Andrew Somers
Forum Replies Created
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Animated masks are the realm of MOCHA. It’s not uncommon to use Mocha for masks even when doing green screen.
But, do you specifically need a mask for something and you can’t use the alpha channel?
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
Regarding permissions— knowing now that you’re in a mixed environment (Win/osX) makes things weirder. But regarding the UID 501 issues and permissions — I’ve had files that both “appeared” to have the same permissions setting in the Finder’s Get Info screen on two different machines, but still not work because the same user “name” (what’s visible in Get Info) was actually a different UID on the different machines. Since OS X 10.5 I’ve made a point to initialize users in a specific order so they all have the same UID/GID on all machines.
On top of this, there are more to permissions than what is shown in the Finder Get Info — ACL, aka access control lists, also affect access.
But I don’t know how this would affect windows as I avoid using that os.
IGNORING OWNERSHIP:
While you’ve solved the problem, there is something that might help in the future — If you connect an external drive, in Get Info for that drive you can set it to “Ignore Ownership”. Then if you consolidate TO that drive, all files should be assigned UID 99. This is a “magic ID” because it makes it appear as if it is owned by any account that looks at the file.Also you can set UID 99 in the terminal, with the command:
sudo chown 99 filename
This shows a list of files with the user and group names and permissions.
ls -l
This shows the list with user IDs.
ls -nSo, here are the name and IDs of some files:
I ran chown to change image.png to UID 99 — but notice it still says asomers/UID 501.
But look when logged in as root, it is *actually* UID 99. But you can’t see this from your regular account because OS X aliases UID 99 permissions to the logged in user. (The same goes for group GID 99).
To change both user and group to 99 for everything in a folder and its subfolders, use:
sudo chown -R 99:99 /Path/To/Files/*
But do be careful, as you wouldn’t want to chown system or other files that should not have permission altered.QUESTION: If I can ask what codec were the files rendered with originally before you re-did them as DNxHD? I know Adobe dropped support for some codecs in the latest version, and I wonder if that is related somehow.
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
(Cassius) …working in a few 4k projects. On which I’ve got great responsiveness either with all files being prores/dnx, or high quality h264…
It depends very much on how far the key frames (I frames) are away from each other. If the keyframes are set close (low GOP), it’s workable. Far apart? Not so much. The higher the GOP setting, the farther the keyframes are apart, and that results in the more RAM needed to buffer, more processing, etc.
So you could have H264 with a vey low GOP (I frames close together) that could work. But notice that in AME the defaults are often something like 72 frames — having frames set that far apart is great for uploading to the web, but literally unusable in editorial.
When you’re trying to find the right H264 setting, trying playing in reverse. When editing, you’re scrubbing and playing in reverse a lot, but H264 typically favors forward only playback, so reverse play just isn’t happening If the GOP is too large, and it often is.
I’ve certainly worked with my share of H264 sources, and if it is camera original such as from a dSLR I usually do try and work with that rather than transcoding if it’s an element for a VFX, but if it is source for editing then I’d want it all transcoded. My personal workstation is a 24 core xeon with 48 GB RAM and and a PCI SSD and RAIDS everywhere, I still definitely feel a difference using H264 vs ProRes. ProRes just works faster encode and decoding. Rendertimes ae the best with ProRes sources and ProRes outputs.
For this and other reasons, 10 bit ProRes is our house standard for quicktime proxies and some intermediates (even finals for video projects — though we will more likely use EXR for intermediates and finals for features).
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
What is the file/folder structure? Are the media folders and project in the same root?
Otherwise, it sounds like you might have a permissions problem. Are you OS X or Windows?
If you are OS X, is every being used by user 501? (google OS X user 501 for more on that fun).
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
Hard to saw without seeing the actual footage.
However, as far as facial sweat, I’d say use Mocha to track masks around the facial features, to isolate the sweaty skin.
Then reduce any specularity — any shinyness — One way would be to “clamp” the highlights using Levels and “clip to output white” ON, and set the output at the brightest skin tone, but darker than the specular, glistening sweat.
Adjust the gamma to get the skin tone right while clipping off all the specularity.
Also, desaturating a bit will help with the “dehydrated” look.
Also, if you’ve tracked in Mocha for the mask, you could sue the track data for a “grunge layer’, something that could be overlaid to affect the texture of the skin. One possibility is to take a high res image of dry, cracked skin and scale it appropriately and track it, then either ADD (or possibly MULTIPLY depending on the elements) it onto the plate.
If you ADD it, you’d need an adjustment layer with levels and the same tracked masks to bring the white levels back down, but an advantage here is that use of levels will also help suppress the specular highlights of the sweat.
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
Is it the long trails that you are after? Then you can use the ECHO plug in.
https://helpx.adobe.com/after-effects/using/time-effects.html
You can also use motion blur to a similar effect, as I discuss in this article.
And then finally, a script or expression might do you well, here’s one example:
https://www.motionscript.com/mastering-expressions/follow-the-leader.htmlAndrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
You (typically) never want video compressed like H264 as a source file, as it will slow the working process greatly because all frames since the last keyframe have to be parsed in order to show a current frame.
But there are plenty of “editorial friendly” codecs, ProRes and Avid in particular, that are available in a variety of data rates. If it’s a proxy that is going to be replaced, then ProRes draft or LT, or Avid DNxHD36. If it is more for final, then Regular ProRes or DNxHD115 or 175.
Alo, on the subject of DCT compression: once the FIRST pass of compression is done, “most” of the image loss is already there, and subsequent DCT re-compressions don’t contribute as much degradation as that first compression pass.
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
To follow up Mark, I tried to recreate the issue — and couldn’t till I read your post again about having the image at 1% scale. I see that the issue is identical for POINT and SPOT lights, and is NOT there with PARALLEL lights (notice also that parallel lights do NOT have a “shadow diffusion” setting).
Basically, a ray tracing engine creates depth-of-field, motion blur, and antialiasing by shooting several rays out of each pixel. As Stu Maschwitz puts it, the AE Ray Tracer is “a brute-force multi-sample renderer“.
My assumption is that the “point” light is 1×1 pixel square. Considering the spot light looks the same, I imagine that the math there also starts with a 1×1 pixel light (this makes sense for computation, I’d venture that a 0x0 point would probably not be used due to computational difficulties or artifacts).
Consider that if you scale your image to 1%, that means that 100 x 100 pixels of your original image now fit in the same size area as that 1×1 point light. And when antialiasing is turned on, multiple rays are created.
So it would seem that even with the light’s shadow diffusion set to 0.0, there is always *some* due to the anti-aliasing multi-ray-sample nature of the system, not to mention the “math precision” (or lack thereof) resulting from *both* scaling small and being very close to the light.
In an attempt to quantify this, I did the following experiment. I created a 100×100 checkerboard, where each square is 10×10. Then setup a scene where the white solid was 1000 from the point light. And then the checkerboard was various distances and scales from the light, with scale 100% being halfway between the light and the white solid.
The second test was just one square, set 5 from the light and zoomed in to show the detail, with only a minor scale change between 8% and 12%.
Here are the results:
Interpretation: I think this may indicate the point light sources is 1×1 pixels, because at 10%, each square is 1×1 of an unscaled pixel, and in this one each black square is a nearly solid dot, and it rapidly degrades as the scale/distance decreases. This is echoed on the right where at less that 10% (meaning the square is 1×1) it becomes a fading dot, but the square shape becomes more apparent as we go larger than that.
As to fixing the problem for your project – is there a reason you can’t move the light farther back, or put the image layer closer to the white?
My suggestion would be to scale no smaller than 50%, and place the light and image as needed to accommodate that (or larger) scale. Alternately use a parallel light, though that might not work for the rest of what you are building.
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
This is easily done with an expression.
On the CompA layer inside CompB for instance, you can refer to the CompA layers and manipulate them via the expression (and whatever controls you set up for the expression), including visibility, opacity, etc.
Expressions are easy to write Javascript with some specific functions added for After Effects. And in fact much of the time you need to do very little writing of code, as you can “pickwhip” to create all sorts of custom controls.
Here’s a “No Writing” version (just pickwhip):
As an example, you could add a “Slider” control to the CompA layer (inside CompB) and it appears as a slider in effects controls, then pickwhip the Opacity of one of the CompA internal layers to that control. On this slider control in CompB you can add further expressions/keyframes to that same control, allowing you to control the internal layer of CompA while in CompB.
If this is something you do a lot, you could even save it as an “animation preset”.
If you would rather use the checkbox to just toggle from 0 to 1 opacity, then you do need just a tiny bit of code:
if(comp("CompB").layer("CompA").effect("Checkbox Control")("Checkbox").value) 100 else 0;
This code assumes that CompA is nested inside CompB and the CompA layer has the checkbox added to it. The IF statement sets the return value to 100 if the box is checked, and 0 if not.If you’re wondering, the checkbox can’t be pickwhipped to thevisibility (layer enable) button, as expressions can’t access it — however SCRIPTS can access the visibility button, so you could develop a script instead, not sure which is best for you.
All this said, I’m not sure from your example what you’re really trying to accomplish?
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com -
AE probably isn’t the best place for a thing like this, but:
The reason the planks are not aligned when on the curve is because the anchor point is what connects to the curve, not the edges.
You need to offset the anchor point’s Z axis to align the edges. This will probably fix the “bump” too.
Andrew Somers
VFX & Title Supervisor
https://www.GeneralTitles.com
