Blog by Eran Stern » NEW DOWNLOAD

NEW DOWNLOAD – Dust Specs
by Eran Stern

July 26th, 2010
Category: After Effects,training

Reality is never bright and clear as we would like it to be. Pavements have cracks, roads are bumpy and the air is filled with tiny particles which, of course, are part of the complex oxygen that we breathe. In addition, there are all sorts of dust and specs noises in the air which also appear on film and video footage, due to the nature of the film material and the light conditions. However, When creating computer graphics, the result is always clean and sterile without all the real sense of nature, especially when you combine video, text and 3D rendered animations.
Therefore, most composting apps, such as After Effects, offer some tools to help you add (or remove) Grain from selected videos. This of course helps to get a more realistic results but sometimes it’s still not enough. Regardless of that, the appearance of the “Dust Specs look” has recently become very popular and many also use it to give some character and a special look to their videos.

So here is a free After Effects project, that uses the built in CC Particle World combined with a few additional effects, to create a layer of dust and small particles. You can use the results as is by rendering the project and adding the video using a blending mode of Add or Screen. A more advanced option is to open the project, change it to your preferable resolution (the project currently is in HD 1920 × 1280) and then add your graphical elements and take advantage of the fact that the particles are “living” in three-dimensional space – this should give more depth to the result.

Here are two examples of the use of various video footage (courtesy of Unlimited Stock Media) and text integration in 3D space.
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