After Effects: Practice for old film effects

This post is written using After Effects 2021.

I wanted to show an animation like old tape films, and made the next video. In this video, I noted how I did it.

In fact, I noticed there are some plugins like motionarray, but I hadn't known before I made it. So, we might be able to do the same thing by easier way with them.

Besides, there is an article for describe how to repeat objects in AE. I use Repeater learned from this article, and didn't try other ways but might be worth trying.

Old film effects

First of all, I made a pre-composition to animate several scenes, without old film tapes.

Then using the pre-composition, I edited another composotion to show an old film tape.

Old film tape

Like next video, I made the old film tape effect.

There are multiple ellipses on the above and below of each scene, and in order to show the same ellipses multiple times, Repeater for a Shape layer can be used. These are steps to make those ellipses.

  1. Add a Shape layer and render an ellipse in it
  2. Click Add on the side of Shape Layer > Contents, and select Repeater
  3. Change Repeater > Copies to add or remove the number of ellipses
  4. Change Repeater > Transform: Repeater > Position to expand intervals between each ellipse
  5. Then do the same thing to show other side

Repeat a film screen

The above step only repeats eillipses, and in order to repeat pre-compositions, Motion Tiles can be used. I tried and these are what I did

  1. Add Stylize > Motion Tile to the pre-composition I made on the above steps
  2. Change Effects > Motion Tile > Output Width to repeat screen horizontally. I chose (odd number) * 100, like 700 or 900. It looks how Output Width works if it is:
    • 100: show 1 screen
    • 200: show 1 screen and 0.5 on the left and 0.5 on the right
    • 300: show 3 screens
  3. Change Transform > Position of the pre-composition to move the repeated pre-composition.

Then we can make an animation like the video on the top of this page.

There is a limitation of Motion Tiles, though, that it cannot exceed 30,000 pixels of either a width or height. When I set more than that, like setting Output Width to 5000, then I got an error After Effects error: Motion Tiles cannot allocate a buffer larger than 30000 pixels in either dimension (516). In this case, we have to reduce either Output Width or Output Height.

Further improvements

I haven't changed an appearance of a old film screen, but I found there are some articles or videos to explain about it. It looked not so simple so I skipped it, but it can make an animation better.