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Flattened Video
This is a problem that doesn’t only affect me, I just wanted to know if there is a way around it.
Say for example I’m shooting a war film, I want to have VFX in it. When I import my original DSLR footage into Sony Vegas Pro 10, everything is fine, the image is how it’s supposed to be.
Then I get to a shot that needs VFX in it, so I import the original shot into After Effects. After exporting from after effects in H.264, the image still looks how it is supposed to look. Then, I import that After Effects rendered shot into Sony Vegas, and the image is completely flattened.
Is there any way to work around this?Thanks in advance 🙂
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6 Replies
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What do you mean by flattened? A rendered video only has one layer. If you want layers from AE, you have to render them with alpha channel transparency.
Jeff
2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64
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thanks for the quick response, Jeff 🙂 I realise I didn’t make it very clear. What I mean by flattened is that the image itself suddenly becomes flat. As in, low contrast, low saturation. I can’t simply manually increase contrast and saturation with Sony Vegas effects, because it doesn’t have the same feel as the original footage, and also degrades image quality further, as you probably know 🙂
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You might want to try a lossless codec to go between AE and Vegas. Quicktime’s animation preset is one I used to use. The DNxHD codec is very good, then there is always uncompressed AVI. I’m sure others here have better choices, I just haven’t had any problem lately.
2-Xeon X5680 @ 3.33, EVGA SR-2 Mobo, 48GB DDR3, GTX 580 3072MB, 16TB Attached Storage, Win7, Vegas 11 x64
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It’s possible that your DSLR footage uses the full 0-255 colour range and Vegas is using this as-is. After Effects might be changing this to 16-235 either during processing or during output encoding, so you end up with less contrast on your processed footage when you import it back into Vegas.
Try using a different output format as Jeff suggests, or look for AE output options related to colour space, or apply the levels plugin with the “studio to computer” preset to the relevant media in Vegas.
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Thanks for your response, Matt 🙂 Those do seem like they could be viable options. I’ll have a look around 🙂 Thank you.
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Thanks for your help everyone. I managed to get the ‘VFXed’ footage to look really close to the original footage using the LEVELS plugin in Vegas. I really can’t render out from After Effects in anything other than H.264 because my computer can’t handle large files xD Thanks! 🙂
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