After Effects - scaling up existing paintbrush strokes

[spicediver]

Any After Effects gurus who can help me out?

My Dune blueeyes effects in AE3 were orginally done on 480p footage.

Now in AE6 when I import identical replacement footage in 1080p, the paint brush stokes look tiny and will not upscale. Updating the Composition size to 1920 x 1080p has no effect on the Effects/Paint brush strokes in the timeline, which remain the old size. Paint is a vector effect, so surely there is way?

Googled the hell out of this and found no solution that worked.

 

[Wakeupkeo]

Hmmm- not rotoscoped, but vector brushes? Did you paint every frame? I have Topaz tools for upscaling, maybe those might help. I know its a ton of work but I'd also be willing to help on some FX if your past FX are not transferring well.

(Coincidentally I have Topaz running my Dune edit right now, and I am doing some blue eye rotoscoping within Premiere for Dr. Kynes during Gurney's baliset scene as we speak LOL)

 

[addiesin]

Not sure about keeping the old work. If someone can help with that, awesome.

But if you need to start over, Ebsynth would also probably be helpful. Basically you need your clip as an image sequence, then make your change on one or more frames within the sequence, then Ebsynth can take that change and apply it to the surrounding frames. Do one shot at a time, each keyframe used will have it's own image sequence generated and you can fade from one to another in your NLE if you have a shot with multiple keyframes colored.

If the only data in the frame that is different from the original frame is eye color it should work relatively painlessly/mostly error-free. That's not to say that editing it back together would be fast or fun. But in the event you need to redo it all anyway, it would cut down time that would have been spent on frame by frame painting or motion tracking or masking or whatever you would have done before.

Photoshop also has a style transfer tool in their Neutral Filters menu but I have not experimented with that at all yet because Ebsynth has been giving me what I need. So, not sure whether it's better or worse.

 

[spicediver]

Hmmm- not rotoscoped, but vector brushes? Did you paint every frame? I have Topaz tools for upscaling, maybe those might help. I know its a ton of work but I'd also be willing to help on some FX if your past FX are not transferring well.

(Coincidentally I have Topaz running my Dune edit right now, and I am doing some blue eye rotoscoping within Premiere for Dr. Kynes during Gurney's baliset scene as we speak LOL)

Yes painted every frame. The old CS3 projects are perfectly preserved and run fine in CS6, so that's my first preference: to scale up the existing effect proportionally on top of the replaced footage.

 

[spicediver]

Not sure about keeping the old work. If someone can help with that, awesome.

But if you need to start over, Ebsynth would also probably be helpful. Basically you need your clip as an image sequence, then make your change on one or more frames within the sequence, then Ebsynth can take that change and apply it to the surrounding frames. Do one shot at a time, each keyframe used will have it's own image sequence generated and you can fade from one to another in your NLE if you have a shot with multiple keyframes colored.

If the only data in the frame that is different from the original frame is eye color it should work relatively painlessly/mostly error-free. That's not to say that editing it back together would be fast or fun. But in the event you need to redo it all anyway, it would cut down time that would have been spent on frame by frame painting or motion tracking or masking or whatever you would have done before.

Photoshop also has a style transfer tool in their Neutral Filters menu but I have not experimented with that at all yet because Ebsynth has been giving me what I need. So, not sure whether it's better or worse.

Well the reason I painted the originals is because the data from frame to frame often *is* changing. The actors or camera move around. Choosing just one shape, opacity and position never lasts long. The results looks great - just hard work that I'd rather not redo!

 

[addiesin]

Well the reason I painted the originals is because the data from frame to frame often *is* changing. The actors or camera move around. Choosing just one shape, opacity and position never lasts long. The results looks great - just hard work that I'd rather not redo!

I think you misunderstand, perhaps I was unclear. I meant the difference between your key frame (in your case, a frame with eyes colored blue) and the original frame (the same frame but untouched, uncolored). The difference here is the color you add. If you don't do other stuff too like smoothing or sharpening, or trying to draw in new details or paint out things, and the only thing changed is the chroma value in some small spots, it should work impressively fast (by work I mean, it should be good at applying the style to the other frames without causing a large amount of smear and unwanted artifacts).

Let me know if this is still unclear. Here is an example in action that took me five minutes:

Reveal message

Password: fanedit.org

 

[TM2YC]

I'm not familiar with After Effects but if I understand correctly, you are opening up your old project file but it's not scaling the old blue eyes 480p FX up properly to 1080p? If you don't find a proper solution to get them to re-render at the new resoluton, a work-around could be to just render the blue eyes out against greenscreen (or another colour) at the original resolution and then drop that on top of the new footage and matte the eyes, that should scale to the new resolution okay. It depends on how sharp you want it to look but it's a slight blur in Dune84 anyway right?

 

[spicediver]

I'm not familiar with After Effects but if I understand correctly, you are opening up your old project file but it's not scaling the old blue eyes 480p FX up properly to 1080p? If you don't find a proper solution to get them to re-render at the new resoluton, a work-around could be to just render the blue eyes out against greenscreen (or another colour) at the original resolution and then drop that on top of the new footage and matte the eyes, that should scale to the new resolution okay. It depends on how sharp you want it to look but it's a slight blur in Dune84 anyway right?

That's an intrigning little workaround. Good to know. Thanks.

 

[spicediver]

I found a solution to this problem for After Effects projects. Will share it here in case members find it useful.

In summary, you change a setting in one brush stroke, copy that value, and then bulk paste it to all the other paint strokes on the timeline. You choose either the Diameter setting, or Transform>Scale setting. Diameter is the more accurate option because you know everything will stay positioned and shaped proportionally. Whereas the Transform>Scale option is based on anchor points, so results may vary.

Example fix:

1. If you painted on 480 footage, replace with the new 1080 footage by selecting the 480 layer in the composition, then alt-dragging the newly imported 1080 version file on top of it in the composition viewer. Check that the resolution in composition properties matches - if not, change that manually.

2. In the search widget of the timeline's assets list type "diameter".

3. For the first brush that appears in the search results, click the twirly circle icon - the property pick whip. Then expand the diameter properties to you can see the current expression text if that doesn't happen automatically.

4. Add a diameter property to this brush's expression: value*2.25;

5. With the brush still selected, go to top menu Edit -> Copy Expression Only.

6. In the search widget of the timeline now type "brush".

7. Click the first brush that appears, scroll down, shift-click the last one, and then paste the expression.

8. Your paint effects are now scaled losslessly to the replacement 1080p footage.

A few things to note…

If all your brush strokes are slightly off axis by the same amount, nudging the frame around may fix it.

Note the 'value*2.25;' I entered for the diameter expression is specific for this 480 to 1080 FX upscale. For other resolutions you will need to work out the correct number.

Finally, layering your existing effects on replacement higher res footage may also reveal quality shortcomings in your paint technique that you got away with in 480p but will not in 1080p!