Andrew Shanks
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Max,
what problems are you having with the edges? Are they jagged? You get this if people have shot on a heavily compressed digital format like DV or HDV. There are some tricks and work-arounds for working with DV,a search of this forum will uncover all the usual techniques (usually involving softening of a colour channel before keying) but probably a good plan is to check out the free video tutorial (demo from the guys at Total Training gurus) on getting a nice DV key using keylight then applying the vector blur effect to the matte (works very well!!!)Keying is a pretty involved subject (I composite for film and TV, …and you will usually use more than one key, and often more than one type of keyer, to produce a final alpha to produce the final composite for a layer), and keylight is a powerful plugin with a lot of settings that all contribute to getting a good key. I suggest if you still have issues getting a good edge you maybe work through the examples in the keylight manual and also read the following articles/tutorials by Barend:
https://www.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=/articles/onneweer_barend/keylight/index.html
https://www.creativecow.net/cgi-bin/page_wrapper.cgi?forumid=1&page=/articles/onneweer_barend/keyingtut/index.htmlIf the edge is clean (i.e. no jaggies, and the edge is correct for the edge of the object with none of the screen included) yet you have a blue tint contaminating your foreground element(which is called spill), you can tweak the colour correction within the keylight filter (indeed if you are using keylight, I’d doubt you’d have spill issues, as more often than not it over-corrects for spill), or use the After Effects Spill Suppressor filter (in the under keying in the filters menu).
Goodluck, I hope my little ramble above is useful.
Cheers,
andrew
🙂
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I don’t know when AE7 is out (apart from the general 4th Quarter prediction that we’ve all heard for the past 6 months), and I don’t know what AE7 has in store for us, but in the manual for lensfeed it mentions that under AE7 a significant speed increase should be observed (hmmmmmm). Oh well, wait and see I guess. 🙂
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It should work fine. I haven’t used Matchmover pro, but i use Boujou and Syntheyes and have had success with both (syntheyes is good as it allows 2D after effects tracker exporting as well as solved 3D matchmove data). Basically you want to export a Maya (.ma) camera-move out of Matchmover and load this into After Effects. You can then place elements on 3D planes which will mean they move correctly in relation to the camera move(and the original tracked background plate can stay as a 2D element in AE). I’ve used this technique a few times for matte painting scenes.
Goodluck! -
The codec you want to use is Avid DNxHD codec, ….go to the following link to download all the various avid codecs (follow the included instalation instructions).
https://www.avid.com/content/7952/AvidCodecsLE101.zip
When within after effects, click the options button within the render output settings to tweak the colour settings, resolution, etc to suit (I’m currently on the road so can’t give you the exact settings, this is all from memory, I think the colour setting should be the digital HD version of 601, …I think thats 709, …but don’t quote me on it ;-). Make sure the import settings within avid match these output settings and you should be sweet (I just came off a show for the BBC that was edited on an HD Adrenaline in 8bit and the Avid DNxHD codec gave the best results, …others such as uncompressed targas and animation or microcosm codecs seemed to have a subtle but annoying change in the black levels, …crazy since they’re uncompressed (we did end up rendering some stand alone elements out of combustion and our 3D stations using targas in the end).
The biggest issue though is the fact there is still no version of this free codec for the Mac.Goodluck!
Andrew
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To smooth out the instability/jitters in a track (or stabilize), a good trick is to use multiple trackers and average their results to obtain your final track. The standard one I use all the time is to track the footage in the forward direction, then make a new tracker and track the footage in reverse with it (tracking the same point I did in the first track, …when combined this should eliminate most small jitters), …then apply an expression to a null layer to average the two tracks to derive its position data, …then you parent whatever object is you wish to lock to that track. Do a search of past posts from this forum to find expressions which do this.
Goodluck!
