[Barend Onneweer]

Well, you can select multiple files in the Project Window and drag them onto the ‘new comp’ button in the bottom of the Project Window.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

What you are seeing is the on-the-fly low quality ‘pixel-aspect ratio correction’ in AE. You’re using non-square pixels and AE is stretching the picture in realtime to it’s intended aspect ratio. But AE’s realtime PAR-correction defaults to a low quality scaling that results in the nasty anti-aliasing jitter that you’re seeing.

Turn off PAR correction to double-check this is the case (button in the bottom of your Comp Viewer).

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

If the footage is interlaced it’s usually better to do masking work on the individual fields – hence the advise to set the comp to double framerate so the individual fields are exposed.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

The general rule of thumb is to motiontrack the raw source footage, to avoid mangling the pixels before tracking.

So in that case what you’d do is corner-pin track the source footage, comp in your elements and then stabilize the endresult.

But depending on the footage you could also try to corner-pin track the stabilized result – it’s just a less clean workflow.

I’d advise you to do the tracking in MochaAE.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Do you mean the ‘juddering’ edges on the back type in the beginning of the clip?

That’s the variation in anti-aliasing on each frame, because the text is rendered on subpixel level.

The way to avoid this is usually motionblur but if the movement s fairly slow you can also make sure you move the text in full pixels per frame. This can be helped using expressions – but it of course limits the flexibility in timing.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

Your description is a bit confusing. A picture would probably come in handy right about now.

But it sounds like you want to manually draw in the highlights. So create an adjustmentlayer, mask the highlight areas, add a little feather to the mask and use Levels, Curves or Exposure to lift the highlights a little.

For more detailed advise you really should show an image of what you’re working with.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

If you can’t bring additional lights, can you put a piece of black fabric or foamboard on one side of the subject? This ‘negative bounce’ will help creating a less flat look.

Other than that, you can manually mask out your highlight areas and lift them a little using any colour grading tool.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

I’d probably draw a path on a solid for the arrow to follow. Set a keyframe on mask shape.

Create your arrow point on a separate layer. Copy the mask keyframe and paste into the position parameter of the arrow point layer. For this layer enable ‘autorotate along motion path’ in the Layer Transform settings.

Apply the ‘stroke’ effect to the solid and animate the start-and endpoint of the stroke.

And then tweak to get the wanted timing and effect.

Barend

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

But still, any other spill supressor behaves much better than the one in Keylight.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects

[Barend Onneweer]

It’s exactly what I do. Most of the time it’s more subtle but Keylight’s spill supression always introduces noise – so I never use it.

Raamw3rk – digital storytelling and visual effects