Motion Morphing

Loki

Loki

Veteran
I have no been able to find much info on this in my searchs, which leads me to believe it isn't easy to do in AE..

Does anyone here know if it is possible to do an image morph between two video clips? Image morphing is simple enough, but motion morphing is a whole other beast.

I ask because I have a project I am currently cutting together that would benefit in a large way from this, it would just give the transition that extra push to really sell the idea of these two shots being one.

any resources/ideas on how to do this? or any pieces of software people know of?
 
Re:Flex does do motion morphing. It is a great little plugin, that allows you to do a lot of fun distortions in addition to all of the morphing stuff. It costs about $500 or so, last time I checked. It used to come FREE with Combustion. I can't compare it to other morphing software since it is the only one I've used, but it seemed very adequate with nice results if you put the time in to refine your morphs. Oh yeah, I guess this is a good time to tell you that morphing isn't as easy as it seems. To get a nice clean morph, a lot of creativity comes into play. Deciding where to morph each object in your scene can become tricky. A big part of the whole process is planning it out BEFORE you film the footage. But, of course this isn't necessary... It just seems like it helps get better results easier. Play around with there free demo for awhile, and you'll see what I mean.

Mike McLin
 
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surf said:
and can I solve morphing without Flex simply in AE?
Click to expand...

Um, yes and no. Technically speaking I guess you could, but it might be a nightmare (and almost impossible, if you want a very detailed morph). You can use a "Mesh Warp". This puts a grid on your footage. You can control how dense the grid is. Basically you animate the points on the grid, and it pushes, pulls and distorts the footage underneath it. You could do this on two different clips and animate the transparency to create a morph effect. The effect is included with AfterEffects (it might be production bundle only).
 
surf said:
and can I solve morphing without Flex simply in AE?
Click to expand...


Yeah, you can use the "Reshape" function, which works with masks. That is a tedious process too, but it is doable in AE.


For morphing, the best program out there is still Elastic Reality, although finding a copy of it could be difficult. It is not a plugin, and the latest version (3.1 I believe) was done in 1999-2000. It produces great results though, with both still and motion clips, although the doing motion clips can be a bit tedious as you are preforming individual frame morphs for the entire lenth of the morph time. But, since you can save selections (orcurves, splines, masks, or whatever they are called in it) and since each frame is only slightly different from the one before it, it's not too difficult to pull off.

I have not seen the Mesh Warp used for Morphing, but that sounds like it would work well also.

I would just hire a shape-shifting midget, but I'm silly llike dat.
 
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