Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
Perhaps the most interesting of the new effects introduced in CS4 is the
Cartoon effect. What this does is take your live-action footage and make it
look like it was filled by hand with color. Now, there have been other cartoon- style
effects from others in the past. What makes this one different is, well, one,
it's free with After Effects CS4 and it's accelerated by the GPU, the video card
inside your computer. So it's rather snappy. Let's try it out.
I'll select my footage and apply Effect > Stylize > Cartoon. The first
parameter I play around with is Fill, Shading Steps. I might reduce it to get a
good color combination or color balance in the image. For me the sweet spot's
between 2 and 3, these are where I get these really bright colors that I personally like.
The second parameter I like to adjust are the Edge, Threshold and Width. That
reduces the prominence of these black lines around the face and other edges in
the image. By reducing the Threshold, you can see we've reduced number of lines
in the image, and we can also play around with how thin or thick those lines are. So
now we have an image that's a bit more pleasing
on the eye. The third set of parameters I go after are
the Detail Radius and the Detail Threshold. That decides how realistic or how
flat-shaded this looks. If I go to some extremes, you can see I get
a very flat-shaded look, very, very smoothed out, almost surreal looking.
Somewhere in between is where I can decide how much detail I have got, particularly in
the face and in the line, it gives me more of a look that I'm after.
And again, this is very iterative, you can go back up to Shading Steps and
control just what sort of color and breakdown you have in here, maybe a
different look right in that area and then Shading Smoothness, whether or not you want
this very highly-detailed look or something as just little bit of detail,
a little bit smoother to look like that. Now I mentioned edges earlier and this is
an area in which you can refine further by twirling down the advanced section
of this plug-in. Here you can go ahead and play around with the Edge Black
Level, the Edge Contrast and really tweak this out a bit more to give more the
look that you are after. Let's move onto this second example and I
will show you some corrective things you may need to do with Cartoon. Here's another
live video. I will select the footage and apply Effect > Cartoon. Remember
the most recently applied effect is always at the top of the Effect menu. And
you see, again we have the black lines and a lot of darkness in the background
and I will scrub through here to see how this looks.
Now I can make my same adjustments in terms of Shading Steps, Edge Threshold,
overall the image is very, very dark looking. Well, don't be afraid to
pre-process the image before you apply cartoon. In this case I'll apply Effect > Color Correction
> Levels. Place Levels before Cartoon and play around with the Gamma and
the White point to go ahead and change what sort of colors are being shoved
into Cartoon in the first place. By pulling down the Input White to right where
the activity starts in the image I already have a more balanced kind of result.
And again, I can play with Gamma just to tweak what range of colors Cartoon
is going to give me in the end. And now I have got something that's rendered
much more like a pastel than my original result without the Levels effect.
Before and after, so don't be afraid to pre-process your footage before playing around
with Cartoon. Now the one other thing I will point out is
you may notice that there is some brightness going on around the edges of this
image. That's an artifact of Cartoon's processing hitting the very edge
of your frame. If you're going to do this for web video,
you might want to take your image and scale it up very slightly, just to get those
edges cropped off by the edge of your composition and so you won't see them
on web video. I'm going to go back to my first example.
I'm going to go ahead and Reset Cartoon, and say well, what if I'm not feeling
particularly inspired today or what if I'm having trouble getting a good
look out of Cartoon? Well, don't forget in After Effects CS3, they
introduced this function called Brainstorm. What Brainstorm does is give you
several variations on your selected effect or selected parameters. And
if you want to really play around, then go ahead and increase the Randomness
and keep brainstorming until you get different looks, like this is a really interesting
posterized look. I'll hit Brainstorm again and keep getting these different
variations. If I see something I like, like these posterized
looks, I can say include in the next Brainstorm and continue from there and
get variations on that theme. This is a particularly interesting one as
well. If you see something you like, go ahead and
do Save As New Composition. It will save it off to its own brand new comp and
then you can continue to Brainstorm and look for other alternatives.
Now, the last tip I'll give you about Cartoon is it doesn't look quite right
on live action footage. It's because the frame rate is too high, it's too
realistic. Go in to your Composition Settings and play
around with lower frame rates, such as 15 or even 12 frames a second to get motion
that's more aligned with what a cartoon should look like.
So hopefully, that'll give you some ideas about how to use the Cartoon effect.