm and are making CrumplePop ShrinkRay, a Mac-only "tilt-shift miniaturization" effect for Final Cut, free through August 19, 2009. CrumplePop effects seem to be based on Master Templates (FCP 6+); you drag and drop a template onto your timeline, fiddle with a few controls, and the template does the rest.
Maltaannon posted a video tutorial and preset in Tilt Shift. The real genius behind his approach is creating a free Preset, teaching people to stretch their troubleshooting skills with a video walkthrough, and creating a commercial opportunity by linking the whole effort to a filter that does something similar (and more), Magic Bullet Looks.
In the latest edition of Digital Arts, Sam Hampton-Smith shows how to recreate the trendy tilt-shift lens effect in After Effects. Eventually this link will work, but for now you'll have to look at a hard copy: Fake the tilt-and-shift look using After Effects.
I'm sure a free AE tutorial will show up soon, but for now the outline re-described in the earlier post (and comments) Tilt-shift photography meme should do fine, if you have a soft touch on your gradient for the Lens Blur, Compound Blur or such filters. 2D Depth of Field, a 2006 video from VideoCoPilot, comes close but is missing something since it had other goals. According to a thread on the AE-List, further understanding can be gained by learning about view cameras, and by extension the Scheimpflug principle for changing the “plane of sharp focus.”
Update: Topher Welsh has a tutorial for AE, though it's not the first one:
Catching up with the DVR... the new Joss Whedon Fox TV series Dollhouse has opening credits that use some tilt-shift; for background see Tilt-shift photography meme (Zoic didn't seem to do the titles but did do the Dollhouse Mind Wipe effects):
Plus another time-shift item, The Simpsons get new titles (Idents.TV has some better viewing options):
The New York Times has had a few items too, including a talking slideshow by Vincent Laforet (see picture at left), who has already moved on famously to DSLR video using the Canon 5D MKII. Others posting a stream of items on the trend include Wired and Boing Boing.
There's also a number of articles on Faking tilt-shift with Photoshop (the real thing even with a Lensbaby is not cheap). The basic approach is simple and can be done easily in After Effect or Premiere:
Update 01/06/09: Brian Maffitt adds a comment on the AE-List, "Trouble with a mask approach is that, while the blur looks good at the edge and the sharp area stays sharp, the intermediate blur is a cross-dissolved composite of blurred and non-blurred which looks "unnatural", especially at large blur amounts. I prefer using the "Depth Map Layer" in Lens Blur, which uses a separate gradient layer to modulate the blur effect based on pixel value. You'll have to fiddle a bit with focal distance and iris radius, but you can get a convincing Tilt-shift with this approach.
Compound Blur can do the same thing and renders more quickly, but without the ability to repeat edge pixels, and the blur is a slightly-less natural gaussian style, rather than the more accurate lens blur. If you use a ramp to create your gradient, make sure to precompose the effect or the blur filters won't see it."
In the same thread, Trish Meyer added a tip for changing the frame rate: "you'll render faster by putting the original movie in a precomp, lowering the frame rate, and turning on the Preserve Frame Frame option in Comp Settings Advanced."
Update 2: see Michael Vitti on selective focus in Comments.
