Putting it all together

An important part of After Effects is knowing how to render the footage. For the previous examples I've used quicktime - compression H264, which is producing reasonably sized files (around 100mb).



I felt the colours were a bit dull and the walking seems boring and doesn't link into the flies very well. The particles don't look too dominant since I changed the lightness but one can see its bounding box when it rises.

For the next render I used Quicktime - JPEG 2000 with 'millions of colours', the colour is much brighter but the file is now 350MB. I think the darker tone works better on the transition, but the particles move too suddenly.

I used Quicktime - MPEG4 for my 3rd render, I feel the man looks a bit lost in the colour change and should perhaps change darkness with the background. The flies should maybe already be moving to make the transition smoother. Finally the particle effect is still too fast because I'm moving its position, using opacity may work better. I rendered these changes but there is a problem with playback where he powersups and hits the fly; it jolts forward. This may be due to the compression.

I rendered it back in to H264 and the movement is back to how it should be but the colour definitely suffers. I rendered using DVT PAL and the colour was richer but the motion stutters on the power up.