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export an effect from AE to Avid
I have been researching this off and on for weeks, trying different combinations in AE, and I cannot get it to work. I appreciate any help offered.
I am trying to render a lens flare effect that I can use as a transitional element whenever I like on an Avid Media Composer. Instead of exporting the movies from the Avid, importing them into AE, setting it up, render/output from AE, then input back into Avid, I thought I could just build some effects to import and use at my discretion.
Fisrt of all, I am using AE 6. I built the lens flare effect in AE over a black solid. I always rendered the movie as an Animation, with millions of colors+ chosen. I have tried setting the black solid mode to screen, I have tried straight and Premultiplied mattes, I have tried importing them into the Avid in every conceivable way, and yet, I cannot get an alpha. Can someone please tell me what I am doing wrong? Thanks!
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3 Replies
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unless there is a ‘render lens flare only’ setting in the effect (and i don’t think there is), the lens flare will be rendered on top of the footage/layer that it is applied to (in your case a black solid). what you can do, is simply duplicate the lens flare layer, with all the lens flare settings and keyframes that you have currently, and sett the lower lensflare layer to use the upper as a lumanence track matte (its a pulldown in the modes section of the timeline).
the flare will look a little muddy, since it was over black. so, you will need to render that with alpha and import back into ae, make sure the interpret footage setting (select footage in project window and right-click or file>interpret footage>main…) is set to premultiplied (this works in ae7, not sure about 6), place in a new comp and rerender with alpha and ‘straight’ selected. if the interpret footage options are different in ae6, you can bring your flare in to a comp and apply unmult effect (freebie from red giant) or xmult (another freebie i found somewhere) or other similar effect taht can remove the black background, then render straight with alpha.
avid may have a setting to pull the black out of a keyed image too…. it’s a common problem that’s been around for as long as people have used alpha channels.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
Thanks Kevin. I posted the same question in the Adobe forums and someone pointed me to a plugin from Red Giant software called unmult. You can’t find it through their website, but if you google unmult, you will get a link for a mac and a windows plugin. There were no instructions however… but all you have to do is add the unmult effect under the lensflare effect and viola! You also need to make sure that when you render, to select straight alpha as opposed to premultiplied.
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great, i wasn’t sure if unmult would work if an alpha wasn’t already there, the few times i’ve used it, it was to remove fringing on some logos a few years ago… now ae can handle that if you set the interpret footage setting correctly.
Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW
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