Blend Modes – Luma

[Chris Kenny]

This one is kind of counterintuitive. Place your foreground plate on the primary storyline. Don’t do anything special to its blend mode. Now, place your matte layer above it as a connected clip, with its blend mode set to Stencil Luma or Silhouette Luma (depending on whether you want black or white to be transparent). Finally, place your background layer above your matte layer, with its blend mode set to ‘Behind’.

Maybe someone has found a less counterintuitive way to do this.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

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[Brendan Gibbons]

This exact same thing messed with my grey matter for a bit as well.

What “seems to work” is the following

Set up your layers as you did. I’m going to refer to the “tracks” as V1, v2 etc, it’s what my brain is happy with at the moment 😉

“v3” foreground
“v2” alpha / luma transition
“v1” background

In fcp 7 days as you pointed out you would make the top layer “travel matte luma / alpa” etc and it would use the properties of the clip beneath it to perform the composite mode.

Instead set the composite on your transition layer to Stencil alpha / or luma depending on what type of clip it is.

Now this is where it gets funky,

Set the composite mode of the top layer to “Back”

Now you should get the desired result…..

Yeah it’s odd I know !

Hope that works for you though.

Cheers,

Brendan

[Brendan Gibbons]

whoops, didn’t check before I posted…

Yes, what chris said.

And I left out the crucial detail of having your foreground element on the primary storyline.

Cheers,

Brendan

[Patrice Freymond]

Chris, Brendan,

thanks, I will try this as soon as I get back in front of the computer, but for today my brain is fried.

Patrice

[Robbert-jan Van der does]

Hi,

I’m just wondering what happens if you connect the clips for the composite underneath and above the primary storyline?
I’m still not used to this possibility because in my mind “underneath” means “audio”, but in FCPX it can be video as well.
I can’t check it myself at the moment as I am not near my edit computer and unfortunately my laptop is a 1st gen MacBookPro from 2006 and can’t run FCPX.
Would it be possible to set it up as you were used to in FCP 7?

Regards,
Robbert-Jan

[Chris Kenny]

[Robbert-Jan van der Does] “I’m just wondering what happens if you connect the clips for the composite underneath and above the primary storyline?
I’m still not used to this possibility because in my mind “underneath” means “audio”, but in FCPX it can be video as well.”

You can do it that way as well, but you’re still stacking your background plate on top of your foreground plate. Except now it’s your background plate in the primary storyline, which I think, in general, makes less sense conceptually.

I’m slightly confused as to why the Travel Matte blend modes are gone. I don’t think anything about them would be fundamentally incompatible with the new trackless timeline. Maybe there’s some additional flexibility provided by the new approach that I’m missing.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Brendan Gibbons]

Yes this is a strange one….

It is well known that the composite modes of secondary storylines appearing over the top of the primary storyline do not work.

But as you mention, add a secondary storyline below the primary storyline and now change the composite mode on the primary storyline it works as expected.

But then you can’t composite that second storyline on top of another layer beneath that.

If the fixed the composite modes to work on all storylines I’m sure it would make a huge difference.

Cheers,

Brendan

[Nick Toth]

Here’s a stack that works for me

Background video on primary story line
Fill video on a connected clip above the primary story line
Key source on a connected clip above the fill video. This clips blend mode is set to ‘stencil alpha’.

(The above is shown in the first screen grab. The next step is shown in the second screen grab which is before I made it a storyline.)

Make the fill and key clips a compound clip and then make the compound clip a secondary storyline to add a trans in/out. Does this help?

NT

[Chris Kenny]

[Nick Toth] “Background video on primary story line
Fill video on a connected clip above the primary story line
Key source on a connected clip above the fill video. This clips blend mode is set to ‘stencil alpha’.”

Ah ha! Yes, this compound clip trick allows the placement of the foreground element above the background element, which makes much more sense. As an added bonus you can do the key in a compound clip in the event library before even editing the clip into your sequence, which is especially handy if you have an animated matte created in an external application, that needs to sync up starting at the first frame of a clip that’s going to be cut into multiple pieces in the sequence.

Also, the compound clip’s filmstrip thumbnails and viewer preview will reflect the key. That’s a nice touch.

The only thing I’d change is, put the compound clip containing the keyed foreground element on the primary storyline. Attach the backplate as a connected clip under the primary storyline. There’s no technical reason for this, I just think it makes more conceptual sense to have the foreground plate on the primary storyline. Well, generally. It depends on what the foreground plate is. If it’s actors delivering dialog, for instance, it’s definitely primary storyline, conceptually.

—
Digital Workflow/Colorist, Nice Dissolve.

You should follow me on Twitter here. Or read our blog.

[Peter Steinberg]

Very nice. How did you get the drop shadow?