[Barend Onneweer]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for your reply. Wouldn’t a 6G drive on a 3G port just work (bandwidth limited to 3G of course)?

Barend

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

Although After Effects is faster when working from uncompressed material (given a fast working disk, otherwise it might even slow down due to the filesize of the uncompressed material) – the picture quality is the same, whether you work directly from the h264 or convert to uncompressed first. Working directly from h264 means you save the disk space but AE may be a bit slower because it needs to decompress the stream and convert to RGB before the other operations.

And back to the original problem: looks to me like the image is completely blown out to max white there. Nothing simple you can do about it now. In theory you could try to replace the blown out material with a still image that you track into the frame.

Barend

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

First: denoise the footage. Even if the noise isn’t very apparent in the source material, keying will indeed bring out the noise – especially in semi-transparent areas.

If you use Keylight: set the output to ‘intermediate’ and not final (in the dropdown menu in the top). Keylight’s built-in spill suppressor has a tendency to amplify noise a lot.

You may have less noise now – but more spill. So you use other ways of spill suppression. Playing with the Hue/Saturation filter is a good start, swinging the greens to another hue a little, or desaturating.

If you have Key Correct Pro, there’s a useful spill killer in there.

And finally if that doesn’t fix it I’ve got a bit of a convoluted trick:

Add a solid behind your greenscreen layer, in the complementary colour to the green. That means an orange-ish tint.

You should see that the green spill in semi-transparencies is now neutralized to a certain extent, but of course you don’t have a transparent background.

So: you duplicate the greenscreen layer including all the keying plugins and you set the top layer blend mode to ‘stencil alpha’, which will force it’s alpha to all layers below.

The blending of the orange solid around the edges should do a useful job reducing spill, but you can also reduce the layer transparency to reduce the influence.

To put the result on your background, you’ll need to drag this comp into a new one and do the final composite in a separate comp. You may want to tweak the coloured solid a little depending on the colour of the background.

And finally, adding Light Wrap will top things off. If you don’t have Key Correct Pro there are some tutorials around that will show you how to build your own.

Hope that helps.

Barend

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

That works! Thanks so much!

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

Hi Dan,

So… a little later I actually ‘got my nerd on’ and managed to get the full vertex data including tangents to a text file.

Now I’m stuck getting the script to draw the shape as a shape layer.

I found examples for generic built-in Ellipses etc, but I can’t figure out where exactly to put my vertex data… This must be one of the least travelled areas of AE scripting…

This is what I got for drawing a generic Ellipse:

var myEllipseSize = [100,200];
var myStrokeColor = [1,0,0];

var myShapeLayer= thisComp.layers.addShape();

var myShapeLayerContents = myShapeLayer.property("ADBE Root Vectors Group");
var myShapeGroup = myShapeLayerContents.addProperty("ADBE Vector Group");
myShapeGroup.name = "Circle";
var myEllipse = focusShapeGroup.property("ADBE Vectors Group").addProperty("ADBE Vector Shape - Ellipse");
myEllipse.property("ADBE Vector Ellipse Size").setValue(myEllipseSize);


And I get that I need to take out the Ellipse bits, but I’m missing something somewhere…

Any pointers would once again be much appreciated!

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

Hmmm… I can of course paste the path into the position property to get an array of coordinates… but when I paste the position keyframes into a text file there’s no tangent information.

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

Hah… the third attempt at Googling brought the solution:

https://aenhancers.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=653&start=30

(also thanks to Dan!).

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

Hah! That works exactly like I wanted… And with very little code… Upon onChange of the editText I did a parseInt and if NaN set the value to 0…

If I sound giddy with excitement with these small results: bear with me here… I started Lloyds FXPHD course a week and a half ago… and hadn’t ever written one line of Javascript before that. And now in the middle of my second script, fully automating my greenscreen workflow. Going a bit overboard even.

😉

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

But I could of course do the parseInt upon onChange of the text field to catch issues before running through the rest of the script and letting the user adjust if necessary before hitting ‘Go’.

Just thinking out loud here.

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist

[Barend Onneweer]

Too bad. Something like inpuType: integer would be an elegant solution. parseInt is correction after the fact whereas constraining the input on … ehm… input would be nice.

Oh well… I’ll stick with the parseInt for now… Thanks.

Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist