[Andrew Shanks]

Yup, Shake is kick-arse at keying, I use both AE and Shake but for those hard keys Shake is my first choice. I’m hoping to do a video tutorial in the coming days to post up here (well, on the Shake Cow section, …I’m a forum leader over on the Shake forum) dealing with shake keying 101 (including dealing with DV/HDV, edge blending, and the concept of core matte, edge matte and tight garbage mattes, …so will cover the shake way of doing what Aharon’s tutorial gives you). There is a thread dealing with this on that forum at the moment.
Here’s hoping I get time to do it soon!

Cheers,

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

As a part time job back in 2000, i used to demo new Adobe software, and went on the road with them for the Photoshop6 road show around our country. Adobe usually prints teeshirts for such events (well, back then they did at least, …everyone who came to one of their shows would get a free teeshirt). I think I have 2 photoshop teeshirt and an illustrator one (I don’t think i wore any of them outside of the shows though, they must be decaying in the bottom of a drawer somewhere…). Anyway, if you want logo material definitely contact the adobe head office for your region (not resellers, but the main office for the country or state), I would think they will be able to help you out. But as others have said, some good additional training books would probably be a better prize for your buddying artists.

Goodluck,

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

a lot of tracking, and if that didn’t work, 3d matchmoving, combined with rotoscoping with a dash of greenscreen keying. Had some friends who worked on it, …not terribly complex techniques, just time consuming and at times a total nightmare 😉 …with effects shots like those, it is all in the planning (before you shoot not after), making sure your full sized actors face movements are as matched to the movement (perspective) of the small body double you are going to composite their features onto (as well as matching lighting, lense, etc).

[Andrew Shanks]

First up, maybe try degraining in AE first (16mm grain can be a bitch for getting a decent tracking lock without jitter). The other thing to do is to track forward, then backward (the same feature) and average them together (again to smooth the final track, ….you can indeed track multiple points and average them all).

Depending on how extreme the perspective change (camera move) is, you might actually need to do a 3d matchmove (track in matchmove software such as Boujou, Matchmover pro or Syntheyes). This will all you to solve for where the camera is moving in 3d space, then you can bring that into AE (using its 3d camera, …imported via .ma support) or Shakes multiplane node (personally I tend to have less grief with AE’s pseudo 3d than Shakes). Place additional layers on layers distributed through z space (i.e. layers switched to be 3d), and arrange them in the comp. You can get a really nice look if care is taken (as the parallax created adds to the reality of the shot). I use Syntheyes and Boujou with AE usually (and it has saved my butt on some pretty nasty tracks from time to time).

If you have Maya or 3d Max, head over to RealViz as they are currently offering their MMTrack plugin for free (its based on their matchmover pro 4 software but works within either Max or Maya). It doesn’t have all the features of a full blown matchmover application, but its still pretty good (and excellent for free!). Only other downside is it won’t export to external applications (although within maya you could probably export the camera solve to its native .ma format and import into AE or Shake).

Goodluck,

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

Keylight should work fine, DVCPro HD is a little noisey but still gives a great key (have done a number of shows that have used varicam).
As with any keying job, the one click key is hardly ever likely to work, I mean you can get okay results if things are well lit and your subject isn’t anything too complicated (with motion blur, hair, etc). Build a proceedural matte (there is a tutorial Barend did here ages ago, …I’ll try and find the link and pop it below), where you build up an edge matte, a vore matte and a garbage matte, …you then apply that to your image and use your own form of spill supression (be it using the built in spill supressor plugin or using saturation (to desat blue channels only), curves or whatever. A bit of light wrap or edge blending can put the finishing touch to the comp.
If you really want to get heavy in the keying dept, get Shake, but there is no reason why you shouldn’t be okay with keylight in AE. 🙂

Here’s Borend’d article on keylight (worth a read)
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/keylight/index.html

and here is his proceedural matte tutorial
https://www.creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/keyingtut/index.html

goodluck,

andrew

[Andrew Shanks]

I don’t have too much to add to what the others have said. If you are wanting to paint on the moving frame, I’d stay within After Effects, if you are wanting to make a clean plate to insert back into a shot (for example to track-in, in order to help with removing something in a scene), use Photoshop (just be sure to degrain before bringing into Photoshop, then regrain (grain match) or add a tiny bit of monochrome noise to the still when you bring it back into your composite (so, as mentioned above, it doesn’t stand out in your shot, as your film/video elements will have grain/noise).

Goodluck,

andrew

🙂

[Andrew Shanks]

Cheers Chris, I have to say I was wondering how they did it, as it was in the days when Optical processes still were the norm and digital compositing was a new (and expensive) option. Makes sense, since if you used a nice fisheye lense, you’d get a nice rolling off effect when the predator was centre frame. In AE maybe try doing the same, using the matte as suggested with optics or bulge as the filter, …and see what you get if you make the distortion over the top on that layer, and then animate the centre point of the effect (lense centre) to follow the character, could get a nice effect where the sides of the character seem to bulge out to the central part of the body (i.e. a fake 3d feel), …then maybe add in a small amount of displacement mapping using the character, just to add detailing/texture to the effect.

Goodluck and let us know how you get on. 🙂

[Andrew Shanks]

Displacement maps are a good place to start for a quick and easy technique. We did a similar effect once, had our character keyed against a greenscreen, she came towards us invisible but warping the surroundings, then had her pulse mildly into view a few times (about 25% opacity, up from zero). Use the displacement map filter on your background layer (or adjustment layer), have your source figure on the top layer (turn off visibility for it, i.e. uncheck the eye), and in the displacement map filter settings, choose that character layer as your source, …then tweak filter settings to suit (if its not giving you a pronounced enough effect, possibly add levels to the character layer, to punch up the contrast a bit). Mess around, but that is a simple way to get the effect. A more correct way is to have a basic 3d model move through shot (and generate a greyscale depth matte out of your 3d application, that you can use as a source for your displacement mapping).

Goodluck!

andrew

🙂

[Andrew Shanks]

Hey Chris,
you’ll soon suss out equivalents to AE in Shake. For instance for levels, using Expand is like tweaking the input levels (under the histogram) and using a Compress is like tweaking the output black/white levels (the gradient bar under the histogram input levels) in AE.

I recommend getting your hands on the “Shake 4 Quick Reference Guide (by Damian Allen), its a tiny notebook style reference book that is like a cheat sheet for using Shake (myself and a number of my friends have this with us where-ever we are working on Shake, …when you’re starting out it’s a godsend for quick info (without having to wade through a manual and have supervisors wondering what sort of noob they’ve just hired).

In regards to AE/Shake, head to this site and check out the AE macros package for Shake (its free):
https://www.strangebrain.com/v2/Products.php?TheProduct=AE_Shake

….word of caution though, if you are learning shake in order to work in facilities, don’t start relying on the AE macros, as you can be sure the facilities you’ll go for work with won’t have them installed. If however you are just doing work on your own system, then definitely check these macros out as they’ll make you feel more at home seeing familiar After Effects filters, etc.

Goodluck!

andrew

🙂

[Andrew Shanks]

Its bad that Adobe support were making you feel like you’re the only one with this problem, because you most certainly aren’t, …we have had nothing but headaches with this ourselves (to be fair it does tend to depend on the hardware it’s running on, …at the facility I was last working at our workstations would always choke on rendering locally, yet if we through it onto the farm those machines always seemed to be sweet (I have no idea what the difference in specs is). I have had this issue a lot on other systems (including my home one) and it has been reported to Adobe. I have put in a feature request for the next version of AE to have the choice of rendering frame buffered (as present) or allow you to switch to scanline if required (…which tends to be slower rendering, but allows you to render high-rez on a very low spec system).

Check out the above page though, as the settings it talks about might just sort out your problems.

Goodluck and let us know how you go!

andrew

🙂