unshaped fill

[Evelina Stepanenko]

Dave,
Thank you for your response.
Basically what I need to achieve is when I render a flare:
the alpha looks like the actual shape of flare I want to render, but the fill is much larger, and has jagged edges. So that, when combined, the end result is accurate (or is exactly what I’m seeing on the screen before render for tape), and no black shoes through.
Certain systems, such as VIZ and DEKO, use these types of flare automatically.

Thank you.

[Ronaldo Montalvo]

it’s not exactly clear from your post if you actually need a separate alpha for another compositing step external to AFX. if you don’t or can do the composite all in AFX try just rendering the flare on it’s own black solid/layer, then change the color mode of that layer to add or screen. in AFX the black drops out and only the flare FX will show over the layers beneath it. no alpha for the flare shape (which Umult gets you) but the composite in AFX will be fine.

[Evelina Stepanenko]

Hi all,
well, I am confident that the actual name for this is unshaped fill.
I’ve been working in AE for a while, and very familiar with unmult and how to go around this problem with animation compression (or any other that marrieds matte and fill together), or using a different background color to get rid of the fading black edges.
However, at the moment I am required to output to tape and MUST render matte and fill separate.
The flares I’m using are part of a project that was commissioned for air. Since it is going directly to tape, and then composited later over live footage, the project won’t be going through avid (where I’d usually use animation compression thus avoiding the problem all together).
I need to render the fill as unshaped (where the flare FILL would actually look on the monitor very overblown, almost made out of hard edges), so that when combined with the alpha from the same render, the final result is accurate- that is to say that the final result would be what you view in After Effects.
I know this is done as one render without having 2 separate projects for Fill and Matte.
I just don’t know how this is achieved: is there a plugin? or a preference change?
If you know anything please let me know.
Thanks for your time and advice.

[Chris Wright]

Perhaps you’re thinking of channel-remove color matting to remove the premultiplied color channel of the bg halo of the flare then render out an alpha channel separately. This gives you more control over the appearance of areas of partial transparency in the workflow.