Outputting Luma Matte

[Outis]

What are the settings when saving a movie (as this text moves)? Do you output two separate output modules or one REG+Alpha? The text created has lots of glow and a 3D effect created in Illustrator, but the resulting alphas I rendered out looked horribly blocky.

Anyone else out there know any tricks to improve the initial aliasing that happens in Illustrator? And then continues a bit in AE–the object I imported int AE is also washed out. Any tricks for creating logos in illustrator and importing them into AE so they retain their look?

Thanks for the help.

[Outis]

Oops, meant do you output as RGB+Alpha…

[Harryjf]

Some effects from Illustrator are not vector based, such as glows and shadows. This might be the blockiness you are seeing…. the artifacting of these effects, especially if they are scaled up.

AE has plenty of shadow and glow to go around.

If your colors are getting screwed up, you might be using transparency or spot colors in Illustrator that just will not show up correctly in AE. Perhaps consider saving the image as a PSD from AI. Or maybe copy and paste the AI file to a PSD, then send that PSD to AE.

One side note though. When rendering text with glows and such from AE to FCP using RGB+Alpha, in FCP make sure to change the Alpha to “Black”, not Straight. Straight will leave halos around your glows. This is the same thing as Straight or Premultiply in AE.

If that doesn’t make any sense at all, just let me know.

[Outis]

I output the RGB+Alpha matte, straight, millions of colors for some text I generated in AE just as a test. Still very blocky. Any help? Sorry I can’t figure this d@*^ thing out, but I have to get it out today.

Thank you!

[Benjamin Tubb]

In my experience, whenever I did shining and glowing effects on text and exported with ‘straight’ alpha, it looked horrible. The alpha just simply included all of the glows, but minus the fading of it. It worked fine when I did premultiplied… Here are my settings that worked: (Although I’ve only done this for Premiere and Avid)

Quicktime Movie
Compressor: None
Quality 100%
Millions of Colors+ (the ‘plus’ will come on when you pick RGB+Alpha)
RGB+Alpha
Premultiplied color (not straight)

That’s what worked for me. Of course, I wasn’t using actual glows, they were radial blurs… and I wasn’t doing anything from illustrator.

Ben Tubb

“Of course, I could be wrong. In fact, I’m probably wrong.”

[Steve Roberts]

[Benjamin18] “The alpha just simply included all of the glows, but minus the fading of it.”

Are you sure?

Technically, it’s not “straight alpha” or “premultiplied alpha”, it’s “straight RGB” or “premultiplied RGB”. The alpha is the same in both.

In Straight movies, when you look at them in an app that doesn’t know what to do with alphas, you see ugly stuff because you’re only seeing RGB. The alpha is there, but the app can’t show it. The RGB is seen all the way to the end of the glow because that’s where the RGB exists — all the way to the end of the glow. The RGB has not been altered (premultiplied) to take into account the alpha values.

However, in Premultiplied movies, the RGB values have been altered (premultiplied) with the alpha values in order to take the opacity variations into account, so we something “normal” in apps that don’t know what to do with alpha information.

If you import the movie into an app that can interpret alpha information correctly, it will take the Straight movie and alter the RGB values within the app to give you the look you expect, with transparency and all. If the app can handle Premultiplied movies, it will do so as well.

For most apps, Straight is the choice. I don’t know why you’ve had bad experience, especially considering that Avid Meridiens require Straight RGB movies. Hm.

[Benjamin Tubb]

I was using Avid Xpress Pro, actually. And I don’t know ANYTHING about AVID, so I bet I was just screwing something up. But in premiere, I imported the Straight one and it would show up terribly, like it would if I just watched it in quicktime. Maybe I had some setting wrong? Meh. The premultiplied got the job done for me.

Ben Tubb

“Of course, I could be wrong. In fact, I’m probably wrong.”

[Outis]

Yes, for me there is no joy yet. Outputting it straight made horrible clouds is FCP.

Any other ideas?

[Outis]

Well, I finally figured it out and the problem was not the alpha output but the way that FCP deals with it. The matte goes UNDER the fill and the fill is the one that is set to composite as a luma matte. Slightly counter-intuitive and hopefully the FCP developers can work on this as when we go to online in an Avid, we have to flip everything.

Thanks to everyone for their help and input. It’s so great to get so much feedback when I needed help.

Thank you!