Trails

Trails are a common technique in tennis where a piece of footage, usually moving about, creates a 'trail' of itself following close behind. There are many, many different ways this can be done, each of them with unique flavor and flair.

Types of Trails

Trails are differentiated by both their repetition style and in the amount of dimensions they exist within.

Manual Trails

A manual trail can be any other trail, as long as no effects are used to build it. This often gives you more control, as you have complete freedom on where and how the trail moves, individual layers, and more (for example, each layer of the trail could have a different filter applied to it!)

2D Trails

The category that most trails fall under, simply put a 2D trail is one that exists only in 2D space (parallel to the window frame).

3D Trails

A 3D Trail is a trail that moves in 3D Space. Popularized by players like mafar_ in the late 2010's, the technique became ubiquitous with the style at the time - especially players who specialized in effect-heavy works.

There are two major types of 3D trails. The first is basically an extension of a 2D trail moving in 3D space. The second is more of a "pop-out" of a particular element, which can be seen below. These two can be also be combined as you see fit.

While the 3D-projected footage often remains a 2D plane, 3D elements can also be trailed; this is sometimes referred to as a 4D Trail, due to it following the timeline of an object moving in space.

Echo Trails

An "echo trail" can be best described as a "comet" - the main layer moves around, with a trail of some sort following shortly behind.

For this example, the "Echo" effect in After Effects was used with ten repetitions, and a decay of 0.9 (meaning 10% of the transparency fades away per frame).

Standing Trail

Standing Trails, usually done manually, have the important distinction of no keyframes; the position of each layer is completely static, or "standing". Famously popularized by Sid, they often can be dozens, if not hundreds of layers long - a very arduous process! Editors with scripting libraries can use Expressions to make this process a lot easier, as you can simply have each layer's position a certain distance, times whatever layer it happens to be.

Creating a 3D trail is similar in process to a 2D one, however you now have to repeat the layer through 3D space. As a result, usually you must do the effect manually as traditional video effects do not apply to 3D space.

...unless you have After Effects and the Trapcode Echospace plugin, which can create 3D trails for you with the click of a button. They still are built layer by layer, but you can apply any offset you can think of (position, time, etc.) This saves a ton of time!

Building Trails

With Plugins

There are many plugins that produce trails. Not an exhaustive list!

Echo

Echo is a vanilla plugin for Premiere and After Effects which "echoes" the footage presented.

S_Trails

Arguably the most well known "trail plugin", S_Trails is part of the Sapphire suite.