Automated edit detection in AE !!!

[Barend Onneweer]

I’m not disagreeing with you there. When the shot count goes up, AE’s timeline gets cluttered with layers. Shy layers help a little.

I come from a compositing background, and know AE inside and out. When I use more dedicated tools for grading I occasionally miss the tools that I know so well.

I often end up using extract and keying tools for selections, adding glows to highlights, matching grain across shots.

This is for commercials, shorts and music videos, often done at 1920×1080 or 2k. There are tools out there that do RT color correction at that resolution (Speedgrade, Scratch, Apple Color to some extent), but there’s a limit to the amount of processing it does in RT. Once you get into advanced grain tools, you’re usually not realtime anymore.

So for short-length programs I find AE’s clumsy interface is outweighed by it’s toolset, flexibility, and the ability to work at high bitdepths.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Lloyd Alvarez]

Hey Bouke,

In my testing my script processed the footage very quickly, I don’t have precise benchmarks but it’s definitely faster than realtime. As for color correcting in After Effects vs somewhere else, I think that’s up to each person, but AE has very powerful CC tools and also masking and tracking etc for very precise secondary corrections. It also works in 32 bit now so you can stack corrections without any fear of clipping.

All I aimed to do with my script (as I do with all my scripts) is to provide a tool that would help you save some time, so if you need to split some footage into scenes whether it be for color grading or adding effects or whatever now you don’t have to do it by hand.

-Lloyd

[Bouke Vahl]

Lloyd,
Please do not see my comments as negative for you work!
It’s great for those who need it. (And perhaps i’m becoming one of them, as i process tons of individual clips trough AE…)
Faster than RT is quite impressive for AE. (I’m from the time that AE comps without any effect can not playback RT)
How do you do it so fast?
(My app works by taking a downscaled sample of the image, and compare color differences against a threshold. A trick to make it faster (for long form, probably not interesting for you) is to compare the current image to an image a second or so further. If that is the same, you have saved yourself some frames to process. Another (for me) quite important option is to make a jump after a cut is found, so dissolves / fast movement will not result in a huge amount of unwanted cuts.

Last but not least, since you are the scriptmaster, interested in earning a bottle of booze of your choice?

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Lloyd Alvarez]

Did not see your comments as negative, I was just responding to some or your points. The speed is simply due to the fact that AE has been optimized quite a bit in recent years especially CS3 running on a Macintel box. So all that speed is credit to the Adobe crew not me. I am just working on 1 layer and I isolate it before i do the work, so comps with tons of layers won’t affect what I am doing. But it defintely looks like you are doing more speed optimization than I am. I wasn’t so concerned with speed this time around since i felt the wait was reasonable and didn’t want to risk missing cuts at the expense of some time gained.. but optimizing for speed sounds like a fun challenge for the next revision.

As for the booze proposal, you can contact me off list. My email is my name @ aescripts

-Lloyd