hey, im still waiting for an answer…

Hi Orlyeyal,

Sorry for the late reply. I overlooked this comment and just saw it now. Sketch does not currently respect Alpha Channel. I will look into an update in this respect and see if it’s possible.

One thing you could try is applying the Sketch effect and then matting through the original footage’s alpha channel.

Hi Pazpaz24,

Sorry for the late reply. I’ve been away. How are you trying to open the file? It’s a simple After Effects file, so you shouldn’t be importing anything, simply opening the .aep file in After Effects… in other words double click the .aep file in the download and it will open in After Effects.

Best,

-felt.

hi

i double click and still not working, its opening in the after and then i got an error “(bad format or not readable)”

Hi Pazpaz,

That’s an error message that I don’t recognise. If an After Effects project file is corrupted in some way, it simply won’t open in After Effects. From what I understand, the project is opening in After Effects, and afterwards you’re seeing the error message. The “bad format”, or “not readable” could be referring to anything – maybe a part of the program itself, maybe a piece of footage that you are importing into the project, maybe it has to do with access privileges on your computer, or it might simply be that the hard-drive is full.

The difficulty is that without being able to see your computer system or see what you’re doing, I can only guess what’s going wrong.

For me to be able to seriously debug this problem, I’d need to know a few things. Firstly I’d like to see a screen-shot of the error message (they often have an error number included that gives a much more specific clue as to what’s happening). I’d also need to know a list of steps that you need to go through to reproduce the error. In other words, exactly what do you do in After Effecs before the error comes up…. and what happens afterwards – does After Effects hang or crash, or is it simply a case that you’re not able to import a certain media type? I’d also need to know which version of After Effects you’re using and on which operating system.

The best and quickest way to contact me is directly through my user page. https://videohive.net/user/felt_tips – there’s a box for doing this half way down the page on the right hand side.

Alternatively, you may not want to go through that hassle. Sketch has well over a thousand sales and I very rarely have technical support enquiries like this, so I doubt it’s a problem with the file. If it’s not a problem with the file, I can’t promise to be able to solve it at all.

However, if you don’t want to go through the hassle of debugging this problem and would like a refund, let me know and I’ll see if I can sort it out with support. Unfortunately, authors are not currently able to grant refunds autonomously.

-felt.

Hi Kevin,

Sketch is essentially a black and white effect, rather than a colored pencil effect.

But what you could do is use the rendered Sketch effect as a luminance matte for the original footage. To do this, you would apply the Sketch effect and render it through.

Then import this rendered footage into the project.

Next make a new composition, drop in the original footage, the “sketched” footage and create an off-white solid layer. Put the solid layer at the bottom, then the original footage, then the “sketched” footage on top. Finally, set the Matte of the middle layer, the original footage to be “luma inverted”. The dark parts of the top layer will act as a matte for the original footage, with its original colors.

You can then add additional layers with the Sketch footage and/or original layers to make a mixture of the effect.

Hope that helps.

Best,

-felt.

Yes! A luminance matte! I had my original video over the sketched vid at reduced opacity and increased saturation, but I want the color exactly on all the sketch lines, and so you got it! Thanks so much Felt!

Glad to be of help!

Hi IrishGull,

Thanks for purchasing. Unfortunately, the shaking is part of Sketch. It’s actually not so much about shaking, but about the cross-hatched shading being in a different place on each frame – exactly as if you had drawn each frame of the animation and animated it by hand. So, an easy, centralized way isn’t built into the project.

However you can hack it!...

Go to comp ! MAIN and find the layers whose names begin with Scribble Fill. Each of these will have a Scribble effect on it and each Scribble effect has a property called Random Seed, which is controlled by an expression. Turn the expression off for the Random Seed in the Scribble effect of each of these layers and the cross-hatched fill will no longer animate. The easiest way to do this is to select the three layers, and press EE on your keyboard (e twice in quick succession). This will show the expressions. Then just click the = switch (to the left of the expression) so that it has a diagonal line through it. The expression is now off.

You’ll also notice, that there’s a kind of displacement wiggle too. With the same three layers selected, press E once. This will show all effects. Turn the Displacement Map effect off. To do this, click the little fx symbol to the left of that effect. You’ll also need to select the layer Outlines. Press E again and turn off the effect x Displacement Map in the same way.

Now there’ll be very little movement in the actual lines of the drawing. The only movement will be the movement of your video. For animated footage, this might look a little weird (and not like a hand drawn animation), but if that’s the way you want it, that’s how to do it!

-felt.

Thanks a million Felt for your very very clear explanation. Also a dummy like me could made it in seconds! For the project I’m making now it’s best in this way, but I see your point in the shaking of this project and I’m sure it will came in handy in the near future. Thanks again irishgull

Hi there.

It’s not a problem. It just means that you left the placeholder graphics in the comps. If the file looks right, it is right and you can ignore the warning.

-felt.

Sorry dont know why the message appeared 3 times!

Thanks, Moshko.

In the composition ! MAIN you’ll see that the outlines and the fills are on separate layers.

The outlines are on the layer 7. Outlines and the fills are on layers 4, 5 and 6, whose names all begin with Scribble fill.

To achieve the effect that you want, you could create a moving matte layer for each of the layers 4, 5 and 6. To do this, you’d need to create and animate a simple matte layer, place it above the first scribble layer and set the Track Matte (TrkMat) of the Scribble layer to Alpha Matte. Then duplicate the moving matte layer and repeat for the other scribble layers.

For the moving matte layer, it’s best to just create a Solid layer, then animate a mask on this layer. The Track Matte of a layer can be found in the modes panel, just to the right of the Blending Mode (i.e. Normal / Overlay etc.)

Awesome thanks Felt tips

See my reply to later version of question.

See my reply to later version of question.

Hi Pete,

My inclination would be to render Sketch in its usual state and then afterwards apply a color effect to it.

Something like Change Color could do the trick. Select black as the color to change and blue the color to change to and adjust the sliders to get the effect looking like you want.

Alternatively, you could use a Hue / Saturation effect to make the output monochrome (You may want to use a Levels effect too, just to make sure that the blacks are black and the whites are white), then apply a Tint effect, which maps black and white to another color.

That should do the trick!

Hi Jess,

You can’t apply the effect directly in Premiere, but there’s no reason why you can’t import your footage into After Effects, apply the effect and then render it out, then import the output into Premiere. If you don’t have After Effects, you can download the free trial version (which is fully active for 30 days) from the Adobe site.

-f.

Hi Stortho,

Excuse the delay. I’ve been away for a few days.

If you know what you’re doing in After Effects, you can easily extend the length of all the compositions. But if you’re a novice, the easier way is to simply break your footage down into chunks, apply the effect and render them out.

Then just import them into a fresh After Effects project, lay them end to end on a timeline, drop the sound over the top and render.

Drop me a line via my Profile Page if you need more help.

-f.

The new version of Sketch deals automatically with footage up to 12 minutes long now. (I was just trying to avoid 13 – call me superstitious!)

Glad you like it!

Hi Jonathan,

The error messages just mean that you’ve left the original placeholders in the composition. If the output looks right, then it is right. The warning is nothing to worry about.

The second error message is also nothing to worry about. You need to choose your own location to output the file to. In Render Queue, you simply change the Output Location of the Output Module. To see the Render Queue, choose Window -> Render Queue or use shortcut Cmd alt 0

-f.

It’s not something that’s built into the template, but you could render sketch and then use this as a matte for the original footage. Simply bring it into a new timeline, apply a Color Correction -> Levels effect to pull the levels to full black and white. Then bring the original footage in, place it below the sketch layer and set it’s track matte property to Luma Matte Inverted. Then put a paper colored layer at the bottom of the layer stack.

That would allow the original footage’s color to come through the sketch.

-f.

There’s another solution too, Krome… PM me and I’ll send you the universal version of Sketch, if you want to use it in the French version.

Best,

Felt.

Update: The download is now universal too… it works in all language versions of Ae.

Thanks, Firsh!

-f.

Hi Scott…

I’ve opened it up in CS5 . On a Mac.

There shouldn’t be any problem on PC platform. In the unlikely event that there are any problems in CS5 PC , you can drop me a line and I can sort it out.

After Effects is fundamentally forwards compatible!

-f.

Thanks Blu… you have indeed found a little bug in the file. Anyway, I’ve sent you an updated version of the project file as well as instructions on how to fix it yourself if you’re more interested to do it that way.

For anyone else reading… I’ve also updated the file in the download.

-felt.

Thanks! You handled that incredibly fast and I appreciate your excellent work. Thanks again and here is how I used it: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/677937531/the-pretty-rough-and-tough

The video looks great, Blu. Thanks for the link.

-f.