BBC News 24 Countdown 1999

Hi All,

I've been a member of the forum for at least a decade but never really decided to post anything in this section until now. I've made a few 'mocks' here and there over the last couple of years but have only recently learnt how to use AE properly. So, to test myself, I decided to recreate the BBC News 24 Countdown from 1999 in HD. I've tried to be as accurate as possible in terms of colour and subtle background details, but given the age of the original sequence and that the majority of videos online containing the sequence are of low quality, it's been difficult to replicate exactly. I haven't properly synchronised all aspects of the animation to the original, though given time I plan to do so. I hope it meets with approval!

P.S. There's subtle background animation going on which can't really be seen below, I would recommend viewing it in full resolution and fullscreen to see everything

Very very impressive - though I think the globe has to be slightly more defocused (more gaussian blur), and the text for the 'BBC NEWS 24' decoders should be Gill Sans Bold with an increased character tracking/kerning to create more distance.

Other than that a pretty faithful recreation!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZRSbSXiyJY

Looks pretty good to me. I agree with the suggestions for the tweaks to the text, but they are subtle

Thanks guys, will update the decoders and globe over the next couple of days.

There's also another issue; I'm trying to avoid that rough 'step' gradient colour changing you get when you render something in a low colour bit depth or with too much compression. The file has a colour depth of 32 bits and when I render a .psd it looks perfect, but when I render the .mov (which I've done in H.264) the roughness comes back - suggesting it's the codec. Do you guys have any recommendations for format, codec and render settings to avoid this?

Hmm, I render as a lossless MOV and then convert to other formats there. Though I suggest you may be able to adjust the H.264 output from AE to something decent, I'm just too thick to know how!

Or add a layer of very faint noise to the image, they'll naturally diffuse the gradient and smooth out the stepping.

Very impressive. Also a nice tribute given the 15th anniversary of its first airing is next week!

I've played around with the tracking and changed the font, before I endeavour on the seemingly endless rendering process, I thought I'd give you a screen shot update. I might also play around with the decoder mask a bit alongside adding some noise to the gradient e.t.c.

http://i1222.photobucket.com/albums/dd484/vumanize/CountdownV2.jpg
http://i1222.photobucket.com/albums/dd484/vumanize/Screenshot2014-10-20at205811.png

VERY nice...

Round of appluase! It's a top effort, and really good.
If you want to go for accurcy, maybe try using a bold version of Gill Sans, and for the " BBC NEWS 24 " text in the background. Give this script a try on the "Text" layer.

I would need to be applied as an expression on the Text, and have a offset slider set for the characters to offset themselves. Built it myself and tested.

I've been inspired by this thread to work on something myself. I created a Composition with the word W O R L D animating through the 5 frames with the positioning of the letters changing.
WORLD DWORL LDWOR RLDWO ORLDW

Then I created a cycle using Time Remapping to keyframe the animation to loop a few times.

I then took that Cycle comp, and used it as a sprite in a Trapcode Form grid, and randomised the loops. so they all animate at different times.

I then mask out which ones are visible.