Green Screen Help!!

[Kevin Camp]

i think you’re going to want to key first… if you are making changes to the color of the footage, first, you will be changing the color of the chroma wall, and that will make keying more difficult.

there are others that have more experience moving fcp projects to ae… but i think i would want to edit the piece first (at least a rough edit) and try to get a reference movie into ae, to avoid having to render to hdv again.

if you can render to lossless animation out of fcp (without compression keyframes), ae will be much happier working with non-interframe compressed codecs (hdv uses interframe compression). but that comes down to disk space, remember that you’ll want to render back to lossless out of ae.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Steve Roberts]

Here’s what I’d probably do:

-First cut the footage down for timing in FCP, so we’re only working with an hour of footage.
-Then convert the HDV footage to something else like Photo-JPEG or Apple’s Intermediate codec. Unless FCP does that automatically. I haven’t worked with HDV.
-Then remove the green from the raw footage in AE.
-Get Nucleo Pro to speed up rendering in AE.

Now 16 hours for a minute sounds like a lot to me, although it could just be the first minute that’s heavy and the estimator can’t see more than that just yet. Here’s a tip: drag your comp into another one and speed it up 120x, so an hour runs as 30 seconds and render that. Then you’ll get an idea of how long it really will take once you do a little math. You see? And you’ll have a cross-section of the whole thing for time-estimating.

I’m wondering if there are some effects that could be replaced with something faster? For instance, lights and blurry shadows could be replaced with ramps (gradients) and fast-blurred copies of footage.

Could you list the effects you’re using? Gaussian Blur, lights, shadows, DOF?

Anybody else?

[Mike Procunier]

If you have any other machines available on you network set up a network render for After Effects. That will help immensely! See Aharon Rabinowitz’s network render tutorial or go through AE’s Help. Also it might make things more manageable to break your project up into 5 minute chunks, render each chunk on the network then join them all together in a final render.

[Brendan Coots]

Unless you’re using some newfangled camera I’m not aware of, HDV’s color sampling is pretty poor (4:2:0, the same basic color sampling as DV, just using a different pattern). That in itself is going to present a major challenge.

Many of the suggestions here focus on outputting to another format or uncompressed to do the key in After Effects, but that won’t get you any more sampling info out of the footage (which is going to be your biggest roadblock to getting a usable key), and even worse the two extra compression stages needed for this workflow (render out of FCP, then render out of AE) will degrade your footage even more. Another thing to consider – the output from After Effects will suffer serious quality destruction unless you output to an uncompressed/lossless format. For 3 hours of uncompressed footage with alpha, you’re looking at hundreds upon hundreds of gigs (possibly even approaching 1 terrabyte) of storage needed. If it were my project I would conclude that this workflow will consumer way too much time, resources and incur a lot of potential quality loss, so it’s probably better to stay in Final Cut Pro for your entire workflow.

Because of this, I would personally just use Final Cut’s built-in keyer, which is decent enough, or go buy the DV Matte plugin for FCP, which is going to save you a LOT of headaches for only $199. There is a free demo so you can test it before buying, as well:

https://www.dvgarage.com/prod/prod.php?prod=dvmattefcp

Then you can layer your backgrounds and other elements within the FCP timeline, and make changes without the worry of hopping BACK over to AE for tweaks. If the shoot was lit properly and the quality of the footage is nice and crisp, you’ll be fine with either of these options.

Ultimately, there isn’t much you can do about the massive render time you are about to incur if the final run time is 3 hours, I would just prepare for that and maybe set it to render over the weekend or something.

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Edit and then key out your footage before color correcting. If you’re concerned about time issues, then greak down your shots into different light schemes. From each group, select a typical piece of footage to work with. Safe the settings for other clips from the same group once editing is done. Rinse and then repeat likewise for other groups.

You may want to convert your HDV to a lossless CODEC for your intermediate work as HDV seems to be horribly slow for anything other than basic editing.

Check out Tim Wilson’s very recent article which covers HDV editing and onlining issues.
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/wilson_tim/ProRes02/03.html

Good Luck
Roland Kahlenberg
https://www.broadcastGEMs.com – Adobe After Effects project files
https://www.myspace.com/rorkrgbspace

[Angus Mackay]

Hey,

There’s sage advice in the two posts above, if your budget is limited. Personaly, (if you can at all afford it) I’d sugest taking a project of that scale and nature to someone who has a proper finishing editor (such as Smoke or DS). I’ve done it both ways and the difference is immense. Smoke sails through stuff like that and has a proper 3D environment for compositing, the keyers and colour correction are killer. And if the post house has a Burn module attached to their Smoke (which most should) there shouldn’t be much in the way of rendering time as it will be done remotely.

If you have the budget, that would make the next month of your life very much easier

HTH

Angus