Time Remapping, Echo Effect, Blur and Keying Anyone?

[Roland R. kahlenberg]

Sounds like this is out of your league- apologies for being candid with this. There are too many errors with your techniques.

Key out images that are as clean as possible.

Check Eran’s tutorial on TIme Blend for the echo effect.
https://library.creativecow.net/articles/stern_eran/Time_FX.php

And even then I’m not sure if you’ll solve your problems but it will certainly solve alot of the fundamental errors.

Best is to hire someone to help you out.

Good Luck
RoRK

broadcastGEMs – AEPro Volume 02 (Professional Adobe After Effects Project Files – Now Available)

[Alan Tonn]

First I want to thank you for being “honest”. Maddening as it is…

“Best is to hire someone to help you out.”

not to sound harsh, but that would be great, except for the fact that this project is for a non profit organization, and I have volunteered to do this, and I have no budget whatsoever except that which I spend out of my own pocket. Every one else involved is also volunteering in the creation of this “music video”.

I am not looking for “Hollywood” quality here, just a little advise on how I could do something’s better to increase the quality of my work. Everyone starts somewhere.

Is there anything that you would suggest so that when I reshoot the green screen part I might have a better key? Should the screen just hang or should I angle it to the bottom to get more even light falling on the screen? Is there anything that you think I might be able to do with camera settings to help? The camera we are using has the ability to do 60 frames a second, would that help?

Thanks for the link; I have been through all of that tutorial and a few others on other sites. I think part of the problem is the amount of speed I have added to the time remapping part of the project. I also think I am trying to use way too much of the footage in the foreground layer causing “blips” of people in the scene. I am going to work with that later today.

Am I in the wrong place? Should I not be here because I don’t do this for a living? Am I unwelcome on these boards? I don’t understand why asking questions of those who live and breathe this stuff gets me responses like this. Is it the way I am asking? I really love the resource this site is, but lately all I have felt in these forums is hostility towards my questions.

Thanks for any and all help.

[Kevin Camp]

for your keying part, you mentioned needing to zoom in to avoid part of the frame that was not covered by the green screen… i would think that all you should need to do is use a mask to ‘crop’ the shot to just the area that you want to key, rather than zoom in or scale up the footage prior to keying.

for time remapping, if you don’t need the footage to ramp up or down in speed, i would use time stretch (layer>time>time stretch…). it’s generally easier to use than tim remapping, you just enter a percentage to speed/slow your footage, if you need to change it later, just choose layer>time>time stretch again and change the percentage.

either way (time remap or time stretch), you might try enabling frame blending (layer>frame blending>frame mix) and enable frame blending for previews (the button in the timeline that looks like film frames). this will start to blend some of those frames that are being lost when speeding the footage up giving it a bit of a motion blur look.

to further that motion blur look, i’m with roland, try cc time blend. the ‘blend’ setting is more natural than that of echo, and it renders faster (though it will disable multiprocessing). you’ll just want to hit ‘clear’ with any changes that you make and prior to render to clear the buffer or you’ll usually end up with some strange frames….

you may find that you’ll want to render the keyed footage out prior to working with time effects… it will speed things up and it will lessen some of the unexpected things that time effects can create in a comp.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Alan Tonn]

Hello

And Thanks! 🙂

I am actually planning another reshoot of the green screen. I have enough screens to cover the entire camera view and think that if I do this I will alleviate some of the problems I am having with a clean key and artifacts due to zooming the footage.

One of the reasons I used time remap is to get rid of the “gaps” between people moving in front of the camera. But I also sped up the people moving across and I think that is part of the problem. I am going to be reworking my time remap.

Ah… frame blending. Hadn’t thought of that.

I tried cc time blend, but that was on the first shoot and it didn’t look good. Because I didn’t get results on the first shoot I avoided it on the reshoot. I will try it again after we get the wider green screen done.

I was thinking that rendering out the key would be a good idea. Just thought I could get it all in one go.

Do you have any thoughts about using the 60 frames per second feature on the camera? Would that help in the final outcome? I figure more frames would smooth the motion, would this be a good assumption?

Thanks Again… ! 🙂