Alright that makes sense. So is radar data layered separately in After Effects. If so how do you go about doing this. I don't think after effects can import KML files? I could be wrong.
I'll admit the way I'm doing the radars for my emulation right now is a bit tedious and was discovered entirely by accident while experimenting
, but it was one of the methods that has worked well for me at the moment.
I download the most recent 30 radar frames from the NWS radar site I'm using. In the case of the 4000, it's
about half of that.
http://radar.weather.gov/ridge/RadarImg/N0R/FFC/Then I import them into AE
I have a pre-comp that is named
radar map, that pre-comp has my radar map, interstate lines, interstate markers, etc. I select all my radar frames and place them inside a pre-comp called
radar framesI take the radar frames per-comp and nest it inside the radar map pre-comp. After that, I take all 30 radar frames and make them 1 frame in length. So basically the first radar frame goes from 0:00f-1f, the second goes from 1f-2f, the third 2f-3f and so on...
Then I add a
Color Key effect to the radar frames pre-comp so I can remove the white BG from the radar frames. (You do this by clicking the color picker icon next to Key Color and you click on the white space on the radar frames pre-comp) You could leave the settings as the default if you want, but I max out the color tolerance to 255 to get rid of some of the ground clutter that occasionally shows up on the radars.
Now this next part I figured out by luck and again experimenting. I took another effect called
Change to Color to my radar frames pre-comp just like I did with the color key. As I'm sure you know, the radars the NWS uses indicates some of the lighter precip as blue, this s where this effect comes in handy. For the From option, I take the color picker and sample the lightest blue color, then for the To option I take the color picker and sample the first green displayed on the radar legend and the light blue automatically changes to that green. I keep repeating this process over and over by duplicating that effect (ctrl+D or command+D for Macs) until the radar matches the color code of the radar legend I'm using for that particular STAR.
Again, the way I do it is tedious, but until I learn a better way of doing it this works for me at the moment. Something I've learned from my instructor/adviser when I took my Intermediate After Effects course at the beginning of the year was that there is no 1 way to perform any type of task in AE. There are dozens of ways to do the same principled idea and get the same end result. You just have to play around and experiment and see what works best for you.
Now, with that extremely long post done and over with, if only I could figure out the right way to do that dang light sweep/flashy effect on the WeatherSTARXL v2 that would be one less monkey riding on my back.
Show Posts
