Color Finesse and premultiplication error

[Walter Soyka]

Have you tried Knoll UnMult? It’s free from Red Giant.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Aaron Neitz]

Nice find. But Color Finesse still is black rimming the edges….

I’m resorting to using a duplicate of the layer that just has keylight and then doing a “track matte alpha” on the layer with Color Finesse. But that involves losing some of the nice spill suppression that Keylight pumps out naturally.

[Michael Szalapski]

Precompose your keyed layer and apply color finesse to the precomp.

You might also find these links on achieving a good key to be quite useful.
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/2/931091#931104
https://angietaylor.blip.tv/file/379536/

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Aaron Neitz]

Yeah, I’ll precomp. Not my favorite way to go, but it works.

Just popped back into CS3 – NOT getting the premult error with Color Finesse.

thanks for the help!

[Jim Arco]

My experience with CF is that it works on the original footage file. If I apply anything effect/blending mode/etc prior to CF, I may get unpredictable results.

Pre-comping is the rule rather than the exception with any complex combination of CF and some other modifier.

I’m not aware of any option within CF to change this.

[Walter Soyka]

[Jim Arco] “My experience with CF is that it works on the original footage file. If I apply anything effect/blending mode/etc prior to CF, I may get unpredictable results.”

And it’s not just CF; precomposing is necessary with many effects.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Bob Currier]

Be sure to install the latest version of Color Finesse, 2.1.11, as there was an alpha bug we fixed that could cause black edges.

You can download the current installer from our website and use your existing Color Finesse 2 serial number to install. If you’re using the version of Color Finesse which came with After Effects, be sure to download the “LE” version of the installer as that’s the one that will accept your serial number.

In other situations pre-comping may still needed with CF because of the way that AE passes pixels to us. We receive just the pixels from the layer CF is applied to, not the composited/effected pixels from all previous layers which is often (but not always!) what you want. Not so much a bug as a feature of the way AE functions.

Bob Currier
Synthetic Aperture

[Aaron Neitz]

Thanks Bob! The upgrade did the trick.