lol, the title threw me off a bit. but nice info and vid man!

I love to experiment with this type of stuff.
Thanks bro

Really superb…. you ROCKS…. but we need somewhhat advacned tutorials, please

Very nice job Andrew!

Thanks for this Andrew! Will be using this very often!

It actually never crossed my mind that you could capture the rack focus….. Makes me wonder what else someone could bring into after effects from real camera elements.

Ah, very nice, very organic, natural feel! Couldn’t think how you were going to apply tracked motion to a blur, very nicely done.

I was wondering the other day if there was a way to use the lens objects from OF as a lens blur bokeh object, instead of just a polygon.

really nice, your so helpful

nice
that was cool
thanks andrew!
check this out:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7lEAnQQSzc
me and my friends made it

Hey man They should start payin for the tutorials cuz i know its alot of time and hardwork that puts in 2 these stuff and alot of ppl just get wants and demands of wot ur tutorials should b some of ‘em just don’t appreciate even ifs its cheap and couple cents let dem pay u got a family u gatta maintain man i’m sure all of us can afford man ANDREW UR STUFF R GR8 THANKS BRO 4 EVERYTHIN U’VE HELP ALOT OF US IN WAYS U CAN’T EVEN IMAGINE U JUST DON’T KNOW U ROCK!!!! DUDE

True Super Geek

I like focusing on nice racks.

All I saw was “Nice Rack” and I clicked! How disappointed I was…

Hey Andrew,

While you are being very experimental how about checking this out and see what you think.
http://maltaannon.com/articles/after-effects/ce-pixelsampler/

A fellow mad AE scientist.

i told you Andrew , i love you , hahaha you’re my brother, keep going, i have learnt alot from your tutorials. hugs from Cambodia.

ha ha I’m doing some of this stuff right now. Normally the way these things work is, I try hard to figure it out, finish a project, and 2 weeks later AK comes out with something. Can’t wait to read it when I get out of the office.

How come the tutorial isn’t in the tutorials part?

So Pretty Smart!!!!!!!!!!!! grettings from VENEZUELA

The title got me interested in something else, but very interesting experiment;however, I would like to see Elephants on acid, or possibly After Effects on acid.

Hey andwer ive watched ur tutorials for some time know and i noticed that when ur using after effects u never experience any lag so can u tell me how u do that because i use after effects and every few minutes it either freezes and/or crashes for me

COOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL….

Stay Off Drugs!! .. Andrew thats key my friend…KEY!(frame)

Its good to know your’re a simpsons fan. an the rack focus is cool too.

I see the potential for a new plug in!

Organic hand-held cam instead of wiggle. Organic rack focus. Organic ISO. Organic Exposure. Organic zoom. Organic camera roll. Organic shutter speed. Organic WB.

lol at first i only saw nice rack and instantly clicked the link

Tracking rack focus is a cool idea. I would suggest an alternative method that may be even faster and simpler: instead of converting the grayscale “focus value” to a position using a tracker, use the layer method sampleImage() to directly read the color value of some appropriate area. You can use a point control to position the sampling center. And you may be even able to track focus on production footage by converting it to grayscale and positioning the point control near some reference contrast point.

You can check out http://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/sample-image.html and http://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/obscuration.html for clear and detailed explanations, and even http://www.videocopilot.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=37518#p156098 on your own forum for some ideas.

It may even be cool to implement it as a “Focus Sampler” preset. Just drop it on some footage, position the point control near a contrasted area, adjust some threshold and you’re done! Target a camera depth of fiend or some blur filter.

Thanks and keep up the great work Andrew!

Or just watch maltaannon’s tutorial posted above by 10 PolarBears which does exactly what I described

Nice and subtile..would be definitely useful…nice jokes parts as always..thanks Andrew!

I might have done it like this:

tint – black and white
levels – crush blacks and whites
threshold – turn anything non-white into black
Invert – that
Expression: sampleImage()

Buku cleaver!!!
Thinking like and artist and technoid at the same time.

Speaking of technoid, here’s a real perpetual motion machine. At least in the context of the earth. As long as the earth turns, it will rotate. If you take it to OZ, it will rotate the ‘wrong’ way.

http://www.earthtechproducts.com/p2592.html

…and rack focus is how I met my wife.

