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What’s the fastest way to import footage with an Alpha Channel ?
Hi there,
I was doing some graphics work for a corporate video in after effects, and saw that the edit had a lot of greenscreen talking heads, so I offered to key them using keylight in AE.
Keylight did a magnificent job of this and I exported to animation codec,millions+ with straight alpha.
Now the client is complaining that FCP still needs to render these shots for hours when he switches his keyed footage for my quicktime ?
Their system is a Quad G5, Blackmagic.
What am I doing wrong ?
Would it have been faster to have output a seperate RGB and a B&W alpha pass in Blackmagic codec and let them do a luma matte key in FCP ? -
9 Replies
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You are doing everything fine!
I have previously experienced very serious problems of lonf FCP renders when using QT with animation codec. Try to render without compressor (NONE).
They have to render anyway
Hernan Torres
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Sheesh – they’d’ve had to render it no matter what.
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True,
but it seems like it takes longer to render an animation codec in than doing a basic FCP color key on Blackmagic footage.
Or is that a misconception ? -
Not at all
But what is really true, is that color Key in FCP, is not as good as Keylight.
Hernan Torres
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[HTedit] “Try to render without compressor (NONE).”
FYI, “None” actually IS a compressor. However, it’s called None cause it’s lossless.
Kevin Monahan
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Pres. SF Cutters -
Sorry, you are right!!!!. it was a cloud on my mind at the time I wrote 🙂
Hernan Torres
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no doubt.
another option would be to lay the matching original source footage over your animations, then use trackmatte>alpha and render that instead. All it has to do with your footage is read the alpha channel so it might go faster.
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ok, I noticed some weirdness with the animation codec in fcp 5.04 yesterday.
we had some motion graphics from after effects with text overlaying a background image through an alpha channel.
The timing of the text coming up needed to be changed, so rather than go back an spend a ton of time retiming re-rendering in AE we tried to cut the animation footage to a frame then hold it for a few seconds.
What would happen when it played was the text would shrink 2 pixels on the paremeter, whenever it would show the still.
Obviously that looks bad so we had to retime everything AE.
Are you saying that the NONE codec alpha channel won’t mess up like the ANIMATION codec does?
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To answer the question and I have not tried this but I do have a Quad G5 and Blackmagic hardware as well.
You could try rendering the sequence as a BMD-10-bit mov then ONLY render the alpha channel again as a BMD-10-bit, then use that as your alpha or track matte in fcp..
If the transparency works, then it should play with no rendering.
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