[Barend Onneweer]

[Wim Roegels] ”

Did I get you right: with ‘Buena Depth Cue’ I get the grayscale depth of field information to feed into lenscare?”

I’m not near my workstation right now, but roughly it goes like this: you open the 3D composition you want to add DoF to. Make sure DoF is disabled for the camera. After installing Depth Cue, there are a couple of new menu options, one of which is ‘Precompose Depth’.

When you do this, Depth Cue creates a duplicate of your 3D comp, with all layers having the depth effect applied.

You end up with two identical comps, one of which is your depth matte.

Drag both comps into a third comp. Turn off visibility for the depth matte. Apply Lenscare to the other comp, and set its depth source to the depth layer.

It’s a bit of a workaround. Changes in the 3D comp aren’t automatically copied in the depth comp. So you really want to wait with this until you’re completely satisfied with the 3D comp, or you’ll end up removing and redoing the depth comp a couple of times.

Not the prettiest or fastest solution. But it works.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

🙂

Lenscare is spectacularly cool. But unfortunately you can’t just replace the built-in DoF blur for 3D comps with Lenscare…

You’d need a depth-matte to control the lensblur. I use Buena Depth Cue for that. It’s a bit of an annoying workaround and somewhat slow to render, but in many cases I find it worth the hassle, to replace the ugly built-in depth blur with Lenscare.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

[imaxblue] “So…what I’m looking for is the best possible monitor for both sharpness/clarity as well as color depth/contrast.”

Well, best for sharpness would be a TFT screen. Best for color fidelity would be a large CRT.

The Dell and Apple screens are okay, but can by no means be considered reliable for accurate color monitoring – partly due to a lack of calibration options.

For color accurate TFT’s with good calibration options start looking at eCinema and CineTal

https://www.ecinemasys.com/
https://cinetal.com/

These are the industry standard for color accurate TFT monitoring – but they max out at 1920×1080.

Eizo has a couple of options in their high-end segment, such as:

https://www.eizo.com/products/lcd/s2411w/index.asp

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Adobe’s licensing scheme actually allows you to install AE on two machines: one at work and one at home. You’re not supposed to run both copies at the same time although there’s no technical mechanism to prevent this.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Yep, you can run Linux on a PS3. But you can’t run AE on Linux…

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Yes, you can just change your framerate to 25. It’s a weird omission in the presets, but 1080p25 is a perfectly valid standard.

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

You could have tried googling “Knoll Unmult”… But basically it created an alpha channel for elements on a black background. Originally aimed at compositing explosion footage, but works well on lensflares.

And it’s free.

https://www.redgiantsoftware.com/unmult.html

Bar3nd

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Sheesh, I got it.

I used a null layer parented to the camera to mark the focus point, and used bits of the expression two threads down to link layer transparency to their distance to the null object.

Then I tied camera focus distance to the camera’s distance to the null object:

L = thisComp.layer(“focus point”);
P1 = L.position – position;
P2 = toWorldVec([0,0,1]);
dot(P1,P2);

Since the null layer is parented to the camera with x and y values being 0, it’s easy to link it’s relative Z-depth to a slide, so now I can control focus distance and falloff with sliders on a separate layer…

Phew…

It’s probably possible to do this without the null object, but since it’s controlled by a slider, I can set the layer to shy and forget its existence.

Thanks anyway.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

[Annietron] “I would like to hear that AE7 is AE 6.5 but with new features.”

Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. There are several articles and tutorials on 7.0 on CreativeCow, so I’d have a look to see if you like it.

But personally I don’t ever want to go back to 6.5.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Although the thoughts behind that article are still valid, I’ve refined my workflow somewhat over the years – and the addition of Keylight to today’s toolset really helps.

I’ve done extensive keying on DVCProHD material over the last year and here’s what I do BEFORE I key.

Drag the footage into a comp. Apply Deartifactor from the Key Correct Pro set. Highly recommended. It really is a world of difference.

Add an adjustment layer. Apply Remove Grain. If you apply the plugin directly to the layer it’ll bypass the deartifactor.

Usually I set noise removal to around 0.5 and sometimes I add a little bit of temporal filtering if the material is noisy.

Drag this comp into a new one and proceed as you would normally – using this comp as your source footage.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects