[Anthony Dupsta]

Scott,
Going to make a bunch of assumptions, only to help speed up your process.
Your title is film editor. So I am going to assume you are cutting, you have jumped into AE and want to do a quick Temp offline effect to import into an offline Avid reel? Again, massive speculation?
So “Look Up Tables” can be baked in or used just to view with. They also follow particular rules on how they are applied. Lets skip all that for right now…
Here are two things you can do since I am speculating on your final delivery. What is it BTW?
v001: You can jump into AE, render out what you need, with no LUT and all the color management off ‘none”
v002: Jump into AE, apply the effect/utility/applyLut. Apply that .cube or 3dl or what ever they gave you. Bake it to your render also with the color managment off, ‘none” and now…
You can deliver one with the LUT baked in and one with out any color mods, clean. Stay away from the REC709 color space for now. Many LUTs will do that rec709 conversion if that is necessary. However, worse case scenario, the editor applies the LUT on his end to your clean render and does some temp color timing to match the dallies.
They will import your render as REC709 and the gamma will than be changed from your sRGB render. Slight gamma shift.
As a rule of thumb I would say LUTs should not get baked in and should only be used as a viewer to keep the pipeline simple.
Try those two renders and mine for better feedback on what is needed.

[Anthony Dupsta]

Scott,

So that is really for viewing. If you want to see what the editor will be seeing than, yes you can set it over to rec709 so you get an idea what he/she will be seeing.
But when they import it into the avid is when they will set it to RGB or REC709. That is regardless to what you set your viewing space as.
Good Luck

[Anthony Dupsta]

Thank you Mark!

I tried making a modification without success. I will do my time-remapping with timewarp sometimes. I set up timewarp to use “source frames” and tried this expression you have. Do you have any suggestion on how to use this technique with timewarp instead of AE’s time-remap? Thanks so much, this is very helpful.

[Anthony Dupsta]

Sorry bout that.

[Anthony Dupsta]

Yes that is what my post explained. I appreciated you reiterating to others how the features in Color Finesse work.
Now lets get back to the issue at hand, seeing if anyone has used Color Finesse3 in a linear working space specifically using EXRs. If so, what is the best way to manage the color. I have a feeling it will not work for users in Linear.

[Anthony Dupsta]

After reading through the link, the answer is: Drum roll…
“No…in 2014, AEcc can not manually draw a marquee around elements in the composition window. You are limited with a “fixed square marquee selection tool.”
So when a user wants to draw a selection around specific nulls in the composition window, 150 nulls located within a point cloud of a tracked Car, and the car is not shaped like a perfect square…users are Out of luck in AE. Got to use a square marquee tool and shift click all those little buggers.

That would be a helpful feature for the future. Free hand marquee tool, Something users have come accustom to while using, Nuke, PFtrack, boujou, motion, Photosop, AI, Fusion, C4D, and Maya. Pretty solid concept and worthwhile for AE to explore for the future! 🙂

Thanks.

[Anthony Dupsta]

Just encase anyone runs into this issue or his thread.
This has been working with some project files and others it is hit or miss. I am working in a Linear work space with EXRs. It seems that when if calls out the error and will not cache in the BG. Nothing will get it working, I have to restart AE, change project files, and when I get it to work on a diff project file, I can come back to the ones that don’t work, and it will begin to cache. I have tried switching disks. But the issue continues. I am trying to weed out the variables. So far the constant variable is all my test are within a Linear working color space. I am going to swap out some of the third party plug-ins and see if those are factors?

[Anthony Dupsta]

Hey Cain,

No they can not be merged down. I agree that this would be a nice feature to flatten your stokes or bake them down in comp. My comps have gotten very heavy with hundreds of strokes in the past and it can get slow.
Two similar solutions I can offer:
One is to of-course bake that comp out, re-import, that will indeed merge them! 🙂
However something you can try; make sure all your paint strokes are inside the same comp. Right click on that comp in the project window and and you can see that the comp, not footage, but comp, can become a proxy. So you can bake the comp down into an image sequence and than assign that heavy paint comp, with tons of strokes, into one image seq that you can toggle on and off for further modifications, much lighter but requires organization and media management. That is my suggestions.

[Anthony Dupsta]

I will keep an eye on this, got to figure out this strange hit or miss BG caching issue. This week I will take note and try it on all the diff comps and see if I can find a pattern. One variable; I will hook up a thunderbolt EXT drive and designate that as the cache drive. Just as a test. However here are the specs for my HD and system while I have been experiencing this BG caching issue. Right now, I will hook up and try an EXT drive this week as a test.

Here are the Specs, specifically the HD
Seagate ST31000528AS 1TB
Journaled HFS+

AE 12.2.1.5
Mid 2011 iMac
3.4 GHz Intel Core i7
32GB DD3
AMD 6970M
OS 10.9.2

[Anthony Dupsta]

No rhyme or reason that I can figure out. I imported an EXR seq from a diff job in a new project and set it up. That started to BG cache with my nice blue line. All good.
I can get it to work sometimes and than magically sometimes it will error out. All this with out any variables?

I switched back into the comp I could not get to work and clicked to cache the back ground and it began to work? So I than cleared all my memory and data base. That same comp would not BG cache after I purged memory and disk cache. NO go. I resarted AE, it began to work.
It seems that it is finicky? I can not dial in why it does and does not work? It is hit or miss. I just purged the system and it now is caching. I am just putting this out there encase others have this strange hit or miss thing happening.