Sendal Blog

This tutorial will show how the vectorizing and colorising of the characters in the “Clanu’ …” titles was done. It’s pretty simple and there’s one often overlooked powerful tool in After Effects, called Auto-Trace. AE Knowledge level required: intermediate.

Download tutorial as PDF here. | Download After Effects project file here.

We will only use standard tools and effects from After Effects (CS3, CS4). This tutorial assumes you have a footage that you have preferably keyed before (though not necessary)

I’ve attached a sample AE file and a PNG with a frame from the footage for those copy/paste fans out there. For PC users: shortcuts with cmd + … are the same but with ctrl.

1. In the image above you see our original footage and the result we want to achieve.

Crate a new Composition (cmd + n) and place the keyed footage file in it. (In the project window, you can use cmd + / to place a selected item in the current composition)

Select the Work area of your composition that you want to vectorize (Move Playhead to Beginning and press “B” then move to your end point and press “N”)

Clean up your alpha channel using “Effects -> Matte -> Matte Choker” on the footage file.

2. Auto-trace, part 1
We will create to vectorized layers from our footage file. One for the colored background and another one for the white detail areas.
Go to “Layer” in the menu and select “Auto-trace”.

Auto-trace will create a vector mask(s) on the current layer or create a new layer the same way.

We’re going to create two new layers. The first layer we’re going to create is the colored one.

In the auto-trace pop-up we will do the following:

Set Time span to Work Area (be careful, auto-trace is not that fast on complex objects so don’t try to trace one hour footage in one minute )
Set Channel to Alpha as we only want the contour.
All other settings are a matter of taste. You can choose to blur the footage before the trace so you have a more rounded and less detailed trace. The minimum area should not be too small and the lower the Threshold is the more detail we will have. I like to have rounded corners so i set the Corner Roundness to about 50%
Check the Apply to new layer Checkbox.

-> Hit OK and watch it happen.

Apply “Effects -> Generate -> Ramp” to colorize the layer.

3. Auto-trace, part 2

- Set Time span to Work Area
- Set Channel to Luminance as we now want to trace the details.
It’s a good idea to blur a little before auto-trace and use a rather low Tolerance. Check out the values i’ve used.
- Check the Apply to new layer Checkbox and hit OK.

You should now have a white layer over the colored one and it should already look good

There are many variations to this effect and this is only a simple example of what you can do.

4. Bonus
In the “Clanu…” Project I also used this effect together with a special colorizing:

To achieve this, I applied a stack of effects as follows:

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That’s all folks! Post some feedback if you enjoy it and find it useful.