Lol the title made me do a double take when it popped up in the RSS feed.

Once i saw the test video before the tutorial i kinda already knew what you andrew was going to do. It’s pretty smart and has made me think of a few ideas of my own

Thanks for the tutorial. You sir are a genious! Chicago loves you, you should come visit us!

Very helpful I would say…Maybe not the most interesting like you said Andrew.

Gracias por toda la informacion Here una buena persona

ingenius!

Such a brilliant idea! Never even crossed my mind that this was possible! Thanks for the awesome tip!

Just finished doing something similar: strapped a vibrator to my camera shot a test grid and used that to control the blur on some landscape footage shot from the top of a hill, to make it look like it was shot from a helicopter without a stabilizer.
Wish I had seen this first, it would have saved me hours of mussing around to get the expressions running right!

Hey Andrew I like your ideas I actually just made a video with fake camera movement but I used your aftershake plugin and just set the slide to 1 check it out http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWWn-zW0Eu8

Very nice experiment! Thanks Andrew!

What would be cool is a way to save the data in some form so you simply have to apply as a preset or plugin, called Organicam. Some of the presets could be called, Frantic, Drunk, Shaken not Stirred…etc.

Haha I got kinda excited two words in, but hey, still cool!

Nice. Great little thing to know how to do…may seem pointless but I bet this technique will be handing for SOMETHING.

Man that’s genius! I seriously want to know how this experiment started!

Wow, that’s actually pretty interesting that you can convert a rack focus to numerical data in AE. I wonder if that’s possible for the iris somehow as well?

I know professionally you’re not supposed to change the iris whilst filming, but it’d be a cool organic intro to a title graphic if mixed with this rack focus technique.

Cool stuff AK.

You are a genius Andrew!

Hi Andrew,

This is absolutely brilliant. I commend you for your ability to think outside the box and devise a way to extract numerical data from an image.

I was bummed when you mentioned using real camera shake data in your earlier tutorial. I had devised the same method a few years ago as a solution to an effects shot I was working on and was so very proud of myself. You’ve stolen my mind!

Anyway, I, like everyone here, am so grateful for your tutorials and fantastic products. You’re an invaluable resource to any AE artist. Thank you for what you do.

Cheers!

hey Andrew that was smarter than the wiggle part in the previous tutorial for real, but can we do that for a zoom in zoom out with a wiggle? ive been always wanted that man thnx

I mean real zoom in zoom out and real wiggle

Yo Andrew! This guy on youtube, you’ve probably seen him but he has taken a lot of these techniques and used them in his vids! Check them out.

http://www.youtube.com/user/thefakinghoaxer?blend=1&ob=4

Hey Andrew, thanks for this tut, I really like this technique of extracting data from actual footage. If you’re looking for a realistic looking effect, what better source than the actual footage right? You mentioned at the end you could do this with a flickering light, which I might try out myself, but I’ve used this expression for a few years for flickering effects and it works really well. Just copy and paste this into almost any property, opacity works well, and you get a pretty awesome effect. If you use this on position properties you can get a very weird effect too. Might give you a seizure, but what won’t these days?

// HIGHER values for probability make a random opacity LESS likely.
// A value of 1 will always create a random opacity, a value of 2 will
// create a random opacity 50% of the time, value of 4 will be 25%, etc.
probability = 6;
// “opacity_normal” is the value set for opacity when the a random
// opacity is NOT chosen.
opacity_normal = 100;
x = random(probability);
if (x <= 1) {opacity = random(100);} else {opacity = opacity_normal;}

“ill press edit… duplicate!”

creating natural Blur from Tracking data??… it’s insane. It’s math. It’s beautiful. Well done Sir, Well done

This was a very interesting experiment, thank you!
I wonder why you didn’t make it a tutorial (or a Short Cuts episode), so it will show up on the tutorial page and people can find it later, without searching the blog.

Stay off drugs?? What fun would that be? You said to enjoy the rest of my week..

Cool men! keep on coming

Blows my mind…

it’s important to stay or even better PLAY with focus!
http://vimeo.com/11631059

But i have to say this technique seems to be very complicated, maybe for really specific project it will be usefull.

When You told about light flickering, first I thought about was Optical flares. I don’t have Optical flares so i can’t make an experiment, sadly

lol, really cool experiment

I’m sensing next VC sets of PRESETS!!! ORGANIC CAMERA and ORGANIC FOCUS (or whatever) Could you include in the ORGANIC CAMERA the “SAMS LOYA HAND HELD CAMERA SHAKE” or the “ANDREW KRAMER’S FATIGUED AFTER CARRING THE HOLE DSLR GEAR FROM REDROCK MICRO ATACHED TO HIS CANON EOS 7D CAMERA WHILE SHOUTING TO SAM 4 HOURS STRAIGHT ‘CAUSE HE CAN’T GET HIS SCENE RIGHT ALL BECAUSE OF THE BUMP CAUSED BY THE DIRECTOR MALLET ON HIS HEAD HAND HELD SHAKING!” Yeah! That would be awesome!!! Can’t wait!

“” – Extract defocus? This is madness!
– THIS IS VIDEO COPILOT!!!111 “”

Cool idea! thx for tut

Ukraine

Nice… Yet again you open the door to new possibilities for us! Keep it up!

Yeah! that is one more step into realistic CG, thank you, this video gives a birth to different and innovative ideas.

I missed the “I am Andrew Kramer and we will see you next time.” part at the end..

The potential in this for management of the built-in camera is enormous!
Thanks for helping us to better understand the science!

Wow I’m inspired! Gonna see what other in-camera things I can take to my digital canvas.

… lol how do you come up with this stuff?

I think maybe you should be piloting rocket ships or something. VERY clever.. I can see the possibilities of this already. Very clever indeed.

Pure genius – well done Andrew.

The title made me think something completely different…

I had the same idea awhile back, but didn’t get anywhere because I was still fairly basic in AE and didnt know very much about it. Couldn’t you write a plugin with this method (on simple shots, of course) to remove DOF?

Anyways, thanks for making this concept a reality. Now I want to know how you figured this out, since you said it was embarrassing.

I wonder if these would work with a circle instead of a square? I think it’s a lot easier to write a good story about a circle, than of a square…

Andrew, really thanks! You are an amazing man who inspired me to work with movies especially with fx. Very thanks!

Dude, that’s seriously clever. At first I was like “I have no idea how to do that”, and the method you were using completely blew my mind.
You should be an engineer or something, that was pure genius.

Keep it up, cheers!

Nice experiment, realy nice idea!
It can use almost anything for organic way of look in
animation of camera, light…
realy nice!

Very cool idea! Thanks for sharing!

Now do we to start calling you “Professor Andrew Kramer”
or Just The Mad Professor?

Very Cool Experiment

Very niiiice! and nice title too!

DUDE!!! You are a freaking GENIUS!!! I would never have thought of that on my own. How in the world did you do that?

I would like to see a real life flicker of a light bulb or element to a flare. Maybe sun flicker applied to a imitation flare from Optical Flares. Of course if the sun flickered we would all be dead, but I am sure you know what I mean.

Ok, I have stopped being supprised by your magic and creativity. You’re a tru wizzard Kramer!

This little experiment is going to come in handy.

Very nice experiment, hopefully i can find something to use it on.

Something that you can do in 3dsmax to get more of a ‘hand animated’ or motion capture feel and would be nice to somehow incorporate into ae is the ability to keyframe & record live keyboard, mouse and/or joystick controls and then use that live recording in your animation.

There are tutorials out there on animating characters in 3dsmax with joysticks, more like puppeteering. Anyway I think this might help make your process go faster.

I think it would be fun to use a wii remote’s acceleromater data to control a 3d camera in ae and then be able to record your motion live.

@Andrew Kramer – You mentioned a flickering light as a source for extracting data. A similar technique was used in Lord of the Rings. They used fire and flames data and blended on scenes to simulate a windy chaotic world, when frodo put on the ring.

Cool!
Please do more Experiments

Sounds like a new video copilot dvd – “real camera movement keyframes”

Excellent!!.this kind of stuff deserves a new preset or plug-in ” VC real-camera data” Ill will pay for that for sure.

andrew you are mad! how did you get there!? it’s madness!

always klever, always Kramer.

Outstanding information as usual. Thx from Oregon

Genius! This seems like you might have been an elephant in the 60′s to come up with that, but useful as heck actually!

Thanks!

Nice experiment Andrew!

I was browsing through videos of YouTube and I found this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZkDjI_aaZg
(a greek song’s videoclip)

It seems that the used one of these techniques to give the video an organic look.
How did they create this artistic-organic look?
Maybe they used another technique of getting info out of real world footage and compositing them into a moving photo or video…

I don’t believe in God. I believe in Andrew Kramer.

That is absolutely incredible. So many possibilities.

Nice thinking man, looking at these tutorials I imagine that you spend 24 hours a day, working on AfterEffects. D

Hi there! I uploaded that Simpsons video to youtube ;]
Since you posted it here many people watch it and comment it. That was nice suprise, because suddenly thousands of people started to watch this video and many posted your name on it
Maybe Im gonna start learning Adobe After Effects this summer…
PS: Simpsons rock!
Greetings from Poland.

Pretty cool, technique. I will test this idea with the flickering light, sound amewsome!

Lol i just love your videos. great job

Deja Vu = Glitch in the matrix = the agents are close……………RUUUUUUUUUNNNNNNNN!!!!!

Very cool done Andrew!

check this out, it’s a school project what I made with some friends.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCh0GVqF9d4

just got dissapointed

That was actually a very clever useless experiment. The end product looks beautiful. This seems more ground breaking the more I think about it. As well as the elephants

Solution très ingénieuse et intelligente! Comme d’habitude avec Andrew !

Great stuff. It’d be interesting to see how this approach compares with using a drawing tablet with Motion Sketch, to cull the data from natural movement.

Andrew, God Bless You! We love you Man!

I was really hoping for some sort of Boob reference!

Andrew you are awesome!

That wall… was certainly not white my friend. haha.

I really wish that you or anyone replies to this.

I have to design my school building collapsing for my institutes video-competition but my brain is just not processing in that direction. Please give me some suggestions. I don’t want it to be hardcore 3D – like modeling the building and then shattering it… it would be to painful to do that way.

please, help me!!!

Can you tell us how to remove a shadow between the rack ?
I encounter these shadows between an C and D rack.

This was very interesting.
Along with the shaky motion this really creates a realistic feel.

Well done.

how to make Camera Projection with cc particle world
how to pause cc particle world effect 5,6 second

RAHUL, I think this tutorial can help you, Andrew makes realistics building with some planes in After effects and not too hard to do : http://www.videocopilot.net/tutorials/3d_city/

good luck

@Rahul…

Hey, not sure if this is the sort of thing you’re after, but I figured I’d give it a go anyway…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C50HHbNhmug...

Check it out. If that’s what you’re after then head over to my site where you can find my e-mail address.

Hi .. as always nice..

But I am kinda pissed no one is replying to my support request emails…

Max

Nic work as always just enough time to watch before school.
Thankyou, Andrew.

It´s completely amazing how you´ve guess the way to “track” the focus. I just want to say you are a genius!!

Man…Even your useless experiments are surprisingly creative.

Bravo!! All respects to A.K.

Nice work Andrew,

On a kind of related topic,
Seeing that the new iphone has a gyroscope, I wondered whether the tracking data from that would be any use to solve a camera match move…

There is an app for recording data from the accelerometer, but obviously that’s not particularly accurate…

Big Big Andrew… Coooool Experiment!
L’ho testato sul Focus Distance con una bella expression!
very very good!
Grazie dei tuoi preziosi consigli!

Hey Andrew, nice rack…focus.

Hey Andrew. Insane ideas. Love the way you open doors to thinking in organic motion. Seems so obvious once you ‘fix the blur’ on the co-relations between perception and reality. Quite genius.

I don’t know why this experiment is so cool to me. I’ve had a glass of wine at the end of my workday, so that might explain it. That said, I’m really impressed by how you came up with a method to get mathematical values from the rack focus. Awesome, as usual.

Very Professio-null Keep going !

Nice rack focus experiment … ha ha, good choice of title Andy !