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Step away from the Apple Keyer now! (And build a better one of your own.)
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[Charlie Austin] “quickly and easily getting a decent looking key from barely adequate green/blue screen material for an offline presentation”
Completely agreed. Strictly offline only. For that purpose it’s sure handy to have around.
But they could have made the darn thing a whole lot better ……. 😉
It’s just not in their DNA, as Ron Brinkmann observes (and he should know a lot better than any of us):
https://digitalcomposting.wordpress.com/2011/06/28/x-vs-pro/
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I agree with Simon.
The keyer is simultaneously great and terrible.
Great idea, terrible execution.
It doesn’t not produce wonderful results in anything that would be worth sending beyond a rough cut. But it’s great for rough cuts.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “The keyer is simultaneously great and terrible.
Great idea, terrible execution.”
The question that intrigues me is why is the execution so bad?
They could have hired any one of a number of talented people who could have helped them make something great …
Hell, this is Apple, they could have bought The Foundry!
But they so clearly didn’t – this very much looks like the work of a team that got pulled off the phone side for a couple of weeks. Image processing for the Instagram market.
They used to employ the team that made Shake and they let them all go.
They managed to retain a lot of the halo effect that came from having distributed Shake as an Apple product (which it wasn’t), but I seriously doubt that they kept any of the skillset on board that could deliver at that kind of level or anything close.
Such a shame.
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I completely agree. I was commenting more on the interface and ease of use if you will. I love being able to select different areas at different points in time, and the refining wheel has been very well done. Ditto with the light wrap. Seems like there’s two teams. Interface design, and developer. The latter is dropping the ball.
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Show me some transparent motion blur and I’m with you. For example a hand moving that was shot at 24p has quite a lot of motion blur. A keyer like key light has no problem cutting out the subject and the areas of motion blur become semi transparent as they should. Sometimes I can get edges ok (like on bald men) but not the motion blur.
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Right, got you.
The interface looks like one of those Apple patent things one sees so many of – it’s all about the design of the user experience. And often about making it as unique as possible.
I think the problem is that the “developer” side is just that – Apple developers.
Developers who understand image processing to the extent that they can make you tools to do cool visual stuff on your phone and tablet.
But who don’t have visual effects as their day job and who may well never speak to anyone whose job it is.
Or worse still, might not understand the need to speak to such people.
Another case in point, is Quartz Composer.
They could make it sooooooo much better. It is an absolutely brilliant concept that has enabled some really talented people, a lot of the time really talented at achieving results against the grain of the app, to do some breathtakingly good stuff.
And yet Apple have apparently no interest in supporting it any longer and could well kill it off any day now.
Or let’s take Motion – my personal favourite.
There are some fundamentally great concepts there, but it’s stuck at a very specific level – and shows no sign of ever getting any further.
I think there’s a reason that ties all this together …
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
I’ve used it for final projects. But they’re usually for web or internal corporate. This is as good as it gets, bald guy shot with C500 (or was it C100?) straight to ProRes (I forget the flavor) via SDI. I exported from FCP X as ProRes 4444 and used in Motion. It was just easier to do the edits in X and export as a file vs. do the key in Motion. ESPECIALLY since there’s no send to motion! As you can see, there’s still a small dark fringe around the whole image. Barely noticeable on the darker parts like blue shirt, but very noticeable around lighter areas like the nose. And that’s the best one I’ve gotten.
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[Simon Ubsdell] “[Jeremy Garchow] “Dare I say, it’s easier in Motion as you can see the group contents all at once instead of constantly jumping in and out of Ae precomps. Am I allowed to say these things in public?”
they do appear to be pondering the thing though. übertwirl down pre-comps indeed.
https://blogs.adobe.com/aftereffects/2013/12/top-after-effects-feature-requests-2013.html
“the ability to open a precomposition in the Timeline panel of the containing composition: Our internal jargon for this feature is übertwirl, referring to the ability to “twirl” a precomposition layer open in the Timeline panel and gain access to the layers within the nested composition, without leaving the Timeline panel of the composition in which it’s nested. This is a feature that we’ve been wrestling with for years, since it is a) obviously useful and b) really hard to do well. Compounding the difficulty is the fact that this feature is one of two rather different solutions to the same problem. The other solution is…”
that still doesn’t get them to the visual stack feedback of a nice photoshop layers palette like motion has though.
It’s funny, I remember years ago giving new staff initial (blind leading the blind) training on AE – and I’d call it photoshop with a timeline bolted on, it seemed a good phrase, but thinking about it, its the fact that motion has kept the layers and timeline separate that allows for that lovely layer view you get.
fab demo btw – mellifluous tones too 🙂
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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[Aindreas Gallagher] “thinking about it, its the fact that motion has kept the layers and timeline separate that allows for that lovely layer view you get.”
It’s really nice to be able to have both options – as well as the dedicated keyframe editor.
All three have enough overlap that you can do some of the same things in different ways, e.g. slip keyframes in either the timeline editor or the keyframe editor, composite in either the layer editor or the timeline editor. (And despite what some will tell you, the Keyframe editor is very fully featured.)
And yes, Ae precomps can be insanely powerful – but they can also be insanely annoying.
(Did I mention that I quite like working in Motion?)
Simon Ubsdell
http://www.tokyo-uk.com -
[Simon Ubsdell] “(Did I mention that I quite like working in Motion?)”
well, you do play it like a clarinet.
https://vimeo.com/user1590967/videos http://www.ogallchoir.net promo producer/editor.grading/motion graphics
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