AE Favorites
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Saving the favorite
What is nice about After Effects is that you can save multiple effects as a favorite. This prevents you from having to recreate this effect each and every time you need to apply it in a project. [an error occurred while processing this directive]To save this as a favorite, highlight all of the effects in the Effect Control Panel, then, Right+Click on any of the effects and select Save Favorite from the pop up menu.
Name the favorite and save it in the Favorites folder. The next time you need to use this effect, type the name in the Effect Search Window and you’re set.
Drawbacks
This Unmult effect is not perfect, it does have a drawback. Because of the way the Set Channel effect is interpreting the Alpha channel, simply applying this method to a layer will not be perfect.
In the following image you can see this in action. On the left is the After Effects built in Unmult effect, on the right is the Knoll Unmult effect.
As can be seen the image on the left is missing a great deal of color information – namely the red ring around the flare, etc.
This problem can be remedied by changing the channel being used as the Alpha channel in the Set Channel effect. If you change the Alpha Channel to Red, for example, the problem of loss of color is solved.
Companies and Products mentioned in this article. |
| Adobe (www.adobe.com) After Effects 6.0 Total Training(www.totaltraining.com) Total Training Videos Red Giant Software (www.redgiantsoftware.com) Knoll Unmult (free download in the Downloads section. Media-Motion TV (www.media-motion.tv) After Effects Mailing List |
So the bottom line here is this, while our newly created AE Unmult effect will work, you may have to tweak it slightly. The benefit is, or course, that you are not relying on an external effect to achieve the desired results. What’s more this effect favorite can easily be transferred and placed on any other AE system you might be using.
To download the complete Halo effect in .sit format, click here.
To download the AE Unmult effect in .sit format, click here.
Unstuff the files and place the items in your After Effects>Favorites folder.
When not working deep in the labs of the DMN Central Division testing the latest and greatest software/hardware products Stephen Schleicher can be found at the local university teaching a few courses on video and web production. He can be reached at schleicher@mindspring.com. You can also visit him on the web at www.mindspring.com/~schleicher
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