Barend Onneweer
Forum Replies Created
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What’s probably happening is that some effects disregard the masks on a layer and directly access the source footage.
The simplest solution would be to precompose the rotobrushed layer and apply the masks on top of the precomped layer.
Or duplicate your footage, remove the rotobrush from the top layer, apply your masks there and use it as a track matte for the bottom layer, by setting the track matte to alpha or alpha inverted. This is probably a more convoluted way of working but sometimes it’s useful to have everything in a single composition.
Hope this helps.
Barend
Raamw3rk – independent colourist and visual effects artist
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Indeed AE checks the plugin folder for plugins.
Some effects can be directly copied into the plugin folder – but many of them come with an installer – which also installs the license. Some plugins also install additional software outside of the plugin folder that is referenced or used by the plugin. So you can’t always just drag and drop to install. Sometimes it’ll work, often it won’t.
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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It’s Keylight’s spill removal that can bring out the noise. Bypassing it (by setting the output of Keylight to Intermediate Result) can indeed introduce green edges. I use the spill killer in Red Giant Key Correct Pro and usually a bit of Lightwrap (in the same plugin-bundle) to get rid of the spill.
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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Lenscare consists of two effects: Depth of Field, and Out of Focus.
Out of Focus is a fixed blur, that applies the same amount of defocus to the whole layer (although it can be animated like a regular blur).
Depth of Field is a ‘compound’ effect that can use the pixel values of another layer to feed the amount of blur.
How you’d normally use the Depth of Field effect:
You create a scene in a 3D application and render out two passes: an RGBA pass and the depthmatte. Make sure your depthmatte shows a nice greyscale.
You import both sequences as layers into a composition, on top of eachother. The depthmatte is set to invisible. To the RGBA layer you apply the Depth of Field effect, and set the depthmatte layer as the “depth layer”.
The Radius is the amount of blur – mimicing your iris radius. Set to 5 for a start, you can tweak to taste later. You should now see certain areas of the image going out of focus.
By default the focal point is set to zero, meaning that everything that’s white in the depthmatte will be sharp, rolling off to defocus towards the dark areas.
You can now select the area of the image you want in focus. There’s two ways to do that: you can set the greyscale level in ‘focal point’, or you click the ‘select depth’ crosshair and point it at the area of the image you want in focus (which will similarly set the greyscale level on the ‘focal point’ parameter.
Now you can keyframe the ‘focal point’ value and pull focus. I typically don’t need to tweak the other values although if my layer has an alpha channel I usually disable “gamma correction” in the plugin.
Hope this helps,
Barend
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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Is it an 8-bit dpx? Haven’t tried in 5.5 but in previous versions AE didn’t support 8-bit dpx. Only 10-bit.
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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The 2600 is excellent bang for the buck – good choice.
Personally I’d get an SSD for the bootdisk – Intel is considered the top brand – but I don’t know how the Crucial performs. There are a lot of speed differences between models. And I’d definitely put in 16GB of RAM. RAM is cheap and nowadays AE makes good use of it.
In the past you couldn’t install Adobe CS on a RAID volume – not sure how it is today but I wouldn’t go there. SSD’s are great for system and bootdisk.
Barend
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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You can always do the pan in post. Shoot completely locked off, and shoot multiple overlapping frames that you can stitch together in After Effects (you’ll need to remove lens distortion using a mesh warp to get the images to stitch nicely – ideally you shoot a separate grid to have a good reference for the warping on the lens).
Once you’ve got your stitched pano you can map it onto a sphere (or use Trapcode Horizon) and pan an AE camera within it.
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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It’s pretty straightforward. What problems are you encountering?
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects
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In my experience Neat Video is more effective than AE’s built-in Remove Grain plugin, both for removing grain and removing compression artefacts (probably just as important when shooting the Z5).
Not often mentioned is that Neat Video also has a sharpener built-in that works really well bringing in detail without nasty edges.
Barend
Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects