Speeding things up, and getting light trails from carlights
by Xavier de Champs (Kovboy)
on
Dec 19, 2007 at 2:10:51 pm
I want to speed things up in this nighttime clip with cars in traffic. I want to get those streaks of light you get when you use long shutter times on a still-camera.
If I just speed things up, I get fast moving dots. I want to get that dreamy light streak look on the headlight.
Re: Speeding things up, and getting light trails from carlights by Kevin Camp on Dec 19, 2007 at 4:26:25 pm
yep, echo would probably be my first choice for something like this, mainly because you can choose an operator like add or maximum which will help intensify the lights. it also has control over intensity decay, which may be helpful.
you may also want to try cc wide time. it will work similar to echo, but it uses frames in front and in back of the sampled frame (echo only work in one direction).
enabling frame blending by itself may help for sped up footage (layer>frame blending>frame mix). ae will then composite the frames that are dropped out when you speed up footage. it will also help in conjunction with echo and cc wide time (with cc wide time you also need to set the effect to use 'native motion blur' to take advantage of frame blending).
even after all that you may still need a little directional blur or radial blur (depending on the movement of the cars) to help smooth things out. glow might add to the effect...
Re: Speeding things up, and getting light trails from carlights by Steve Roberts on Dec 19, 2007 at 4:53:40 pm
Hmm ... yes. Adding blur and glow, but only to the streaks might be good. That could be done by duping the streaked layer, blurring it, then setting its mode to "add" or "screen". This way the cars would not be blurred as well.
Now if the camera is locked off, and you have some time, you could draw some masks where you want the streaks and use the stroke effect to get sharp streaks. Maybe dupe and offset them a bit to get extra copies to save time. Just a thought ...
