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Keylight + Matte Tracking problem
Hey all,
I’m animating a logo for a company. The company already has an animated logo, but they want to extend it. The logo is simply white text on a black background, however the animated version I’m working to extend has a piece of red text that drops down over the logo (the year 2013). I created a 3D animation of their logo in Maya, built from scratch, rendered out the footage, and brought that into After Effects. Now I’m trying to create a seamless transition from my 3D animation to their animated logo. This is where it gets sticky… their animated logo is slightly different than the logo I animated, so I have to replace certain parts of their logo with the last frame of my animation. To do this, I layered their logo on top of mine and masked out the pieces that I wanted to keep from mine. That’s all good and great, but it gets harder with that pesky red 2013 dropping in. So I duplicated their logo, applied a keylight to keyout the red I wanted to keep. Then I made another duplicate layer and turned it into track matte, connecting it with the keylight layer as an “alpha inverted matte”. My results are pretty good, but there is some odd white artifacts creeping through and I can’t for the life of me figure out whats going on. I tried playing around with the keylight but I can’t find a way to tighten up the key (assuming its the keylight that’s creating a problem)
I know this is kind of hard to follow, but if anyone has any idea what Im doing wrong (or another way to go about solving this problem), I’d really appreciate the help!
Thanks!
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4 Replies
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Might be some problem with the keying process. Can’t say much without looking at the shot. If you can upload a screenshot, It would help a bunch to understand the issue.
Vishesh Arora
3D and Motion Graphics Artist
Films RajendraBlog:
https://digieffects.wordpress.com2011 3D Demo Reel:
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You shouldn’t be keying. Look into using the Preserve Transparency switch or a Track Matte or the Set Matte effect. Channel Operations are also viable options but they’re trickier to work with.
HTH
RoRKIntensive mocha & AE Training in Singapore and Other Dangerous Locations
Imagineer Systems (mocha) Certified Instructor
& Adobe After Effects ACE/ACI (version 7) -
Hey guys, thanks for the replies. I figured it out, although there may have been an easier way to do this, like Roland suggested. What I did is I keyed out the red I wanted to keep, then used a red solid underneath of the same color of the text that I wanted, and paired to that layer as an inverted alpha track matte. This gave me great results. The problem I was having before was that the layer that was keyed and the layer beneath that I turned on the track matte settings for were both the same footage. Although the red part I wanted was showing through, there were some artifacts because there was apparently a tiny difference in size of the matte compared to the text underneath that I wanted to show.
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[Alex Vlair] “Although the red part I wanted was showing through, there were some artifacts because there was apparently a tiny difference in size of the matte compared to the text underneath that I wanted to show.”
This is common in the workflow you described. Generally I’d either add a Generate > Fill effect with the correct red color to the visible layer if it’s a solid color, or try to remove the fringing with some combination of the Matte effects (Simple Choker is… well… simple) and Channels > Remove Color Matting. The latter requires generating an alpha on the layer, so either pre-comping your track matte with the visible layer, using the Channels > Set Matte effect or applying the effects directly to the keyed layer.
Darby Edelen
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