Andrew
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To smooth out the instability/jitters in a track (or stabilize), a good trick is to use multiple trackers and average their results to obtain your final track. The standard one I use all the time is to track the footage in the forward direction, then make a new tracker and track the footage in reverse with it (tracking the same point I did in the first track, …when combined this should eliminate most small jitters), …then apply an expression to a null layer to average the two tracks to derive its position data, …then you parent whatever object is you wish to lock to that track. Do a search of past posts from this forum to find expressions which do this.
Goodluck!
Andrew
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Totally agree with the others, Commotion rocks, and i still use it (love that superclone :-), …still has the most accurate purely 2D tracker i’ve ever used, but it is painfully slow at larger sub-pixel levels.
A tip to get better tracks in AE is to track in one direction, then do a second track in the other direction (i.e. one tracking forward, one tracking backwards along the timeline), then write a quick expression to average those two tracks, …it works really well at giving a less jittery and far more useable track.Another option is a 3D tracking application (I use Syntheyes) that can automatically track numerous points in an image (very quickly) and allow exporting of either an individual tracker (in 2D space), an average of a selection of trackers (2D), or a 3D matchmove (i.e. camera move saved in a maya file that is readable in After Effects, …I have used this a couple of times to track odd angled planes into a shot I’ve been doing a matte painting extension for (where a purely 2D element would not match up right due to perspective shifts.
just a couple of ideas.
Goodluck!
Andrew
🙂
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Totally agree with the others, Commotion rocks, and i still use it (love that superclone :-), …still has the most accurate purely 2D tracker i’ve ever used, but it is painfully slow at larger sub-pixel levels.
A tip to get better tracks in AE is to track in one direction, then do a second track in the other direction (i.e. one tracking forward, one tracking backwards along the timeline), then write a quick expression to average those two tracks, …it works really well at giving a less jittery and far more useable track.Another option is a 3D tracking application (I use Syntheyes) that can automatically track numerous points in an image (very quickly) and allow exporting of either an individual tracker (in 2D space), an average of a selection of trackers (2D), or a 3D matchmove (i.e. camera move saved in a maya file that is readable in After Effects, …I have used this a couple of times to track odd angled planes into a shot I’ve been doing a matte painting extension for (where a purely 2D element would not match up right due to perspective shifts.
just a couple of ideas.
Goodluck!
Andrew
🙂
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No easy answer to this one. I did a show a couple of years back where we tried the old blue signal thing (the TV was fairly modern so would display blue if no signal was present). The biggest problem we had was that the blue spill you get from the screen is crazy bad, you end up getting very fuzzy soft edges around the screen and having to do a bit of spill suppression for the surrounding areas. Another option is actually sticking green or blue card (with tracking blips) to the front on the screen (hard to get card flat and non-creased, but still doable). the other option is to pre-edit whatever needs to be running in the screen, burn it to a DVD (in either looped form, or single play) and plug a DVD player in to cue the playback (make sure you have some sort of countdown leader on it so the actors have a warning about their cue).
As for tracking points, little squares of gaffer tape work well, make sure the colour contrasts with the screen colour you use. After Effects can have problems with tracking crosses if they rotate too far (since the program has problems dealing with the fact the original geometry that was looking like a plus symbol might now be looking like an X, you can of course sort that out by starting the track again when it goes astray (and it will take a new snapshot of the trget geometry from the position it starts tracking from). A tip with tracking things in AE is to create a new null layer and apply any transforms to that, ..then parent whatever layer (or layers) you want to move to that null. This way you can scale, rotate and move your layer independantly and it will always retain the tracked transform (as its following the un-changed null movement/transform).Goodluck!
Andrew
🙂
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Thanks Dave!
the footage was definitely interlaced, I work on progressive (25P HD) footage most of the time (man, I love working with whole frames rather than interlaced). With the footage in question, each field is distinctly different (in that there is a difference in the frame depending on the interpretation, …i.e. a ball rolling through screen might be further on with lower than with upper field, …which you expect with 50 fields per second, …but i still don’t know why the motion wasn’t doing the little step forward step back dance under one interpretation, ….very strange…. 🙂