[Adam Welch]

The four point garbage matte doesn’t transfer over to After Effects. However, if you use the “Crop” effect in Premiere, After Effects will interpret the effect information as a layer mask.

As was mentioned earlier, once you have your footage cut together and masked in Premiere, you could export as a .mov using the animation codec with millions+ of colors, and this would at least keep the alpha channel information when you import that new piece of footage into After Effects.

Depending on what system you have, there are some hardware-enabled effects that work in both programs. For instance, I have a Matrox Axio LE system, and effects like the Matrox Chroma Key, and Matrox Blur/Soft Focus transfer back and forth. As a general rule, only effects that are listed in After Effects’ presets bin AND Premiere’s effects list are cross-software.

[Adam Welch]

Are you able to key or mask out the shadows and then add your own shadows?

Duplicate the animal layer, apply Hue/Saturation and turn the lightness down to -100, and position/rotate it where appropriate. Then apply some blur and turn the opacity down to 20-30%, and change the transfer mode to multiply.

I guess the catch is if you’re able to key/mask out the shadows.

[Adam Welch]

Thanks for your responses, guys. All of the referenced tutorials are great, in particular the “Making Elements Grow” tutorial. I use techniques from that tutorial quite a bit. Unfortunately, I can’t quite come up with a way to keep the arrow head and rectangle aligned as they animate.

Todd — I thought about using the stroke effect and animating the arrow head to follow it, but matching the movement of the head to exactly match the edge of the stroke is the part that’s eluding me.

One idea is to line my two solids up, arrow head and rectangle, with the arrow head to the right, then apply CC Repetile to the rectangle and expand it left. This gives the illusion of “rightward” motion.

[Adam Welch]

Depending on how she’s framed, you could letterbox her interview (and other interviews in the piece for consistency)… or you could put a soft feathered mask around her face, and apply a gentle blur and darkening effect to everything outside the mask. If she doesn’t move her head around alot, this could be an easy and quick fix without the headache of motion tracking and/or rotoscoping.

Is there a way to get creative and horizontally dissect the frame, selectively blurring/color adjusting various pieces, and in so doing soften up the chin area?

Or you could do a picture-in-picture, scaling down her interview shot and embedding it in a graphic bg of some sort…? I’m just trying to think of some time-effective solutions, since digital removal of body parts is a labor-intensive operation that I probably wouldn’t have time for.