Arthur Vibert
Forum Replies Created
-
Have you tried pre-rendering the precomp?
Arthur VIbert
-
Lumiere is not, in my opinion, a professional solution to working in HDV. I found it very difficult to work with, particularly since I had a large quantity of footage. I think the only good FCP solution to working in HDV is FCP 5.
Arthur VIbert
-
Or right : )
-
Sounds like you need the “select all tracks forward” tool. You access it by clicking and holding on the third button from the top of the toolbar until the tool options slide out. Select the tool that looks like two arrows pointing left. You can also access it by pressing “t” 4 times on the keyboard.
Good luck.
Arthur Vibert
-
Do you have Motion? There are quite a few particle fire generators that come with that. Also, Wondertouch makes several suites of emitter plug-ins for Motion that have some excellent fire and smoke effects.
Arthur Vibert
-
I’ve been doing quite a lot of greenscreen work with HDV recently. Unfortunately it suffers from many of the same problems that DV does – high compression resulting in compression artifacts that can compromise the edge of your key. That stated, it is possible to get a pretty good key – you just have to stick with it. It really helps if the original video is shot properly as well. The less you have to do to accommodate poorly shot footage, the better your end result will be.
If you are new to keying in After Effects I would recommend “After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques” by Mark Christiansen. It is packed with great information and also has several strategies for dealing with highly compressed formats like DV and HDV.
Arthur Vibert
-
DV, as you’ve discovereed, has a lot of compression artifacts that can cause the problem you are describing. One technique for reducing the effect of the compression artifacts is to convert your footage from RGB to YUV using Channel Combiner. Check repeat edge pixels and using Channel Blur apply a small amount of blur to the green and blue channels. You can solo each channel by pressing Alt+2/Option+2 or Alt+3/Option+3. Focus on a particularly noisy area of the frame (in your case probably around your subject’s hair) and apply just enough blur to reduce the artifacting. Apply Channel Combiner one more time to return from YUV to RGB. This should reduce your chatter.
I highly recommend “After Effects 6.5 Studio Techniques” by Mark Christiansen which is where I got this technique. It has tons of great information about compositing with AE.
Arthur Vibert
-
I’ll second the dvMatte Pro vote. It’s designed for greenscreen work in DV – which as we all know is difficult because of all the compression – and it works wonderfully well. It also works very well for less compressed video formats as a result. I’ve used it successfully to key some very difficult greenscreen footage (I know, because I shot it, too). The price is quite reasonable for this powerful tool, as well. You can find it at dvgarage.com.
Arthur VIbert
-
Go to the Foundry site https://www.thefoundry.co.uk where you’ll find a number of greenscreen and bluescreen samples you can play with.
Arthur Vibert
-
Try going into your user preferences. You probably have “on timecode break” set to “make new clip.” You can change that to either “abort capture” or “warn after capture.” Be aware that if you change your setting to “warn after capture” there could be broken timecode in your clip.
When this becomes problematic for me I usually just capture now and make a note in my log which I run on a seperate computer in Filemaker so if I need to recapture later finding the clip is less of a problem.
Arthur VIbert