[Andy George]

Hi Johnny,
That type of functionality is not built directly into keylight, but can be done
pretty easily.

Here is how I would do it.

1. Duplicate your footage to be keyed
2. On the top copy pull your key like you normally would
3. Apply the tint effect to your finished key. Change the black
value to white so that you have a completely white image. We will use
this as a luma matt to tell AE what information to display.
4. Precompose your luma matt
5. go back to your original footage copy. This needs to sit directly
below your luma matt in stacking order. Change the track matt to Luma Matt inverted.
This tells AE to use the black pixel values of the above layer to determine the opacity of the lower layer-

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Nico,

I can think of a few ways to tackle the problem but not without diving into some expressions.

You could place an identical camera in your precomp and then link it to your main camera via quick-whipping the position/orientation properties from one comp to another.
That way the camera in your precomp will mirror your main comp.

This method starts to run into problems if you parent your camera to null objects to animate the camera.

A more robust method might be to use an orientation expression linked to a null object. Then use this null object to drive your camera and the orientation of the layers in the precomp.

Turn auto orient off.
Put a 3D null object in the same position
as your camera. Parent the camera to the null.
In your precomp you will want to apply this expression to the orientation
of the objects you want to follow your null

L = thisComp.layer("Null 1");
lookAt(fromWorld(L.toWorld(L.transform.anchorPoint)),transform.anchorPoint)

With the top line of the expression selected after the = sign, quickwhip to the orientation property
of the null in your main comp. Now it should look something a bit more like this

L = comp("Comp 1").layer("Null 1")
lookAt(fromWorld(L.toWorld(L.transform.anchorPoint)),transform.anchorPoint)

Now as you animate the null object the camera will match it’s position and the layers in the
precomp will orient towards the null objects anchor piont.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Dale,

The pixels are not being recombined in any way here. They exist on a 1:1 level.
You will have as many pixels at the end of the process as you did at the beginning.

What’s happening is the shape of pixels is actually changing. Your HDV codec uses non-square pixels (Par 1.3). This elongated pixel shape is what creates your nonstandard size (1440×1080) To be viewed properly in most circumstances this needs to be converted to square pixels (Par 1) Most editing applications do this automatically for you. After Effects will do it if you have the “toggle pixel aspect ratio” button selected. Once those rectangular pixels are squished back down to perfect squares your video size changes to the standard 1920×1080.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Olly,

I have CS3 and CS4 running on the same machine with no problems.

I think the deal is it works as long as you install CS3 first

-Andy

[Andy George]

[Sebastien Mouttet] “is there another way to do this without having to create 3 layers?”

You could do it using 2 layers by skipping the null and parenting the front layer to the back layer.

Here is a cool expression by Dan Ebberts that will make a layer invisible when facing away from the
camera.
https://www.motionscript.com/design-guide/invisible-facing-away.html

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Charles,
Make a new project, drag and drop your projects to be
joined into the project panel-

-Andy

[Andy George]

Stephen,
I noticed in another post your are running FCP7.
What operating system are you running?

Do you have the most current updates for After Effects and Final Cut?

You could try trashing your Preferences and see if that does anything.
Hold down the Command, Shift and Option keys as you start After Effects to restore preferences to their default settings.

I am importing a file from final cut
How are are you exporting the file from Final cut?
Is the File in Final Cut Prores or are you converting
it to prores upon export?

But after efffects does not recongize the file
It recognizes it in 8bit though correct?

But after effects will work with h264.
Are you saying that when you set a comp containing h.264
footage to 16bit you don’t have the same problem?
Im assuming you know h.264 and AE don’t play well together.

It would help if you could walk us through your process step
by step. The more details you can provide, the more likely we will be
able to figure out the problem.

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Joseph,

Check out these links-
https://kb2.adobe.com/cps/402/kb402801.html
https://blogs.adobe.com/toddkopriva/2009/03/prores-422-colors-in-after-eff.html
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/2/973320

-Andy

[Andy George]

Göran,

Your welcome. Maybe this script would help to
center all of your anchor points-

https://aescripts.com/repositionanchorpoint/

-Andy

[Andy George]

Hi Göran,

This is from the adobe help manual
https://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-79fca.html

Here’s an expression for the Scale property of a layer that maintains the relative size of the layer in frame while changing the z position (depth) of a layer or the Zoom value of a camera:

cam = thisComp.activeCamera;
distance = length(sub(position, cam.position));
scale * distance / cam.zoom;

-Andy