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It sounds like it’s not seeing the second field and you’re just getting one field and one interpolated field back out. by any chance do any of your comps have “Preverve Framerate when nested or in render queue” checked in the advanced comp settings? It’s useful to turn this on when rotoscoping or keying but it messes up field renders (if you need it set you can double the comp frame rate, which is actually how you should be working or you won’t see the non-dominant field)
Is your source interlaced? How is it interpreted? If you interpret interlaced footage as whole frame (do not separate fields) and then do a frame render you are not reducing the quality (you cannot do any transforms or blurs this way though) as AE just puts the two fields back at once. True a frame render will be steppier than a field render but it in most cases it’s acceptable.
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios

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I found it kind of tricky to do in after effects, the matte filter itself has a slider for the channel you want to matte and it’s hard to tell what the id number is to select, combustion has a nice picker that lets you click on a couple of pixels of the object you want to remove and it works, also the show G-Buffer filter is usefull for checking what 3d channels are in your render, in combustion it colours them brightly but in after effects (extract 3d channel effect)it’s usually a very low contrast greyscale, it might look completely black but if you tweak or use auto levels you’ll see the different channels, I don’t know how the colours relate to the object id’s though however which is the problem.
Remember that the matte won’t be aliased, the “Use Coverage” checkbox will improve the edges if your render included coverage, otherwise you could choke the matte or use the feather option, for a couple of projects we rendered at double the resolution to improve the results. I love after effects and it’s my main workhorse but I usually find combustion handles 3d channels and rpf’s better.
You might look into using a “Pure Colours” pass as a trick to get multiple mattes from the same render, it was shown to me once and is a cool trick but right now I don’t know how to explain it or point you to an explanation, basically you render from max with objects containing 100% colours which you can then matte out like a key, you render to RGB but use it for mattes only along with your real RGB render. (You can leave all your lights and textures off generally for the pure colours pass to speed up your renders)

Glenn Stewart
1k Studios

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Watch out with consolidate footage though, if any psd has more than one layer with the same name only one of them will be kept and the others trashed even though they’re being used, I just checked to see if they fixed it yet and on the mac at least it’s still a problem, maybe 7 will have fixed it. It bit me pretty bad one time, I was completing a project that used a layered psd as an image sequence, every layer had the same name and I tried to tidy it up using consolidate, didn’t spot it till after delivery and it was a huge problem. As you can imagine I’ve been shy of that damn command ever since. I know it’s bad to set up psd’s like that but you can’t always control the elements people give you.

I wish the consolidate would trim video clips to the portions being used, if that was the case I’d be tempted to use it but otherwise I’ll stick with reduce project.
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios

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In the project that has the comp you need select the comp in the project window and go File/Reduce Project, now save with a different name (you have deleted everygthing that was not used in that composition). Now open the project you need it to come into and import the project you just saved, you could import it and reduce later but I find it’s easier to reduce first.
Glenn Stewart
1k studios

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I don’t know how the script works exactly but it’s not necessary to use it. Save it to your hard drive then go File/Run Script/Choose File and navigate to where you saved it. (you have to enable scripts in your preferences first or else it’s greyed out). When you run the script it will create a dialogue box, with the mask selected hit the “Apply Tracker” button, it will create a motion tracker with a point set at each of the mask vertices, now run the tracker as usual (take your time, if it loses the track go back and fix it, I think you can do a point at a time if necessary) when you have finished tracking select the mask and the tracker in the timeline and hit the apply mask button.
I’ve only tried it with relatively simple stuff but it’s an amazing script, all credit to the guy who wrote and posted it, I had nothing to do with it at all unfortunately, scripting kind of freaks me out and I was hoping they would convert it to actions like photoshop.
Glenn Stewart
1-k Studios

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I don’t know how the script works exactly but it’s not necessary to use it. Save it to your hard drive then go File/Run Script/Choose File and navigate to where you saved it. (you have to enable scripts in your preferences first or else it’s greyed out). When you run the script it will create a dialogue box, with the mask selected hit the “Apply Tracker” button, it will create a motion tracker with a point set at each of the mask vertices, now run the tracker as usual (take your time, if it loses the track go back and fix it, I think you can do a point at a time if necessary) when you have finished tracking select the mask and the tracker in the timeline and hit the apply mask button.
I’ve only tried it with relatively simple stuff but it’s an amazing script, all credit to the guy who wrote and posted it, I had nothing to do with it at all unfortunately, scripting kind of freaks me out and I was hoping they would convert it to actions like photoshop.
Glenn Stewart
1-k Studios

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We had to do this recently, did a lot of research, found a photoshop plugin and a lot of technical data and graphs but the artist got a decent result by separating the layer into the three primary colours (I forget the layer mode you need to composite them back together again but it’s mentioned in the After Effects 5.5 magic book if you have it, bad video tutorial), and using optics compensation on each layer to line them back up, I think the blue layer was the only really bad one with it and red getting further from the green towards the edges. I’m not sure how accurate you need your results to be but she was happy with the results.
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios

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Try the script, I was doubtful at first but it works pretty well, of course it’s only as good as the tracker but I’ve been able to get good results from it. I wouldn’t try to do the whole silhouette at once though, break it up into separate masks. If it’s just a zoom it should be quite easy to do using free transform of the mask points also.
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios

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Try the script, I was doubtful at first but it works pretty well, of course it’s only as good as the tracker but I’ve been able to get good results from it. I wouldn’t try to do the whole silhouette at once though, break it up into separate masks. If it’s just a zoom it should be quite easy to do using free transform of the mask points also.
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios

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Thanks Jeff, I was starting to wonder if it was just my system or that I was being completely unreasonable due to the lack of interest in this. And I agree, since the voodoo cards 10bit was the selling point, to go back to 8bit for us is a step back. I’m not saying 8bit makes a lot of sense in a lot of cases but with motion graphics it’s not the best option.
Glenn Stewart
1k Studios
PS I’m still amazed that anyone encoding mpeg2 from animation (or any other RGB) codec quicktime is completely messing up their luma, there is a huge bug in the YUV conversion, the pros know about it and encode from YUV codecs but no-one fixes it, Unbelievable!!