[Barend Onneweer]

It also depends on what the source for the material is. You mention dpx files. Are you working on film scans? Or was it some flavour of HD video?

If your source was HDCAM or DVCProHD, I’d de-artifact first. There’s a good de-artifactor in Red Giant’s Key Correct Pro. There’s a similar one in Magic Bullet if you happen to have that.

Then I usually do a grain removal pass, using AE’s Remove Grain. Even if the grain is hardly visible, it will result in less edge jitter on the key, and less noise in the semi-transparencies.

If your material is film scans, skip the artefact removal, but just add the grain removal.

No fix for bad lighting, and it will result in slower rendering, but it should improve quality of the edges of the matte.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

AE is still mostly CPU based for rendering. GPU assists in certain previewing and rendering processes.

The only question is how AE CS3 will compare with or without Nucleo Pro, in terms of efficient use of all 8 cores. But I have no doubt that the 8 core will be substantially faster than the quad core. Over to Steve…

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Any 32-bit application can only address a maximum of 2 GB of memory. Pretty well documented limitation.

A ‘solution’ is to use something like Nucleo or Nucleo pro, which will launch multiple instances of AE during previewing or rendering.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

STAY OFF THE CAPS MAN!

There is no easy way to change the color schemes for layers, but it might improve in the next version :-). You’ll be able to download a beta version from the Adobe site soon, so you can evaluate whether the new version works for you.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Not sure if you know anything about bookkeeping, but it’s all about rounding errors.

Let’s say you had a pretty complex set of calculations. Add, subtract, divide, multiply. Loads of numbers being pushed around. Now in every calculation you decide not to use decimals, but round to integers after each calculation.

The end result could be significantly different from the outcome if you had used decimals.

So it’s all about preserving accuracy throughout all the calculations, to avoid rounding errors. Even if you decide to round off in the final stage.

Hence 16-bit calculations are better, even if in the final stage you go back to 8-bit. Of course 32-bit float would be even better.

The reality is that in some cases you won’t see the difference. And in some you’ll see dramatic differences.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

If I read correctly, the statement is that CURRENT versions of Adobe software won’t be updated for Vista. My guess would be that CS3 will run on Vista.

You don’t really expect them to rewrite AE 7.0 to be optimized for Vista would you? At this point, wouldn’t you rather get AE 8.0?

Same with MacIntel support. Do you really want Adobe to spend their resources on rewriting AE 7.0 for MacIntel? I’m assuming at this point you’d much rather get 8.0.

I fail to see the big news here.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Unless you’re looking at an iMac or Macbook as an alternative, for 1500 you won’t be able to buy a Mac Pro.

Other than Audition which isn’t available on OSX all your tools will run on both platforms. If you’re already working on Windows, I don’t see a specific reason to switch.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

https://generalspecialist.com/2006/10/greenscreen-and-bluescreen-checklist.asp

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

As the others have mentioned, when you shoot 35mm for chromakeying, you want to telecine to files. Next time make sure you get 2k dpx (10-bit) or tiff (16-bit) sequences. Even when your final delivery format is SD, you’re going to love keying at high resolution and downsampling afterwards.

But to help out on this particular crisis: make sure AE isn’t separating fields. Even if your footage is progressive, you need to make sure AE is interpreting it as such.

And second: I’ve had good results smoothing out jagged edges by using the Artifact Removal tools in Key Correct Pro.

https://redgiantsoftware.com/keycorrect.html

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Hmmm… interestingly, I see that I don’t have the camera mapper either. It’s mentioned on one page at their website, but not on the other…

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects