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Batch Track Matte
Hello Everyone,
I have a series of about 10 interviews shot two camera, one is a close up, second camera is a medium shot. The interviews are quite heavily edited so we are cutting between close up and medium shot every 10 seconds or so. The subject was shot against a window, subject was a little under exposed, so I need to boost the brightness on just the subject and not the window behind them. Subject moves a bit so I need to do track matte on the color corrector. This was pretty easy to do using the the Fast Color Corrector and the pen mask tool that you can now add to most visual effects, and looks great.
The problem is that I have to do this shot by shot. The only way I can figure out how to get the mask to track is to set up the mask on a shot and then press the play forward button on the effect. The mask tracks pretty well, but stops at the out point of the clip. I then can set up the mask on the next shot and press play forward on that shot. It takes several minutes to do each shot, and I probably have 70-80 cuts in the series of interviews, so it is not practical to have to sit and wait for each shot to finish and then start the next shot. It would be nice if I could set up the mask for each shot (basically just cut and pace the same effect to all of the close ups, and then again for all of the medium shots) and then just have all of the masks track as a batch overnight, kind of like rendering out a long project out of after effects.
I have tried to nest all of the shots and applying the mask to all of the close ups, but the mask will not track when there is blank space in the sequence. I have also tried applying the mask to a master clip, but you can not mask master clips.
I do not want to have use “replace with after effects composition” because that gets weird if I need to trim the edits.
Any ideas?
Thank you,
-david
David Lynch
Northwestern University -
3 Replies
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Can you get back to the original material? Or were the interviews supplied cut?
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I have the original material, its probably 2 hours of raw footage cut down into ten 5-6 minute separate segments. The content is pretty much cut, just moving on to finishing.
I toyed with the idea of taking the raw footage and color correcting that and exporting new files, then replacing the original footage with the color corrected files. But that would be a pain to try to get the timecode on the new files to match the original. Plus there are two cameras and about 9 different files that are around 20-30 minutes long each, that I would still have to track one at a time before I could export.
It seems as if there has to be a better way.
Thank you,
-david
David Lynch
Northwestern University -
[David Lynch] “I toyed with the idea of taking the raw footage and color correcting that and exporting new files, then replacing the original footage with the color corrected files. But that would be a pain to try to get the timecode on the new files to match the original.”
And that would give you the best results.
You can use the previous edits as reference, and by adding the timecode display (set to “media”) on each clip in the edit, you turn it into conforming – tedious yet accurate.
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