Aharon Rabinowitz
Forum Replies Created
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I don’t know anything about the DAT format, but I can tell you that to compress your AVI’s cleanly (or with as little noise as possible) either render to the AVI DivX codec (which are still large files), or use a program like Sorenson Squeeze or Cleaner to compress it well.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
In your output module, set it to RGB+A (to include the alpha channel), and this is very important: Make sure to render with the setting “Straight (Unmatted)” instead of “Premultiplied (Matted with Color)”
When you render it, if you play those files they will look terrible (Jagged and non-transparent), but when you bring them into FCP or any compositing software, they will read the alpha channel and clean it up nicely.
If you don’t choose straight, your BG color will get pulled in, and the colors will be off.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
Instead of using the glow effect, which I find a biot moody, why not try this:
Pre-comp the entire object fade-in sequence you have, and then when you drop that comp into your final comp, suplicate the layer, and on the top of the 2 layers, add a blur, and change the transfer mode to “add” – play with the transparency a bit.
Maybe that will help.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
Try turning up (or is it down?) the viscosity property when you want them to stop. This controls how sticky the air is.
If you turn it up to a medium value, they’ll eventually slow down on their own. However if you want them to stop suddenly, you’ll need to keyframe it so that at one frame it’s fast, and the next it slows down and stops.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
Since even on star wars they have to clean up their keying, you’re going to have to do a little work. There’s no free greenscreen ride. Serioulsy.
If you try yo key out the entire shot, instead of an area of focus (you actors for example), you will only make yourself miserable.
First things first – Create an animated junk matte around the area of focus. In other words – if you have a person on a green screen, before you key them, create a loose animated mask around them that moves with them. With the mask set to “add,” everything outside the masked area will be invisible. Then key that. This way, you only have to worry about the stuff closest to the actor.
Since your stuff is bad, there are probably changes in color and light of the BG – in that case, you may need to keyframe the keying effect’s properties to change over time.
You may still need to roto it a bit and use levels. Bad footage is bad footage, no matter how you spin it.
OK, now that I’ve said that – let me make a suggestion that works sometimes, and sometimes not:
Select your green screen footage, and add the Keylight effect to it. Get the best key you can – it doesn’t need to be perfect.
Next, with the layer selected, choose Layer > Auto Trace
Tell it to use the work area and set the channel to alpha.
This creates several animated masks on the layer that when combined make a very tight junk matte.
Set all of the masks to “add” – you may have to make only the first one add and the rest subtract or vice versa. Play around until you get what you need.
Set all of the masks to be feathered about 10 pixels
Set all of the mask expansions on the masks to at least 5 or 10 pixels.
Play with all of these values and see what you get. You may want more feathering and expansion.
This often works, but sometimes doesn’t. It’s really iffy, but iof you get lucky, You should have a tight key+junk matte at this point.
You may need to actually duplicate the layer (so you have 2 exact copies, one on top of the other) so that it fills in some of the more transparent areas. Or you could try to precompose it and use a levels effect as I described previosly.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
1 minute of uncompressed video (no audio) is about 1.8 GB.
When you are using Quicktime with animation compression, depending on the footage, it can be significantly smaller or not much smaller at all. You can try switching to another codec, and then maybe setting the QT quality settings lower, to help lower the file size.
What I usually do is render out as animation compression, and then take my render and drop it into a nother program called “Sorenson Squeeze” to compress it cleanly. It’s works pretty well. “Cleaner” does the same thing, though I haven’t used it.
—————————————-
Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
I’ve gotten this message for 3 reasons:
1) The file is currupt – if you can make it again, or get the orginal file again, try that.
2) AE just doesnt like the format – convert it to something else
3) AE is running low on memory – could be a memory leak, or could just be too much for AE to handle.
You can set AE to flush the memory during renders – here’s a string explaining that (This is from when I asked the question):
https://www.creativecow.net/forum/view_thread.php?threadid=724345&forumid=2&postid=110310745576931&highlight=shecret&archive=_2004|1|0
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
I’ve been given stuff with dots and cross hairs, and both worked. I can’t say which is better. As long as your tracking points are really defined from anything else in the immediate area Both color and brightness), you shouldn’t have too much trouble – though ineveitably you will probably have to make minor corrections to your track – it’s almost never a free ride. But, using trackpoints will make life a lot easier – a lot of times I wish I had something…
I will say that feeding anything to a monitor may cause problems – at least with a tradiditional monitor. If you’ve ever watched the news when they showed a monitor in the BG of an interview, you can see the monitor refreshing itself – it blinks, and a line passes over it repeatedly. While the human eye can’t see this, it becomes very obvious on video. It may get in the way of tracking.
I don’t know if this is an issue on a flatpanel – I’d do some testing or ask someone who’s done this beofore about any potential pitfalls, just to be sure. I’ve never been given anything like that.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
I would guess that that was done with 3D (At least I’d do it that way) – however there is a tutorial on creating a filmstrip that uses a plug-in for AE, called Forge Freeform, that can do something like that , through I don’t really know much about it.
https://www.forge.net/ffae_filmstrip.htm
Also, maybe Trapcode’s 3D stroke can help too:
https://trapcode.com/products_3dstroke.html
If I were doing it in 3D, with Maya, I’d create some curves I wanted my strip to follow, then create some strips with lots of polygons, and then set to animate on the path, and then deform to the path.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com -
Rendering is the term used for The process of creating a synthetic image from data.
In this case, that means outputting the particles on your stage as an image sequence (such as TIF, TGA, PNG) or as an AVI.
Until you render out your movie or sequence (by hitting the Red Record button), all that work you did in pIllusion hasn’t actually been used for anything. It’s still just data. You want to turn that into pictures, which is what rendering, whether in pIllusion, AE, or Maya, is all about.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
—————————————-
Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com