Help and opinions on my After Effects idea

[milwaukeejoe]

Ok... so this is my first shot at after effects... what i adventually want to achieve is a plasma firey shere...like the sun in the center of his hands... can anyone point me in a direction for a tutorial to get closer to what im looking for?..

also... how do i render out of AE with the same quality as the film i imported?

thanks guys.... youre all so helpfull

[AtomicEagle]

Your approach in AE depends on a lot of things. I don't know what 3rd party plug-ins, if any, you're using, but I have one that can create a 3-D sphere with whatever source material you want to use. I'm not at home, so I can't tell you what it's called right now. I like to take pictures to use as source material, so I would probably take pictures of fire, use that as the template to make the sphere, then use turbulent distortion, some layering using whatever blending/matte combinations I think look good...etc....I could go on all day about different ways I'd try to do what you want to do, but I can't really tell you unless I actually tried it.

Also, try creative cow for AE tutorials. They have really good video tutorials that have helped me out very much.

As far as your rendering issues...what is your imported footage saved as? QT files? AVI? And what codec are you using? I'm not an expert on compression, so I'll usually just do trial and error until I find a workflow that gives me good results.

*edit*

I saw your video on vimeo and that looks pretty good. If you want feedback on how to fine tune it I bet people over at creative cow would have some ideas.

[Banacek]

Hi.

I saw your video. In first moment I thought a "burn spot" appears in the middle of his hands, and finally burn the film, like old movies.

I dont know if that was the effect you try or not.

If you just want to make a fire-ball in his hands, first of all you have to get a really good fire-clip.

Its not difficult to find (also with cromas)

Then you can try to deform it, making a ball, using differents filters and AE distorsions.

¿Wich plugins you use in the clip?

Thanks.

[the_amo]

Also, the fireball passes in front of the black frame borders. That shouldn't happen xD

Look for tutorials on Creative Cow, and VideoCopilot

[Joe.lipinski]

I know that I seen a tutorial somewhere online with the exact effect you are going for. Check around the indymogul forums, because that is where I believe I saw the link to it. They taught you how to do it in AE.